The Lakeland evening telegram. (Lakeland, Fla.) 1911-1922, 1914-10-28
WELCOME TO THE OLD BOYS
WHO WORE THE GRAY

VIM WUhE IdE 0hAy
The veterans are within cur gates
and Lakeland welcomes them with
true, warm-hearted hospitality, for
our people realize that 1t is an honor
and privilege to entertain these
gray old men who represent the rem
nants of once great armies that
made mighty history nearly half a
century ago and in the language of
General Grant himself achieved
prodigies of valor" upon terrible
fields of strife.
The war in which they fought is
but a memory now. Time, with sure
but tender and kindly touch, has
obscured it's cruel realism. Its grim,
lighting armies have faded from the
earth and march now only in ghostly
review down the haunted streets of
proud heroic memories. Its soldiers
sleep beneath the sod and the dew
save only an aging remnant left to
greet each other with the clasp of
comrades in annual reunions whose
numbers are fast diminishing. Its
issues are all settled and settled for
ever, and these old veterans still
spared to us, with the sunset glow of
life upon their good gray heads, are
living memorials of a splendid, tragic
past whom we can never honor too
much nor care for too kindly.
Only those who were in the Con-
federacy and Of it; who breathed its
spirit and were inspired with its
hopes; who endured it's privations
and faced its dangers, can ever un-
derstand in their fullest meaning
how high and pure and honest were
the animating motives of the South.
ern people in that brave but futile
adventure to establish separate
government Of their own, The cause
was doomed from the start, for not
only were overwhelming numbers to
90 the work of conquest, but the
very centripetal ferees et nature,
which operate in morals as in
physics were against it and the issue
was hardly less doubtful than the
courses of the stars; but before it
died it gave the world a new lesson
in war and lighted the pages Of
American history with the splendor
Of valor, endurance and sacrifice not
often equaled and never surpassed.
History has told in it's cold and
pulscless way the tragedy Of the war,
its battles, seiges and varying for
tunes until the end came at Appoma-
tox, but only in these reunions of the
men who fought it, when hearts
grow warm and tongues wag elo-
quently graphic in individual stories
Of the strife; in "reminiscences that
will live only in tradition, and HUI
man interest narratives told by the
men who were themselves the actors
in the drama, can the true spirit of
the brave, simple, honest Old South
and her soldiers be adequately rec
ognized.
And that is the chief purpose and
best value of these meetings of the
veterans. They live once more in
the thrilling days of war when gal
liant foemen fought each other fairly
in open battle for the mastery
They hear again the wild music of
the boisterous drum, the silver notes
of heroic bugles." and as the long
film of memory unrolls before them
they see the marching columns and
the battling armies and can almost
hear the crash and roar of musketry
and cannon and the fierce, long
drawn, penetrating yell peculiar to
the s'rdiers of the South when the
fray was on. To men who were good
fighters then and have been good
citizens ever since it is a very tonic
in their old age, after fifty years of
peace, to meet in these reunions,
live through those times again and
give themselves without restraint to
the warm spirit of the conradeship
begun and cemented in the crucial
test of war.
The bitterness of the strife has
passed from all manly hearts; the
nation is stronger and better for it's
passage through the crucible of al
conflict inevitable from the founding
of the government; and while here
and there are a few unreconstructed
souls, both North and South, that
stopped growing fifty years ago and
refuse to forgive or be forgiven, they
are negligible backnumbers amid the