Thus ended the battle of Cedar Creek. Darkness, alone, saved Early's army from capture. As it was, most of his artillery and wagons were taken.
It is needless to tell how Sheridan broke Early's left by an assault with the Nineteenth corps and Custer's cavalry at the same moment of the last successful charge upon his right. It was a famous victory, though not a bloodless one. Of the gallant men who went into the fight that morning on the union side, 588 never came out alive. Three thousand five hundred and sixteen were wounded. Early did not lose so many but his prestige was gone, his army destroyed and, from that moment, for the confederacy to continue the hopeless struggle was criminal folly.
Cedar Creek was the ending of the campaign in the Shenandoah valley. There was some desultory skirmishing, but no real fighting thereafter.
Among the wounded were Captain Charles Shier, jr. and Captain Darius G. Maynard, both of the First Michigan cavalry. Captain Shier died on the 31st of October. He was wounded in the charge on the confederate battery. Captain Shier was as gallant an officer as any who periled his life on that famous battle field; and not only a fine soldier but a polished scholar and an accomplished gentleman as well. He was a distinguished son of the state of Michigan and of the noble university which bears its name. In his life and in his death he honored both. Massachusetts remembers the name and reveres the memory of Charles Lowell. Mothers recite to their children the circumstances of his heroic death, and in the halls of Harvard a tablet has been placed in his honor. Charles Shier is a name which ought to be as proudly remembered in Michigan and in Ann Arbor as is that of Charles Lowell in Massachusetts and in Cambridge. But fate, in its irony, has decreed that the nimbus which surrounds the brow of a nation's heroes shall be reserved for the few whom she selects as types, and these more often than otherwise idealized types chosen by chance or by accident. These alone may wear the laurel that catches the eye of ideality and furnishes the theme for the poet's praise. Others must be content to shine in reflected light or to be forgotten. The best way is to follow William Winter's advice and neither crave admiration nor expect gratitude. After all, the best reward that can come to a man is that intimate knowledge of himself which is the sure foundation of self-respect. The adulation of the people is a fugitive dream, as Admiral Dewey knows now, if he did not suspect it before.
In the original manuscript of the foregoing chapter, written in the year 1886, Lowell was represented as marching "without orders" from right to left with his own brigade and the Michigan brigade. In the text the words "without orders" have been omitted. This is not because my own recollection of the events of that day is not the same now as then, but for the reason that I am reluctant to invite controversy by giving as statements of fact things that rest upon the evidence of my own unsupported memory.
After the manuscript had been prepared, it was referred to General Merritt with a request that he point out any errors or inaccuracies that he might note, as it was intended for publication. This request elicited the following reply:
"West Point, December 2, 1886.
"General J.H. Kidd,
"My Dear General:
"So much has been written as to the details of the war that I have stopped reading the war papers in the best magazines, even. An officer writes one month what is to him a truthful account of events and the next month that account is contradicted by three or four in print with dozens of others who content themselves with contradicting it in talk. The account you send me of Cedar Creek is not more accurate than the rest.