It was, truly, the bitterness of death that we tasted at ten o’clock on the morning of that ninth of April, 1865, at Appomattox Court-House. Gray-haired soldiers cried like children. It was hard to say whether they would have preferred, at that moment, to return to their families or to throw themselves upon the bayonets of the enemy, and die.
In that hour of their agony they were not insulted, however. The deportment of the enemy was chivalric and courteous. No bands played; no cheers were heard; and General Grant was the first to salute profoundly his gray-haired adversary, who came, with a single officer, to arrange, in a house near the field, the terms of surrender.
They are known. On the tenth they were carried out.
The men stacked the old muskets, which they had carried in a hundred fights, surrendered the bullet-torn colors, which had waved over victorious fields, and silently returned, like mourners, to their desolate homes.
Two days after the surrender, Mohun was still alive.
Three months afterward, the welcome intelligence reached me that he was rapidly recovering.
He had made a narrow escape. Ten minutes after the death of the faithful Nighthawk, the Federal line had swept over him; and such was the agony of his wound, that he exclaimed to one of the enemy:—
“Take your pistol, and shoot me!”
The man cocked his weapon, and aimed at his heart. Then he turned the muzzle aside, and uncocking the pistol, replaced it in its holster.
“No,” he said, “Johnny Reb, you might get well!”