f fire,
tearing out their lives. Shaw led from first to last. Gaining
successfully the parapet, he stood there for a moment with uplifted
sword, shouting, "Forward, Fifty-fourth!" and then fell headlong, with
a bullet through his heart. The battle raged for nigh two hours.
Regiment after regiment, following upon the Fifty-fourth, hurled
themselves upon its ramparts, but Fort Wagner was nobly defended, and
for that night stood safe. The Fifty-fourth withdrew after two-thirds
of its officers and five-twelfths or nearly half its men had been shot
down or bayoneted within the fortress or before its walls. It was good
behavior for a regiment, no one of whose soldiers had had a musket in
his hands more than eighteen weeks, and which had seen the enemy for
the first time only two days before.

"The negroes fought gallantly," wrote a Confederate officer, "and were
headed by as brave a colonel as ever lived."

As for the colonel, not a drum was heard nor a funeral note, not a
soldier discharged his farewell shot, when the Confederates buried him,
the morning after the engagement. His body, half stripped of its
clothing, and the corpses of his dauntless negroes were flung into one
common trench together, and the sand was shovelled over them, without a
stake or stone to signalize the spot. In death as in life, then, the
Fifty-fourth bore witness to the brotherhood of man. The lover of
heroic history could wish for no more fitting sepulchre for Shaw's
magnanimous young heart. There let his body rest, united with the
forms of his brave nameless comrades. There let the breezes of the
Atlantic sigh, and its gales roar their requiem, while this bronze
effigy and these inscriptions keep their fame alive long after you and
I and all who meet here are forgotten.

How soon, indeed, are human things forgotten! As we meet here this
morning, the Southern sun is shining on their place of burial, and the
waves sparkling and the sea-gulls circling around Fort Wagner's ancient
site. But the great earthworks and their thundering cannon, the
commanders and their followers, the wild assault and repulse that for a
brief space made night hideous on that far-off evening, have all sunk
into the blue gulf of the past, and for the majority of this generation
are hardly more than an abstract name, a picture, a tale that is told.
Only when some yellow-bleached photograph of a soldier of the 'sixties
comes into our hands, with that odd and viv