With the Zionists in Gallipoli

by J. H. Patterson

America holds many interests for me, and I never fail to pay our cousins a visit when the opportunity occurs. Perhaps the chief of her attractions, so far as I am concerned, centre in and around the State of Virginia, that beautiful piece of country where most of the great battles of the Civil War were fought.

All my life I have made a point of studying military history and the campaigns of the great Captains of the past. Indeed, I have tramped over many battlefields in Europe, Asia, Africa and America, not at all with the idea that the knowledge would ever prove of value from a military point of view, but solely because I was deeply interested in soldierly matters.

In Spain and Flanders I have followed the footsteps of both Napoleon and Wellington.

In Canada I have sailed up the stately St. Lawrence, and with Wolfe in imagination again stormed the Heights of Abraham. When I stood on those heights some one hundred and fifty years after the great victory which added Canada to the Empire, I was able to realise, more fully than I had ever been able to do from books, the magnitude of the task which General Wolfe had before him when, on that fateful night of the 13th September, 1759, he led his troops up that precipitous road to victory.

In the United States I have, on horseback and on foot, followed Stonewall Jackson up and down the Shenandoah Valley, from Harper's Ferry (over the Potomac) to the Wilderness, where he was seized with such strange inertia, and on to that fatal Chancellorsville where an unlucky bullet, fired from his own lines, put an end to his life and all chances of victory for the South.

When I was at Washington, General Wotherspoon, the Chief of the War College there, very kindly supplied me with maps and notes which he had himself made of the battlefield of Gettysburg, and I am convinced that, if General Longstreet had arrived on the field in time, victory would have rested with the South; and I am equally convinced that, if Stonewall Jackson had been alive, Longstreet would have been in his proper place at the right time.

What a pity we have no Stonewall Jackson with us in these days. How noble is the epitaph on the monument of this great soldier. I only quote the words from memory, but they are something like this:

"When the Almighty in His Omnipotence saw fit to give victory to the North over the South, He found that it was first necessary to take to Himself Stonewall Jackson."

It was a great pleasure to me to see his wife, Mrs. Stonewall Jackson, when I was at Washington, but unfortunately I did not have the chance of speaking to her.

I was delighted to meet Miss Mary Lee several times, the daughter of the best loved General that ever led an Army—Robert E. Lee, the Commander-in-Chief of the Confederate Forces. Miss Lee gave me much pleasure by recounting many anecdotes about her famous father. Among other interesting reminiscences she told me that when the war broke out her youngest brother was a mere boy still at school, but the stirring accounts of the great fights in which his father commanded and his older brothers took part, so fired his ardour that one day he disappeared from school, and was not heard of by any of his family for the best part of a year. During this time he served as a soldier in a battery of Artillery. One day, while a furious battle was raging and the fortunes of war swayed first to the South and then to the North, General Lee observed some of his guns rapidly retiring from a particularly hot position. He galloped up to them himself and ordered them back into the fight. The Commander-in-Chief was somewhat surprised when a powder-blackened, mud-grimed young soldier, in a blood-stained shirt, said to him: "What, Dad, back into that hell again?"—and back into that hell the General sternly sent them at a gallop, and by so doing won the day for the South. Luckily, his boy came out of the battle unscathed and is alive to this day.