the 6th Mississippi 70 per cent.; and at Antietam the 1st Texas lost 82
per cent. The loss of the Light Brigade in killed and wounded in its
famous charge at Balaklava was but 37 per cent.

These figures show the terrible punishment endured by these
regiments--chosen at random from the head of the list--which shows the
slaughter roll of the civil war. Yet the shattered remnant of each
regiment preserved its organization, and many of the severest losses
were suffered by regiments in the hour of triumph, and not of disaster.
Thus, the 1st Minnesota at Gettysburg suffered its appalling loss while
charging a greatly superior force, which it drove before it; and
the little huddle of wounded and unwounded men who survived their
victorious charge actually kept both the flag they had captured and the
ground from which they had driven their foes.

A number of the Continental regiments under Washington, Greene, and
Wayne did valiant fighting, and suffered severe loss. Several of the
regiments raised on the Northern frontier in 1814 showed, under Brown
and Scott, that they were able to meet the best troops of England on
equal terms in the open, and even to overmatch them in fair fight with
the bayonet. The regiments which in the Mexican war, under the lead of
Taylor, captured Monterey, and beat back Santa Anna at Buena Vista, or
which, with Scott as commander, stormed Molino Del Rey and Chapultepec,
proved their ability to bear terrible loss, to wrest victory from
overwhelming numbers, and to carry by open assault positions of
formidable strength held by a veteran army. But in none of these three
wars was the fighting so resolute and bloody as in the civil war.

Countless deeds of heroism were performed by Northerner and by
Southerner, by officer and by private, in every year of the great
snuggle. The immense majority of these deeds went unrecorded, and were
known to few beyond the immediate participants. Of those that were
noticed it would be impossible even to make a dry catalogue in ten such
volumes as this. All that can be done is to choose out two or three acts
of heroism not as exceptions, but as examples of hundreds of others. The
times of war are iron times, and bring out all that is best as well as
all that is basest, in the human heart. In a full recital of the civil
war, as of every other great conflict, there would stand out in naked
relief feats of wonderful daring and self-devotion, and, mixed among
them, deeds of