Old Guys Rule

From Stories, Anecdotes and Humor from the Civil War

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A writer for the Washington Chronicle observed that the greatest power of endurance of such hardships as belong to a soldier's life, belongs to men over thirty-five years of age; that men from eighteen to thirty are ten times on the sick list where those older are only once; that the hospitals around Washington develop the fact that, aside from surgical cases, the patients there under thirty-five are forty to one over that age. Consequently a sound man of forty, and of temperate habits, will endure more fatigue and hard treatment than one equally sound at the age of twenty.

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