This is the other picture that the talk of the two old soldiers called up,—dead Confederate against living Federal; and these two pictures stand out before me again, as I am trying to make others understand and to understand myself what it was to be a Southern man twenty-five years ago; what it was to accept with the whole heart the creed of the Old South. The image of the living Federal bids me refrain from harsh words in the presence of those who were my captors. The dead Confederate bids me uncover the sacred memories that the dust of life's Appian Way hides from the tenderest and truest of those whose business it is to live and work. For my dead comrade of the Valley campaign is one of many; some of them my friends, some of them my pupils as well. The 18th of July, 1861, laid low one of my Princeton College room-mates; on the 21st, the day of the great battle, the other fell,—both bearers of historic names, both upholding the cause of their State with as unclouded a conscience as any saint in the martyrology ever wore; and from that day to the end, great battle and outpost skirmish brought me, week by week, a personal loss in men of the same type.
The Princeton College room-mate who fell on the 18th of July was James Kendall Lee, a distant relative of the great soldier; the other was Peyton Randolph Harrison, of Martinsburg (W.) Va., representative of the oldest families in the old state. His brother, Dabney Carr Harrison (Princeton, '48), another close friend, took service in the Confederate army, first as chaplain, then as captain of a company, and was killed at Fort Donelson which, as I painfully remember, was at first reported as a Confederate victory.
The surrender of the Spartans on the island of Sphacteria was a surprise to friend and foe alike; and the severe historian of the Peloponnesian war pauses to record the answer of a Spartan to the jeering question of one of the allies of the Athenians,—a question which implied that the only brave Spartans were those who had been slain. The answer was tipped with Spartan wit; the only thing Spartan, as some one has said, in the whole un-Spartan affair. "The arrow," said he, "would be of great price if it distinguished the brave men from the cowards." But it did seem to us, in our passionate grief, that the remorseless bullet, the remorseless shell, had picked out the bravest and the purest. It is an old cry,—
Ja, der Krieg verschlingt die Besten.
Still, when Schiller says in the poem just quoted,
Ohne Wahl vertheilt die Gaben,
Ohne Billigkeit das Glück,
Denn Patroklus liegt begraben
Und Thersites kommt zurück,
his illustration is only half right. The Greek Thersites did not return to claim a pension.