The soldier is not the cold unfeeling, immovable animal that some people seem to think he is.  On the contrary, and paradoxical as it may appear, he is warm-hearted, sympathetic, and generous spirited and his mind often reverts to home, kindred, and friends, when least expected.  His love and sympathy for his fellow-soldier is proverbial in the army.  In the lull, of battle, or on its eve, men with bold hearts and strong nerves look each other in the face with grim reliance.  With set teeth and nerve’s strung to extreme tension, the thoughts of the soldier often wander to his distant home.  The panorama of his whole life passes before him in vivid colors.  His first thoughts are of the great beyond—­all soldiers, whatever their beliefs or dogmas, think of this.  It is natural, it is right, it is just to himself.  He sees in his imagination the aged father or mother or the wife and little ones with outstretched arms awaiting the coming of him who perhaps will never come.  These are some of the sensations and feelings of a soldier on the eve of, or in battle, or at its close.  It is no use denying it, all soldiers feel as other people do, and when a soldier tells as a fact that he “went into battle without fear,” he simply tells “what George Washington never told.”  It is human, and “self-preservation is the first law of nature.”  No one wants to die.  Of course ambition, love of glory, the plaudits of your comrades and countrymen, will cause many a blade to flash where otherwise it would not.  But every soldier who reads this will say that this is honest and the whole truth.  I am writing a truthful history of the past and honesty forces me to this confession.  “All men are cowards” in the face of death.  Pride, ambition, a keen sense of duty, will make differences outwardly, but the heart is a coward still when death stares the possessor in the face.  Men throw away their lives for their country’s sake, or for honor or duty like a cast off garment and laugh at death, but this is only a sentiment, for all men want to live.  I write so much to controvert the rot written in history and fiction of soldiers anxious to rush headlong into eternity on the bayonets of the enemy.

Historians of all time will admit the fact that at Gettysburg was fought a battle, not a skirmish, but it was not what Northern writers like to call it, “Lee’s Waterloo.”  The Wilderness, Spottsylvania, and Petersburg were yet to come.

* * * * *

CHAPTER XX

Gettysburg—­Fourth Day—­Incidents of the Battle—­Sketch of Dessausure, McLeod, and Salmonds.

A flag of truce now waves over both armies, granting a respite to bury the dead and care for the wounded.  The burial of the dead killed in battle is the most trying of all duties of the soldier.  Not that he objects to paying these last sad rites to his fallen comrades, but it is the manner in which he must leave them with his last farewell.