The National tribune. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1877-1917, 1902-12-25


not know the place Of his grave. At this
she wrote that she was surprised that l
was unwilling to do this small service for
a soldiers mother.
"Why, Chaplain" she said, "if you
don't know just where my John is buried,
you might ask the sexton. He'll tell
YOU"
Her ideas of soldier burial places were
based on her knowledge of the New Eng
land village cemetery. where the old sex
ton knew the precise location Of every
grave dug in his day or his fathers, in
that graveyard. Others, besides that
mother. may be as much in the dark as
she was about soldier graves and soldier
burials. Soldiers themselves had to learn
the truth little by little, and it is well that
it WAS SO.
UNMARKED wAYsIDE GRAVES.
When we made more into the interior
OF North Carolina, for the purpose OF
burning the great bridge of the Petersburg
& Weldon Railroad at Goldsboro, we
learned new lessons as to caring for the
soldier dead, or as to the necessity of fail
ing to care for them in the exigenc;es Of
more active warfare. At Kinston we had
three officers and 90 men killed, and more
than so wounded, in a single charge. Then
in n few hours our regiment must push on
to like service in other fields. The best
that we could do in the brief interval of
our stay was to bury our dead hurriedly
in common grave, or in long trench
by the wayside, the officers by themselves,
and the enlisted men near them. Suisse
quently the bodies of the officers were re-
covered by a flag, Of truce, but those Of
the men remained in their wayside grave
with never a stone or stake to mark
them. and we had reason to believe that
the field of their burial would be plowed
and planted by the returning owners as
though it had never been moistened by the
blood OF patriots.
Other regiments had their dead buried
hurriedly on that field, and on other fields
beyond, where they were even more has
tily covered with earth on the spot where
they fell. There was no time to do more.
AS We came back from that expedition
we found some Of these hurried graves
already partially uncovered by the wind
and rain and by trampling hoofs, and we
realized that many Of the soldier dead
must fail Of permanent resting place in
the. bosom of mother earth. As l read
that day, in my daily course Of Bible read
ing, the Hist Psalm, the words, Our
bones are scattered at the graves mouth
had new significance and impressive
ness to me.
GRAVES IN TIE SHIFTING SANDS OF NOR
RIS ISLAND.
On Morris Island, after the attack on
Fort Wagner, the disposition of the dead
was even more suggestive of the darkest
side Of army life and of army deaths.
Hundreds of Union soldiers were dead on
the parapet Of the fort, in the ditch before
it, and all the way down the island be-
tween the Union and Confederate lines,
among the sand-hills or on the intervening
sand-plains. 1t would have been practi-
cally impossible for the force available to
gather and remove all the dead and bury
them in permanent graves. The best that
could be done at the time, during the brief
truce arranged for the purpose. was to
lift up and remove the wounded, and hur-
riedly to cover the bodies of the dead in
sand graves near where they fell And a
grave in those shifting sands, where the
ocean tides and the whirling gales were
continually overturning what had before
been turned, was not permanent resting
place; there was no rest there even in the
grave.
A correspondent of the Charleston Cour-
Ter. who was witness of the CHASTITY
scene before Fort Wagner, after the Sat
urday night attack on it, described it in
terrible vividness. Probably no battle
field in the country" he said, "has ever
presented such an array of mangled bodies
in so small compass as was to be seen
on Sunday morning. The ground in front
of the battery was thickly strewn; but in
the ditch around the works the dead and
wounded, white and black, were literally
piled together. Blood, mud, water, brains,
and human hair, matted together; men ly-
ing in every conceivable attitude, with
every conceivable expression upon their
countenances; their limbs bent into unnat-
ural shape by the fall of 20 or more feet;
the fingers rigid and outstretched as if
they had clutched at the earth to save
themselves; pale, beseeching faces, looking
out from among the ghastly corpses with
means and cries for help and water, and
dying gasps and death strugglcs-these
are some of the details of the horrible pic
turc which the night of Saturday had left
to be revealed by the dawn of peaceful
Sabbath"
Yet this was but single point after the
battle. On both sides of the line drawn,
by mutual consent, across the island, dur
ing the hours of truce, many dead were