“You will not suffer, after all, as I shall,” replied Mildred. “You will have the exciting scenes of war to occupy your thoughts, and I shall have nothing to think about but you. O, the long weary days that must pass away! I shall think of you as constantly exposed to dangers.”
And so they separated, both saying in their hearts, as they went their respective ways:
“O, shall we ever meet again?”
CHAPTER XVII.
PEACE.
The frightful clouds of war have rolled away. The smoke of battle has dissolved into the darkness of the Past. The blood-spots have been washed out by the rains and dews of heaven. Blessed Peace spreads out her snow-white pinions, dripping balm for wounded hearts, from the granite hills of New England to the smiling prairies of the Lone Star State. The little hillocks of earth that rise up all over the South mark the gory fields where the enraged warriors met in the death-struggle. We can again re-visit the awful spots where once the earth groaned under the tread of men and horses rushing head-long to the fray, and we can call up the phantom forms, and make them re-enact the bloody tragedies of battle in solemn silence. The gloomy cedar-brakes of Murfreesboro, the plateau of Bull Run, the dark stream of Chickamauga, the rugged Mount that looks down upon Chattanooga, the black hills of Vicksburg, pock-marked by the shells of a fifty-days’ siege—are all there yet, dumb witnesses to the ferocity of human passions. To-day, at all these, and many other places, we can take the torch of history, and relight the terrible scenes enacted in the now silent past. We see long lines of soldiers start up in battle array, grasping the deadly musket, and solemnly preparing to die, in that ominous lull which always precedes the mighty shock of battle. There is a strange silence. The very forests seem to be holding their breath in expectation of a storm more awful than the cyclone of nature. What is it? The awful pause of Death.