ilitary life was too brief and
desultory to be of any value to the historian of the war. For my own
life that experience has been of the utmost significance, and despite
the heavy price I have had to pay for my outings, despite the daily
reminder of five long months of intense suffering, I have no regrets. An
able-bodied young man, with a long vacation at his disposal, could not
have done otherwise, and the right to teach Southern youth for nine
months was earned by sharing the fortunes of their fathers and brothers
at the front for three. Self-respect is everything; and it is something
to have belonged in deed and in truth to an heroic generation, to have
shared in a measure its perils and privations. But that heroic
generation is apt to be a bore to a generation whose heroism is of a
different type, and I doubt whether the young people in our car took
much interest in the very audible conversation of the two veterans.
Twenty-five years hence, when the survivors will be curiosities, as
were Revolutionary pensioners in my childhood, there may be a renewal of
interest. As it is, few of the present generation pore over The Battles
and Leaders of the Civil War, and a grizzled old Confederate has been
heard to declare that he intended to bequeath his copy of that valuable
work to some one outside of the family, so provoked was he at the
supineness of his children. And yet, for the truth's sake, all these
battles must be fought over and over again, until the account is
cleared, and until justice is done to the valor and skill of both sides.

[Note: I had a similar experience some years after I wrote this paper,
when I was spending the summer at Westport on Lake Champlain. Wandering
far enough off into the country to lose myself--for me no unfamiliar
feat--I joined a man who was driving his cows to town and in my talk
with him it turned out that he had been through the Valley campaign on
the other side, and together we recalled encounters and scenes that were
not recorded in the histories, insignificant skirmishes--significant
enough to those who were killed and maimed. Who remembers the little
brush at Weyer's Cave, where the Confederates came near bagging General
Merritt? I have not been allowed to forget it these fifty years.]

The two old soldiers were talking amicably enough, as all old soldiers
do, but they "yarned," as all old soldiers do, and though they talked
from Baltimore to Philadelphia, and from Philadelphia to