The letter said:—­

“We were ordered to fire, and I took steady aim and fired on my man at a distance of sixty yards.  He dropped like a stone, at the same instant a broadside from the ship scattered among the trees, and the enemy vanished, we could scarcely tell how.  I felt as though I must go up to the man I had fired upon to see if he were dead or alive.  I found him quite still, and I was more afraid of him when I saw him lying so than when he stood facing me a few minutes before.  It is a strange feeling that comes over you all at once when you have killed a man.  He had unfastened his jacket, and was pressing his hand against his chest where the wound was.  He breathed hard, and the blood poured from the wound and his mouth at every breath.  His face was white as death, and his eyes looked big and bright as he turned them staring up at me.  I shall never forget it.  He was a fine young fellow, not over five and twenty.  I knelt beside him and I felt as though my heart would burst.  He had an English face and did not look like my enemy.  If my life could have saved his I would have given it.  I held his head on my knee and he tried to speak, but his voice was gone.  I could not understand a word that he said.  I am not ashamed to say that I was worse than he, for he never shed a tear and I did.  I was wondering how I could bear to leave him to die alone, when he had some sort of convulsions, then his head rolled over and with a sigh he was gone.  I laid his head gently on the grass and left him.  It seemed so strange when I looked at him for the last time.  I somehow thought of everything I had ever read about the Turks and the Russians, and the rest of them, but all that seemed so far off, and the dead man so near.”

This was the secret tragedy of the common fraternity of manhood driven by custom into a sham battle of death.  The European war of 1886 was a conflict of Slav and Teuton.  France will never forgive Germany for taking Alsace and Lorraine.  It was a surrender to Germany of what in the United States would be equal to the surrender of Philadelphia and Boston, with vast harvest fields in addition.  France wanted to blot out Sedan.  England desired to keep out of the fight upon a naval report that she was unprepared for war.  The Danes were ready for insurrection against their own Government.  Only 3,000 miles of Atlantic Ocean and great wisdom of Washington kept us out of the fight.  The world’s statesmanship at this time was the greatest it had ever known.  There was enough of it in St. Petersburg, Berlin, Rome, Paris, and London to have achieved a great progress for peace by arbitration and treaty, but there was no precedent by which to judge the effect of such a plan.  The nations had never before had such vast populations to change into armies.  The temptations of war were irresistible.