UNDER TWO FLAGS.
Some time in '63 there came to the regiment a young and beardless boy, "the only son of his mother and she was a widow." Timid and shrinking, he was assigned to a company in which he had neither friend nor acquaintance, and he soon grew homesick and despondent. He had been my brother's schoolboy friend and in pity for his loneliness I made an effort to secure his transfer to the Oglethorpe's. His captain declined to approve the papers and the effort failed. Frail and unfitted to endure the hardships of a soldier's life, he nevertheless bore up bravely under the constant toil and danger of the Dalton and Atlanta campaign until the battle of Kennesaw was fought. His company was on the skirmish line that day and suffered heavily. When the Federal line had been repulsed and in the hush of the twilight air the roll was called, he was reported "missing," a word that carried with it to many a lonely home a world of agony in those war days.
Two hours later a member of his company came to me and said, "Dick is lying dead between the picket lines. If I can get two others, will you go with us to find the body and bring it in?" Prowling around at night between two hostile skirmish lines in constant expectation of being shot by either side was not a pleasant duty, but I thought of his widowed mother and, and told him I would go. He went away to secure other help, but learned in some way that he had been mistaken; that the dead soldier lying cold out under the starlight was not Dick, but another member of the regiment. A few days later we abandoned the Kennesaw line and I heard no more of my boy friend until the war had ended. Then I learned through returning prisoners that he had been captured at Kennesaw; that under the bitter cruelties of prison life he had grown sick and helpless and was slowly dying; that in his weakness and under the inhuman policy of Grant and Lincoln, hopeless of release by exchange, he was offered a chance of renewed life if he would consent to serve against the Indians, who were giving trouble in the far West. Lee's shadowy line was growing thinner day by day. Hood's reckless raid on Nashville had ended in disaster and the end had nearly come. With the shadow of the grave resting on every prison wall and more, perhaps, from love of mother than of life, he yielded. But the seeds of death were sown too deeply in his boyish frame. The prison horrors, that merit, but find no place on Lincoln's monument, nor Grant's mausoleum, had done their work. A few short months and somewhere under the Western sky, far from home and kindred, the prairie grass was weaving in the summer sunshine, its creeping tendrils over his lonely grave.
Poor, gentle-hearted Dick! Deaths were common, sadly common in those old days but the memory of his fate has never been recalled in all these years without a sense of sadness and of sorrow. My heart has never judged him save in pity and in kindness always, for I am sure few mounds of earth have lain above a purer or a gentler heart.