The land is one vast graveyard. The women who mourn husbands and lovers stray over fields of strife, and wonder where the loved one sleeps. Friend and foe, "in one red burial blent," are lying down in the unbroken truce of death.
Atlanta's struggle against the restless Sherman has been only wasted valor, a bootless sacrifice. Her terrific sallies, lightning counter-thrusts, and final struggles with the after-occupation, can be traced in the general desolation, by every step of the horrible art of war.
Here, by the grave of his intrepid comrade, Henry Peyton reviews the past four years. His scars and wasted frame tell him of many a deadly fray, and the dangers of the insane fight for State rights.
The first proud days of the war return. Hopes that have failed long since are remembered. The levy and march to the front, the thousand watch-fires glittering around the unbroken hosts, whose silken-bordered banners tell of the matchless devotion of the women clinging blindly to the cause.
Peyton thinks now of the loved and lost who bore those flags, to-day furled forever, to the front, at Bull Run, Shiloh, the Seven Days, Groveton, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Chickamauga, and Spottsylvania.
The foreign friends in Europe, the daring rovers of the sea who carried the Stars and Bars from off New York to Singapore and far Behring Straits. What peerless leaders. Such deep, sagacious statesmen. The treasures of the rich South, the wealth of King Cotton, all wasted uselessly. A popular devotion, which deeply touched the magnanimous Grant in the supreme hour of victory, has been lavished on the altar of the Confederacy where Davis, Lee, and Jackson were enthroned. Fallen gods now, but still majestic and yet revered.
Peyton thinks with an almost breaking heart of all these sacrifices for the Lost Cause. By his friend's grave he feels that an awful price has been paid for the glories of the short-lived Confederacy.
The noble-hearted Virginian dares not hope that there may yet be found golden bands of brotherhood to knit together the children of the men who fought under gray and blue. Frankly acknowledging the injustice of the early scorn of the Northern foe, he knows, from glances cast backward over the storied fields, the vigor of the North was under-estimated. The men of Donelson, Antietam, Stone River, Vicksburg, awful Gettysburg, of Winchester, and Five Forks, are as true and tried as ever swung a soldier's blade.
He has seen the country's flag of stars stream out bravely against the tide of defeat. If American valor needs a champion the men who saw the "Yankees" at Seven Pines, Gaines Mill, Marye's Heights, and holding in fire and flame the batteries of Corinth and Knoxville, will swear the embittered foes were worthy of each other.
The defeated Confederate veteran, as he plucks a rose from the grass growing over the gallant Valois, bitterly remembers the useless sacrifices of the whole Southern army to the "Virginia policy." A son of the "old State" himself, he can feel now, in the sorrow and silence of defeat, that the early triumphs of the war were wasted. The great warlike generation was frittered away on the Potomac.