The daily morning journal and courier., 1898-08-15

gets to regard the waste of human life very much as he regards the waste of other war material. It becomes ne- cessary part of the business, and there is no use in reflecting upon it. When I came back I observed that there had been a transformation effected in the men themselves. Their faces told it with new lines, and their manners be- trayed it, Half of our brigade had been distributed between the trenches and the hospitals. The ease with which command could be Knocked to pieces as the ofTicial>report phrased it, put quite new aspect on our own self-importance, and that sentiment about the "sacredness of the person." which some of us had brought with us out of civil life had to be put away like our tooth-brushes and bath-towels. The change expressed Itself in both a grim kind of humor and a growing self agnegation. Concretely put in army language, it was, "Oh, man or two doesn't count much now"
 This, I take it, is one of the valuable requirements of the veteran. It was common remark in our regiment that our boys could shoot now without shut ting their eyes, the deep significance of which is in the fact that the ineXperi- enced recruit who is called upon to shoot down fellow-being has at first a singular repugnance to seeing himself do it. Long afterwards the men in my regiment, when talking over a battle, would recount with unconcern how they lifted" or ''flattened" a Johnny that is to say, how they shot the man through the heart, so that he jumped into the air, or how they shot him in the brain, so that he fell over on his face. There is, of course, a good deal of protective bravado in this. A man who Is vereran is man who has not only to face the foe, but to look sharp after his own sensibilities.
 Another thing has to be taken into account. To fight with the vigor and deadliness that gives a regiment the ti- tie of the Bloody tn or the Fighting tn, it is necessary to acquire some kind of technical vindictiveness. In other words, man must be hurt be- fore he will fight back with the neces- sary vim. All this means that to come to the killing business effectively, we have to summon the animal propensi- ties, and keep the reflective conscious ness out of the way. The change ex- pressed itself in the desire to 'get square" with the men who had hurt us so on that Sunday morning.
 Then, too, when it is all over and the grass has come to cover the trail of it, we get to see that war always involves
 
 generally on the side of the vanquished and one-half the glory, the patriotism and the gallantry go for nothing in the result.
 Sleepy old Corinth lies there still in the southern sunshine. The double road from the Landing to the front winding through the trees and the open for seventeen miles, is a grass grown path upon which the fringed gentian and the ox-eye daisy have en- croached. It is no longer congested with the long wagon-trains of supplies. The gullies and ravines that were once filled with the fragments of equipments and the waste of provisions, and over which the endless chain of cursing teamsters drove their mules night and day, is macadamized and solid with the weight of years. An equable silence and solitude reign where the forest
 echoed with our pageantry, and we once borrowed the poets words to
 make the picture vivid, and said: "The bladed guns are cleaning, Drift in heightened trim, Files on files for hazy miles, Nebulously dim.'
 All the heroes who travelled that un- certain road have gone on to glory 1 Grant, Sherman, Buell., Lew Wallace, Beauregard, travelled on afterwards to | national fame, and all save Lew Wal lace are as silent as the boys they left behind them in those dusky woods | But who has told or can tell the story of the thousands of mothers and fath- | CTS who came down there to look for their first born, and stood helpless be- | fore that cruel barrier of the heaped d-up trench?
 A gray-bearded friend who fought against us as wickedly as he could, went with me over the obliterated paths, and softly pulled the clematis aside to look for the long, disappeared | grave-mark. We mingled memories without reproaches, and as we sat on
 an old fallen trunk that must have | beena sapling when General Johnston | rode his horse up to it-and death-and
 the west wind brought the faint sound | of peaceful steam whistle faraway, I
 could not find it in my heart to remind
 my companion that the blood and
 treasure, the devotion and heroism,
 that the south poured out look now, in
 these sylvan groves where we shake | hands, like a monstrous mistake soft
 ened only by time.
 | DRESSING FOR DINNER