"Young man, if you really desire to serve your country, go home and enlist."
Thoroughly disgusted, I retired, and so ended what might have saved to the service one of the best bodies of men that ever wore a government uniform, and at a time when the country was sorely in need of them.
A word now of the personnel of the One Hundred and Thirty-second Regiment and I am done. Dr. Bates, in his history of the Pennsylvania troops, remarks that this regiment was composed of a remarkable body of men. This judgment must have been based upon his knowledge of their work. Every known trade was represented in its ranks. Danville gave us a company of iron workers and merchants, Catawissa and Bloomsburg, mechanics, tradesmen, and farmers. From Mauch Chunk we had two companies, which included many miners. From Wyoming and Bradford we had three companies of sturdy, intelligent young farmers intermingled with some mechanics and tradesmen. Scranton, small as she was then, gave us two companies, which was scarcely a moiety of the number she sent into the service. I well remember how our flourishing Young Men's Christian Association was practically suspended because its members had gone to the war, and old Nay Aug Hose Company, the pride of the town, in which many of us had learned the little we knew of drill, was practically defunct for want of a membership which had "gone to the war." Of these two Scranton companies, Company K had as its basis the old Scranton City Guard, a militia organization which, if not large, was thoroughly well drilled and made up of most excellent material. Captain Richard Stillwell, who commanded this company, had organized the City Guard and been its captain from the beginning. The other Scranton company was perhaps more distinctively peculiar in its personnel than either of the other companies. It was composed almost exclusively of Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad shop and coal men, and was known as the Railroad Guards. In its ranks were locomotive engineers, firemen, brakemen, trainmen, machinists, telegraph operators, despatchers, railroad-shop men, a few miners, foremen, coal-breaker men, etc. Their captain, James Archbald, Jr., was assistant to his father as chief engineer of the road, and he used to say that with his company he could survey, lay out, build and operate a railroad. The first sergeant of that company, George Conklin, brother of D. H. Conklin, chief despatcher of the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western, and his assistant, had been one of the first to learn the art of reading telegraph messages by ear, an accomplishment then quite uncommon. His memory had therefore been so developed that after a few times calling his company roll he dispensed with the book and called it alphabetically from memory. Keeping a hundred names in his mind in proper order we thought quite a feat. Forty years later, at one of our reunions, Mr. Conklin, now superintendent of a railroad, was present. I asked him if he remembered calling his company roll from memory.
"Yes," said he, "and I can do it now, and recall every face and voice," and he began and rattled off the names of his roll. He said sometimes in the old days the boys would try to fool him by getting a comrade to answer for them, but they could never do it, he would detect the different voice instantly.
Now, as I close this narrative, shall I speak of the gala day of our home-coming? I can, of course, only speak of the one I participated in, the coming home to Scranton of Companies I and K and the members of the field and staff who lived here. This, however, will be a fair description of the reception each of the other companies received at their respective homes. Home-coming from the war! Can we who know of it only as we read appreciate such a home-coming? That was forty-one years ago the 25th of last May. Union Hall, on Lackawanna Avenue, midway between Wyoming and Penn, had been festooned with flags, and in it a sumptuous dinner awaited us. A committee of prominent citizens, our old friends, not one of whom is now living, met us some distance down the road. A large delegation of Scranton's ladies were at the hall to welcome and serve us, and of these, the last one, one of the mothers and matrons, has just passed into the great beyond. Many of those of our own age, the special attraction of the returning "boys," have also gone, but a goodly number still remain. They will recall this picture with not a little interest, I am sure. If perchance cheeks should be wet and spectacles moistened as they read, it will be but a reproduction of the emotions of that beautiful day more than forty years ago. No soldier boys ever received a more joyous or hearty welcome. The bountiful repast was hurriedly eaten, for anxious mothers, wives, sisters, and sweethearts were there, whose claim upon their returning "boy in blue" for holier and tenderer relationship was paramount.
Amidst all these joyous reunions, were there no shadows? Ah, yes. In the brief period of nine months our regiment had lost forty per cent. of its membership. Company I had gone to the front with one hundred and one stalwart officers and men, and but sixty-eight came back with the company. Of the missing names, Daniel S. Gardner, Moses H. Ames, George H. Cator, Daniel Reed, Richard A. Smith, and John B. West were killed in battle or died of wounds soon after; Orville Sharp had died in the service. The others had succumbed to the hardships of the service and been discharged. Of the same number Company K took into the service, sixty-six came home with the company. Sergeant Martin L. Hower, Richard Davis, Jacob Eschenbach, Jephtha Milligan, Allen Sparks, Obadiah Sherwood, and David C. Young had been killed in battle or died of wounds; Thomas D. Davis, Jesse P. Kortz, Samuel Snyder, James Scull, Solon Searles, and John W. Wright had died in the service. The most conspicuous figure in the regiment, our colonel, Richard A. Oakford, had been the first to fall. So that amidst our rejoicings there were a multitude of hearts unutterably sad. Will the time ever come when "the bitter shall not be mingled with the sweet" and tears of sorrow shall not drown the cup of gladness? Let us hope and pray that it may; and now, as Father Time tenderly turns down the heroic leaf of the One Hundred and Thirty-second Pennsylvania Volunteers, let us find comfort in the truth,
"Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori."