Gen. Taylor had dismounted. There was the offender; he was severely reprimanded and placed under guard. Turning to the accuser—an old woman—the General gave her some silver coin in payment for her chicken. That war was not hell.
When Richard Cœur de Lion was ill in Palestine the Islam commander, Saladin, "sent him the choicest fruits and refreshment of snow during the burning heat of summer; and at the siege of Jaffa, Saphadan, the Mohammedan chief, observing Richard dismounted, sent him two Arabian horses, on one of which he continued the conflict until nightfall. He further solicited and obtained from Richard the honor of knighthood for his son." This was not much like hell.
Again, Richard promulgated, like Gen. W. T. Sherman, regulations for the government of his troops. "A thief was to have his head shaved, to be tarred and feathered." Had Sherman issued and enforced an order like this, the sight of his troops would have frightened all the inhabitants out of Savannah.
Our Unknown Dead.
Extract from an Address of Gen. S. G. French Made to the U. C. V. Camp, No. 54, Orlando, Fla., June 8, 1893.
Comrades: The solemn ceremony of Decoration Day has been performed. The few graves, alike of the Confederate and the Union soldiers that rest in our cemetery, have been decorated with floral offerings, and the cause that so few of the Confederate dead sleep where loving kindred can care for them inclines me to say a few words in regard to the unknown dead.
From Dalton down to Atlanta, and around that city, there was one continuous conflict for one hundred days, and not a day passed without some troops being engaged, and so the dead were left throughout a hundred miles on either side, resting where they fell.
If we turn to the east again, we find that Gen. Grant crossed the Rapidan May 4, 1864, and, taking the direct line to Richmond, immediately the battle of the Wilderness followed, and he announced that he was going "to fight it out on that line if it took all summer." A few days after came the battle of Spottsylvania, and June 1 that of Cold Harbor, where the Federal troops refused to make a second attack.
In these three great and sanguinary battles the commander of the Union forces did not meet with success, and so on the first day of summer he left that line and swung around, as McClellan did, to the James river. After Cold Harbor it seems as if there was no desire for another general engagement, and the hammering away mode of war commenced on Lee. On July 18, 1864, President Lincoln called for five hundred thousand more men, and so the detrition process went on for nine months, mainly on and near the picket line, being in all nearly eleven months and a half that Lee confronted Grant's hosts of men, and over all this extent of country lay the blue and the gray side by side in death. Devastation, as in the Palatinate, had done its work.