ought to the great
Charlottesville hospital sad reinforcements of wounded men. Crutch-races
between one-legged soldiers were organized, and there were timber-toe
quadrilles and one-armed cotillions. Out of the shelter of the Blue
Ridge it was easy enough to get into the range of bullets. A semblance
of college life was kept up at the University of Virginia. The students
were chiefly maimed soldiers and boys under military age; but when
things grew hot in front, maimed soldiers would edge nearer to the hell
of battle and the boys would rush off to the game of powder and ball.
One little band of these college boys chose an odd time for their
baptism of fire, and were put into action during the famous fight of
"the bloody angle." From the night when word was brought that the
Federals had occupied Alexandria to the time when I hobbled into the
provost marshal's office at Charlottesville and took the oath of
allegiance, the war was part of my life, and it is not altogether
surprising that the memories of the Confederacy come back to me whenever
I contemplate the history of the Peloponnesian war, which bulks so
largely in all Greek studies. And that is all this paper really means.
It belongs to the class of inartistic performances of which Aristotle
speaks so slightingly. It has no unity except the accidental unity of
person. A Southerner in the Peloponnesian War has no more artistic right
to be than A Girl in the Carpathians or A Scholar in Politics, and yet
it may serve as a document. But what will not serve as a document to the
modern historian? The historian is no longer the poor creature described
by Aristotle. He is no annalist, no chronicler. He is not dragged along
by the mechanical sequence of events. "The master of them that know" did
not know everything. He did not know that history was to become as
plastic as poetry, as dramatic as a play.

V

[Note: [Greek: akoueis Aischine]; Dem. 18, 112. My Millwood friend was a
scholar of the old times and would not have paused to consider whether
the omission of [Greek: o] was due to scorn of AEschines or dread of the
hiatus.]

The war was a good time for the study of the conflict between Athens and
Sparta. It was a great time for reading and re-reading classical
literature generally, for the South was blockaded against new books as
effectively, almost, as Megara was blockaded against garlic and salt.
The current literature of those three or four years was a blank to mos