The loss of the Light Brigade in killed and wounded in its
famous charge at Balaklava was but 37 per cent.

These figures show the terrible punishment endured by these
regiments, chosen at random from the head of the list which shows the
slaughter-roll of the Civil War. Yet the shattered remnants of each
regiment preserved their organization, and many of the severest losses
were incurred in the hour of triumph, and not of disaster. Thus, the 1st
Minnesota, at Gettysburg, suffered its appalling loss while charging a
greatly superior force, which it drove before it; and the little huddle
of wounded and unwounded men who survived their victorious charge
actually kept both the flag they had captured and the ground from which
they had driven their foes.

A number of the Continental regiments under Washington, Greene, and
Wayne did valiant fighting and endured heavy punishment. Several of the
regiments raised on the northern frontier in 1814 showed, under Brown
and Scott, that they were able to meet the best troops of Britain on
equal terms in the open, and even to overmatch them in fair fight with
the bayonet. The regiments which, in the Mexican war, under the lead of
Taylor, captured Monterey, and beat back Santa Anna at Buena Vista, or
which, with Scott as commander, stormed Molino Del Rey and Chapultepec,
proved their ability to bear terrible loss, to wrest victory from
overwhelming numbers, and to carry by open assault positions of
formidable strength held by a veteran army. But in none of these three
wars was the fighting so resolute and bloody as in the Civil War.

Countless deeds of heroism were performed by Northerner and by
Southerner, by officer and by private, in every year of the great
struggle. The immense majority of these deeds went unrecorded, and
were known to few beyond the immediate participants. Of those that were
noticed it would be impossible even to make a dry catalogue in ten such
volumes as this. All that can be done is to choose out two or three acts
of heroism, not as exceptions, but as examples of hundreds of others.
The times of war are iron times, and bring out all that is best as well
as all that is basest in the human heart. In a full recital of the civil
war, as of every other great conflict, there would stand out in naked
relief feats of wonderful daring and self-devotion, and, mixed among
them, deeds of cowardice, of treachery, of barbarous brutality. Sadder
still, such a recital would sh