The Salt Lake herald. [volume] (Salt Lake City [Utah]) 1870-1909, 1899-06-04
NEW GRAVES
AT ARLINGTON.
By EDWARD MARSHALL.

| Ugly in the bare red of its monotony
of newly turned clay, the new graves
of the soldiers, dead in the Spanish
American war, will pitifully bear their
| flowers this Memorial day.
1t was Sunday afternoon when
| drove out to Arlington. Holidaymak-
ers swarmed into the great National
! graveyard as If it were a picnic
! ground. The spreading trees and rich
turf of the old cemetery We're green
and peaceful. Where lay the dead
heroes of our civil war was sclemnitv,
but no sadness. The scars of that
great conflict had been obliterated by
| time. But where the new graves are is
this great red blot-a tremendous
wound in the sward TO tell a story,
awesome and as, full of heartache as it
! is OF glory.
Almost precisely a year before I had
travelled about from camp to camp and
! come to know our soldiers. 1 had
messed and camped with the gallant
Ninth cavalry; 1 had gone to Cuba
| with the surgeons and the hospital
corps; 1 had gone into battle with the
rough riders and fought with them and
bled with them Among the brave,
| black troopers Of the Ninth numbered
scores Of friends. Among the rough
riders there was scarcely a man whom
I did not personally know. Day after
| day, since the time when battle and
disease began among these my friends,
! 1 had watched the records and l knew
who were dead / wanted earnestly to
find their graves. But on the long rows
of tiny tombstones there were no
names. Each had it's inexpensive, I'M
romantic number. On one or two some
reverent one had scratched a name in
| lead pencil but they were all strange
names to me. A pleasant man came
from the office of the cemetery with,
at first, some merriment. He showed
me the map of the graves. I looked at
it with eager interest. / looked away
as quickly when 1 saw the long rows
marked unknown" 1t seems to me
a pity that our government does not
make some plan by which the identity
of the men who go out to fight for it
shall be certainly preserved
One Little Decorator.
Then I drove back to the graves.
They were not wreathed with flowers,
as one would have expected them to be
just after they had been made, but
from each one floated little flag. They
were pitiful little flags, those bits of
color on our soldiers new graves. They
were made of the cheapest cloth, and
the red and the blue in them was stem
ciled on with cheap paint, which will
run down and spoil the white stripes
when the first rain comes. On one or
two of all the thousand graves were
tiny nosegays. 1 fancy that they had
been put there by a little girl that
morning. 1 saw her going about weep
ing, with some other punches of flowers
in her hands. She told me that no one
she knew had been buried there, but
that her big brother" had been killed
in the Philippines.
The graves were dug by contract,
doubtless, and are arranged in rows so
regularly that they make straight lines,
no matter in what position you stand
as you view them. They were dug by
contract, and there were not enough
dead soldiers to fill all of them, for
there are many blank spaces where one
may walk, if he is not on crutches, as
I was. If he is, the soft earth which
has been loosely thrown into the use
less holes will sink beneath his crutches
and he will founder, as if in quicksand.
I tried to walk about among the graves,
but the government of the United States
had too little land to spare to make the
paths wide enough for a lame mans
progress.
Leaves Mark Capron's Grave.
I saw Captain Capron a moment or
two after he had been hit at Las Guas-
imas. I saw his grave at Arlington. At
GuasinaS he so covered himself with
glory that he made the brave men in
that brave regiment of rough riders
look at him in amaZement, and more
than one of them there, in the excite
ment of the first battle, took time
enough as he passed him to pause and
bare his head. At Arlington a grateful
country has not taken time to pause
long enough in its monotonouS worka-
day hours to put flowers on his grave.
Two faded palm leaves were laid upon
it. That was ALL
Near his grave is that of another
soldier whom 1 knew WELL Captain
William O'Neill, the famous Buckley"
He rests under a handsome granite
stone, and some one had smothered the
sodden mound with flowers the day I
saw it. 1t was he who made a famous
remark. Some one had said that our
landing in Cuba would be a gamble
who wouldn't gamble for new
star in the fiag?" Buckley quietly re-
marked, and went on chewing his to-
bacco.
To one who had seen the men who
are now lying at Arlington in camp
and on the battlefield it was tremen-
dously impressive to gaze at their last
resting places I raised my eyes, and
across a beautiful ravine the silvery
sheen of the Potomac greeted them. |
Beyond that lies Washington-the
magic city in which the country for
which they fought and died has its
governmental center. The great white
dome of the capitol changed slowly to
a red dome as the suns setting colored
everything. The tall shaft of the
Washington monument pierced a tinted
sky.
From Fort Meyer came the long, quiv-
ering, pathetic bugle notes of taps"