this sweet air and natal earth. I shall
not be suspected of being averse to the Greek cause; I know and feel its
necessity; it is beyond every other a good cause. I have defended it with
my sword, and was willing that my spirit should be breathed out in its
defence; freedom is of more worth than life, and the Greeks do well to
defend their privilege unto death. But let us not deceive ourselves. The
Turks are men; each fibre, each limb is as feeling as our own, and every
spasm, be it mental or bodily, is as truly felt in a Turk's heart or brain,
as in a Greek's. The last action at which I was present was the taking of
----. The Turks resisted to the last, the garrison perished on the
ramparts, and we entered by assault. Every breathing creature within the
walls was massacred. Think you, amidst the shrieks of violated innocence
and helpless infancy, I did not feel in every nerve the cry of a fellow
being? They were men and women, the sufferers, before they were Mahometans,
and when they rise turbanless from the grave, in what except their good or
evil actions will they be the better or worse than we? Two soldiers
contended for a girl, whose rich dress and extreme beauty excited the
brutal appetites of these wretches, who, perhaps good men among their
families, were changed by the fury of the moment into incarnated evils. An
old man, with a silver beard, decrepid and bald, he might be her
grandfather, interposed to save her; the battle axe of one of them clove
his skull. I rushed to her defence, but rage made them blind and deaf; they
did not distinguish my Christian garb or heed my words--words were blunt
weapons then, for while war cried "havoc," and murder gave fit echo, how
could I--

Turn back the tide of ills, relieving wrong
With mild accost of soothing eloquence?

One of the fellows, enraged at my interference, struck me with his bayonet
in the side, and I fell senseless.

"This wound will probably shorten my life, having shattered a frame, weak
of itself. But I am content to die. I have learnt in Greece that one man,
more or less, is of small import, while human bodies remain to fill up the
thinned ranks of the soldiery; and that the identity of an individual may
be overlooked, so that the muster roll contain its full numbers. All this
has a different effect upon Raymond. He is able to contemplate the ideal of
war, while I am sensible only to its realities. He is a soldier, a general.
He can influence the b