So ends the story of a great battle where a boy showed that he could fight as bravely and think as quickly and hold on as enduringly as any man. What the boys of '64 could do, the boys of 1915 can and will do if ever a time comes when they too must fight for their country.
CHAPTER XVI
MEDAL-OF-HONOR MEN
To-day in the world-war that is being waged in two hemispheres among twelve nations, we hear much of the Victoria Cross and the Iron Cross, and the decoration of the Legion of Honor, those tiny immortal symbols of achievement for which men are so willing to lay down their lives and which are cherished and passed on from father to son as a heritage of honor undying. Not since gunpowder sent armor, swords, spears, arrows, bows, catapults and a host of other outworn equipment to the scrap-heap has the method of warfare been changed as it was in the year 1914. Battles are now fought in the air and under the water and armies move forward underground. Automobiles and power-driven cars, trucks and platforms have succeeded the horse. Aeroplanes have taken the place of cavalry. Vast howitzers carried piecemeal on trucks, which can run across a rougher country than a horse, have made the strongest fortress obsolete. Bombs which kill every living thing within a circle one hundred and fifty yards in diameter, vast cylinders of gas which turn the air for miles into a death-trap, airships which can drop high-power explosives while invisible beyond the clouds, aerial and submarine torpedoes which can be automatically guided by electric currents from vessels miles away, guns that send vast shells a mile above the earth to carry death and destruction to a point twenty miles away, concealed artillery equipped with parabolic mirrors and automatic range-finders which can shoot over distant hills and mountains to a hair's breadth, and destroy concealed and protected bodies of men, rifles which shoot without noise and without smoke, machine-guns that spray bullets across a wide front of charging men as a hose sprays water across the width of a lawn, wireless apparatus which send messages thousands of miles across land and sea, all these and hundreds of other devices would be more of a mystery to Grant and Lee and the other great commanders of the Civil War than the breech-loading magazine rifles and artillery and iron-clads of their day would have been to Napoleon. The warfare of to-day is farther removed from the period of the Civil War of half a century ago than the Napoleonic wars were from those of Hannibal over a thousand years before.
Methods have changed, but men are the same to-day as they were when they first built that great tower on the plain of Shinar. The eternities of life are still with us. Brave deeds, acts of self-sacrifice, truth, honor, courage, unselfishness still stand as in the days of old. Every man or woman or child, small or great, can achieve such deeds. At the end of this chronicle of the brave deeds wrought by our fathers and grandfathers in a war which was fought for an ideal, it is most fitting that the boys and girls of to-day should read what was done by commonplace men as a matter of course. From the great list prepared by the War Department of the United States of those whom their country have honored have been selected a few stories of the way different men won their Medal of Honor.
In 1864 General Sherman was in the midst of his great march to Atlanta. Grant had begun the campaign against Lee's army which was to end at Richmond, while to Sherman was given the task of crushing his rival, Joseph E. Johnston. Inch by inch the whole of that march was fought out in a series of tremendous battles. One of these was the hard battle of New Hope Church in sight of Kenesaw Mountain. The battle was fought as a successful attempt on the part of Sherman to turn the flank of Johnston's position at Alatoona Pass. During the battle, Follett Johnson, a corporal in the 60th Infantry, did not only a brave, but an unusual deed. While his company was awaiting the signal to take part in the battle which was raging on their left, they were much annoyed by the deadly aim of a Confederate sharp-shooter concealed in an oak tree a quarter of a mile away. Every few minutes there would be a puff of smoke and the whine of a minie bullet, too often followed by the thud which told that the bullet had found its billet. When at last the sixth man, one of Johnson's best friends, was fatally wounded through the head, Johnson made up his mind to do his share in stopping this sharp-shooting permanently. Unfortunately he was only an ordinary shot himself, but he crawled down the line and had a hasty conference with one of the best shots in the regiment.
"You get a good steady rest," said Johnson, "and draw a bead on that oak tree. I'll kind of move around and get the chap interested and when he gives you a chance, you take it."
The Union sharp-shooter agreed to carry out his part of the bargain. Johnson suddenly sprang to his feet and ran in a zigzag course to a position farther down the line. A bullet from the watcher in the tree shrieked close past his head.
"Lie down, you fool," shouted his captain. "Are you trying to commit suicide?"