(As so much of a race depends on how it faces death, and how
it stands personal anguish and sickness. As, in the glints of emotions
under emergencies, and the indirect traits and asides in Plutarch, we
get far profounder clues to the antique world than all its more formal
history.)
Future years will never know the seething hell and the black infernal
background of countless minor scenes and interiors, (not the official
surface-courteousness of the Generals, not the few great battles) of
the Secession war; and it is best they should not--the real war will
never get in the books. In the mushy influences of current times, too,
the fervid atmosphere and typical events of those years are in danger
of being totally forgotten. I have at night watch'd by the side of a
sick man in the hospital, one who could not live many hours. I have
seen his eyes flash and burn as he raised himself and recurr'd to the
cruelties on his surrender'd brother, and mutilations of the
corpse afterward. (See in the preceding pages, the incident at
Upperville--the seventeen kill'd as in the description, were left
there on the ground. After they dropt dead, no one touch'd them--all
were made sure of, however. The carcasses were left for the citizens
to bury or not, as they chose.)
Such was the war. It was not a quadrille in a ball-room. Its interior
history will not only never be written--its practicality, minutia; of
deeds and passions, will never be even suggested. The actual soldier
of 1862-'65, North and South, with all his ways, his incredible
dauntlessness, habits, practices, tastes, language, his fierce
friendship, his appetite, rankness, his superb strength and animality,
lawless gait, and a hundred unnamed lights and shades of camp, I say,
will never be written--perhaps must not and should not be.
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