ll true men will understand and none, least of all the brave men who
faced it in battle, will deny to the old Confederate the just right to
be proud that he was comrade to those men and marched in their ranks,
and was with their leader to the end. Of that army, I had, thank God!
the honor to be a soldier. It came about in this way.

=The Call Comes Home=

When the war began I was a school boy attending the Military Academy in
Danville, Virginia, where I was born and reared. At once the school
broke up. The teachers, and all the boys who were old enough went into
the army. I was just sixteen years old, and small for my age, and I can
understand now, but could not then, how my parents looked upon the
desire of a boy like that to go to the war, as out of the question. I
did not think so. I was a strong, well-knit fellow, and it seemed to me
that what you required in a soldier was a man who could shoot, and would
stay there and do it. I knew I could shoot, and I thought I could stay
there and do it, so I was sure I could be a soldier, and I was crazy to
go, but my parents could not see it so, and I was very miserable. All my
classmates in school had gone or were going, and I pictured to myself
the boys coming back from the war, as soldiers who had been in battle,
and all the honors that would be showered upon them--and I would be out
of it all. The thought that I had not done a manly part in this great
crisis would make me feel disgraced all my life. It was horrible.

My father, the honored and beloved minister of the Episcopal Church in
Danville, and my mother, the daughter and grand-daughter of two
Revolutionary soldiers, said they wanted me to go, and would let me go,
when I was older--I was too young and small as yet. But I was afraid it
would be all over before I got in, and I would lay awake at night, sad
and wretched with this fear. I need not have been afraid of that. There
was going to be plenty to go around, but I did not know that then, and I
was low in mind. I suppose that my very strong feeling on the subject
was natural. It was the inherited microbe in the blood. Though I was
only a school boy in a back country town, my forebears had always been
around when there was any fighting to be done. My great-grandfather,
General Thomas Nelson, and my grandfather, Major Carter Page, and all
their kin of the time had fought through the Revolutionary War. My
people had fought in the war of 1812, and the Mexican War, and