ual
fortitude and transcendent bravery alike the shock of battle, the
pangs of "hope deferred," the untold hardships which soon became their
daily portion. Their bleeding feet dyed alike the snows of Georgia and
the rocky mountain paths of Tennessee.

As their ranks were decimated by battle, disease, starvation, death,
the hearts that were left swelled higher and higher with holy zeal,
sublime courage. Night after night, with lagging, unwilling feet, they
made the hated retreat.

Day after day the sun shone on those defiant faces as they presented a
still unbroken front and hurled themselves again and again against the
invaders, contesting every inch of the land they loved.

Ah, the horrors of those latter days, when daily, almost hourly,
brought to me ghastly wrecks of manhood, when my ears were always
filled with the moans of the dying, or irrepressible agonizing shrieks
of those who were undergoing the torture of the surgeon's knife
without the blessed aid of chloroform, for that was contraband of war.
Do you wonder, then, that I love to call those comrades of mine "my
boys"? Whether they served in the Army of Northern Virginia or the
Army of Tennessee, they were all alike my comrades. Their precious
blood has often dyed my own garments. I have gone down with them to
the very gates of death, wrestling with the death angel every step of
the way, sometimes only to receive their last sighs as they passed
into the valley of the shadow, sometimes permitted to guide their
feeble feet once more into the paths of glory.

I have shared their rations, plain but plentiful at first, at the last
only a mouldy crust and a bit of rusty bacon. I have been upon an
ambulance-train freighted with human agony delayed for hours by rumors
of an enemy in ambush. I have fed men hungry with the ravening hunger
of the wounded with scanty rations of musty corn-bread; have seen them
drink eagerly of foetid water, dipped from the road-side ditches. Yet
they bore it all with supreme patience; fretted and chafed, it is
true, but only on account of enforced inactivity. I have packed
haversacks with marching rations for forty-eight hours, a single
corn-dodger split and with only a thin slice of bacon between the
pieces. This was a _Confederate sandwich_. And on such food Southern
soldiers marched incredible distances, fought desperate battles. The
world will never cease to wonder at the unfailing devotion, the
magnificent courage, the unparalle