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whackers and jayhawkers who hung about the armies and infested the border were often worse than Apache Indians. The Confederate raiders burned some buildings, the devastation of the Shenandoah Valley caused much suffering and venom. But that is about the list of what you might call atrocities. Yet without any unnecessary ferocity, the mere inevitable horrors of fair, honorable, open warfare roused enough exasperation and bitterness and animosity and rancor, you understand. The hatred on both sides was at white heat while it lasted."

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"I can scarcely credit," René said, 'that what has cooled so soon could have been so fierce."

"You are comparing our forty years," Wade conjectured, " with your hundred and ten after the war in what's-itsname?"

"Just so," his guest replied. "It seems the hatred can scarcely have been so intense as you claim, nor the provocations so frightful."

"You ought to have heard the veterans last Decoration Day," Wade told him. "They had a sort of reunion of both sides here. Several of them stayed at my house and they made my porch their headquarters. You ought to have heard the stories they told."

"For instance," the Frenchman suggested.

"Oh, I can't begin to tell them," Wade disclaimed. "I'm commercial, you understand. I never can remember the names of the battles and generals and colonels, nor the number of the regiments, nor the dates either, for that matter; any more than I can remember the names of all those high-and-mighty families you were telling me about, you understand. But I took in the gist of their talk, you bet. I just sat there and smoked and listened, and when they ran dry I'd take 'em out in the pantry for a little ammunition. One evening in particular, I think it was the 29th of May, they got going.

"There were two of them staying with me, my uncle, General Tom Wade of Milwaukee, and Colonel Melrose of Boston, an uncle of my wife's. They were both born in Middleville, you understand, but one went west and one went north, and they live there yet. They were back in Middleville for a visit. Then there was Captain Tupper, cousin of the farmer you met, and Captain Bowe, uncle of the storekeeper. They both live here, came back after they made their pile, but they were out west when the war broke out. They were Union men too, you understand.

"We had five Confeds. Captain John Spence, my mother's youngest brother, Colonel Parks, father of the Parks you met, and old General Humphreys, Dick Humphreys's father. They live here, and with them were Colonel Janney, Henry Tupper's father-in-law, and Colonel Rhett, my sister-in-law's uncle.

"They were all right there on my porch, where you and I were sitting this morning. It was a beautiful night, hot for May and still. They had had a snifter or two all around and had rather limbered up to each other and warmed up to their talk. They talked war, of course, talked it good-naturedly. They had all been in it, had all lost near relatives in battle: Colonel Rhett had lost most, never heard of such a connection as the Rhetts. But Colonel Janney had lost nearly as many. The five Confeds had all come out of the war beggars, lost every cent they ever had. Yet they all talked good-naturedly, you understand. They got to talking about a cornfield; not the cornfield at Gettysburg, but one famous in some small battle, early in the war, soon after Bull Run, I think. Anyhow they called it Rumbold's cornfield. I can't remember the name of the battle or of the locality, but they remembered it all right, you understand. They talked about the first charge and the second charge, and the second day's fighting, and the third charge across that same cornfield.

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Colonel Melrose said nothing. Uncle Wade asked, 'Were n't you there, Melrose ? '

"Melrose tugged at his curly gray beard.

"'Yes, I was there,' he said. The most fearful moment of my life was in Rumbold's cornfield.'

The second shell burst midway of the company a little toward the rear. The force of the explosion knocked me flat on my face, though I was not hit. When I scrambled to my feet I glanced behind me, could not see Nathan, and ran back to look for him. I had heard of the horrors of war, but then I first realized them.

"We expected him to tell a story, but "A fragment of shell had torn him he said no more.

"General Humphreys launched into an account of the difficulties the Confederates labored under, their shortness of supplies, and all that. He told how they got five field-guns in position to cover that cornfield, and he made a good story of it too. You could just feel what an exploit it was merely to plant those guns after all they had to overcome. Then, when they were in position, they found they had just three shells. Only three shells, you understand. And before they could get more the first charge across the cornfield began.

"You ought to have heard Humphreys describe just how they felt, how they could not see the men charging, but could see the movement in the corn, how they made each one of those shells tell, and at short range too. How the shells failed to stop the charge, how the riflefire failed to stop the charge, how they barely saved their guns, how they lost one and recaptured it next day. He made you feel the fierceness, the hurry, the sweat of it all, you understand. He had sighted one of the guns himself for the second shot.

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open from hip to hip. His heart could scarcely have ceased beating, his flesh must still have been quivering. But what I saw was already a loathsome carcass, not a man.

"I turned away. Gentlemen, there was nothing there for me to help. Nothing but carrion, what an instant before had been my dearest friend, the man I most admired, the most promising youth I ever knew. I bore my part in that charge, did my utmost in the fight. But I was a mere maniac with the riot of my feelings, the turmoil of my thoughts. I was surprised at the clearness of those same thoughts. The rush of the charge, the fury of the fight, the confusion of the retreat were enough to occupy the whole of any man's faculties. The mere physical horror of what I had seen was sufficient to benumb any conceivable intellect. Yet I went through everything like a wound-up automaton, not needing any faculties seemingly, for what I did, thinking independently of what I was doing, and observing my own sensations as one does in the double-consciousness of a dream. I remember what I thought, for I went over it a hundred times, a thousand times in the next year.

"First of all there was a sort of incredulous amazement at the intensity of the internal, physical sensation of overwhelming grief. It amazed me that it could hurt so atrociously, and I was more amazed that a spiritual smart could feel so entirely corporeal, like a scald or burn. It was as if I had swallowed hell-fire and it blazed in me without consuming me, a suffocating agony.

"Then there was the bewilderment at my loneliness, the inability to realize

that he would never speak to me again, that we should never again exchange confidences. I had gone to college very unformed. There was not much to form a lad on the Eastern Shore in those days. And at Harvard my mind and soul had developed rapidly. But my intellectual growth had been less the effect of Harvard than of Nathan Adams. He had been not so much my guiding star as the sun of my existence from the moment I first saw him. My other interests had been swallowed up in the fascination he exercised over me, and always for good. He was the prophet, preacher, and poet of my college days. My devotion to him was the first passion of my life, its only passion up to his death. To please him, to strive after the ideals he held before himself, to aspire with his aspirations, had been the sum of my aims. Behold, the idol had vanished from my heart's shrine. Life was empty.

"Also I was dazed with a sense of the loss to the commonwealth. Not only I but all who knew him had regarded Nathan as a natural leader of men, as possessed of transcendent powers, capacities and abilities, as born to a high destiny, as a precious possession of his state, his nation, of the world. I quailed at the irretrievable annihilation of his potentialities for good, of all he was certain to have done had he lived.

"Likewise I was overwhelmed with the sense of the waste of life the war en tailed, of its frightful cost to humanity, and with that sense a crushing weight of my part of the duty to win for the country all his blood had been spilled for, all that was to be bought at the price of such lives as his. I had an access of partisan patriotism.

"And yet I felt not only that flare of ardor, but the lofty intellectual exaltation of devotion to the cause which had led us to enlist, swamped utterly by a torrent of personal animosity, of revengefulness, throughout that charge. I felt that life's most precious prize would be to have the man who fired that shell VOL. 101 - NO. 5

helpless before me, to feel my bayonet pierce his breast. That feeling haunted me for months. After I was an officer, after I had my sword and had used my sword, after I knew that gritty, friable, yielding grind of bone under my sabrepoint, no other desire so consumed me as to meet in fair fight the man who fired that shell and feel tingle all up my arm the crunching, clinging drag of my sabreedge cleaving his skull. I was astonished at the elemental fury of my inward savagery. I was as primitive as Agamemnon praying to Jupiter to let him feel his spear-point rend Hector's corselet and pierce his breast-bone. I was as primitive as a Sioux brave at a wardance.'

"When Melrose stopped, nobody thought of cigars. They sat so still you could hear the breath whistle in Colonel Park's asthmatic wind-pipe. And they were still for some time.

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At last Humphreys asked: ""And now?'

"And now,' Melrose took him up, 'there is not even the ghost of that acrimony left. We meet and you tell of it and I hear of it and know that you are the man. But all that volcano of hatred is burned out in me. I tell of how I felt, but the telling does not revive the feeling it recalls. I have no more animus against you than if those horrors had happened in some past lifetime, or to other men altogether.'"

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"Oh," Wade laughed, "I remember names I learned at school. But I get so lost among names of battles, commanders and numbers of regiments, you understand, that I give up altogether. I can repeat a conversation pretty well, though. My wife says it's a wonder that a man who can remember another man's language so exactly can find so few words to express his own ideas. But that's the way I'm built. I remember what impresses itself on me, you understand.

"After we got out on the porch again they were all a little uncomfortable. Melrose's story had been too real. Captain Tupper started in to create a diversion; you could hear that in his tone.

"Speaking of sighting a shell,' he said, the best shot I ever saw was fired from a battery I commanded on the march to the sea. It was just before we reached Columbia. There was really no force in front of us, but they behaved as if they had a substantial body of men, and fooled us for some hours. We got our guns well within range and wellmasked. Through my binoculars I could see the enemy's staff as pompous as if they had an army of a hundred thousand men intrenched.

"There was an officer with a gray goatee seated at a little table, two younger officers, with black goatees, standing on his left, and five or six men on his right, one in front with a long dark beard. They were as cool as if they controlled the situation, orderlies galloping up and galloping off and all that.

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"We had a German named Krebs, a barrel of a man, but a wonderful artillerist: I called him and he sighted our best gun through the scrub pines.

"He plunked the shell square on that table, I saw the table smash, and the shell exploded as it struck the ground. That was the best cannon-shot I ever saw or heard of.'

"The instant Tupper ceased Colonel Rhett cleared his throat. He spoke in a muffled, choked voice.

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nition the same evening. I was one of the half-dozen men on that general's right hand. I was the only one not killed of the nine by the table. The general was my father, and the man with the long black beard my brother-in-law. Two of the others were my cousins.'

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'You may be sure we were all uncomfortable after that. And it did n't seem to me another drink was in order, just then, either.

"Colonel Tupper spoke like a man. "It was all in the course of duty, Rhett,' he said. 'I would n't hold a personal grudge for it against you, if our places were changed, not if the shell had killed all my family and friends.'

"That sort of relieved the tension and we all felt less nervous when Rhett answered,

"I hold no grudge, Tupper. We're all friends together, now. And since you mention it, it would have taken an almighty big shell to kill all my kin at one shot.'

"We laughed at that and felt better. "Captain Bowe cut in. He thought he could change the line of thought.

"Duty led to some pretty unpalatable acts being forced on a fellow in wartime,' he said. Sometimes I think some of the duties that resulted in no bloodshed at all were worse to have to do than any kind of killing. I was in the Shenandoah Valley, and I can tell you turning ladies and children out of doors and burning their homes before their eyes took all a man's resolution and devotion to duty. It took all a man's resolve not to bolt and desert rather than carry out orders. I had some horrible days then.

"The worst of all was near Red Post, at an estate named Tower Hill, belonging to some people named Archibald. Of course there were women at home, only the women. Mrs. Archibald was not over twenty-six. She had four children, a beautiful little girl of about five years, twin boys, not any too sure on their feet, and a baby not six weeks old. She had two sisters, handsome dark

girls, about seventeen and nineteen; Rannie their name was, or something like it. Her mother was an exquisite old lady, all quiet dignity. They were not hard and cold and scornful like some of the women I had had to leave houseless; they acquiesced without protests. Mrs. Archibald said she realized how distasteful my task must be to me. Indeed, I had tears in my eyes when I talked to her, I know. They huddled together just beyond the heat of the fire, and watched the barn and quarters burn and the house catch. They clung to each other, and the girls cried softly. By the Lord, gentlemen, that hurt more than any loss by death, and death took some of my dear ones during the war. That tried my soul more than danger or privations. It was bitter hard to have to do, and it is not agreeable to recall, even now.'

"Janney swore out loud.

"This seems to be a day of recognitions,' he said. Their name was not Rannie, it was Janney. They were my sisters and my mother. I was not two miles away, and I saw the house go. vowed to kill the man that burned it, if I ever met him, and I meant it too.'

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"Does that vow hold good?' Bowe asked quietly, never stirring in his chair.

""Time has canceled all the rash vows of those years,' Melrose put in before Janney could speak. All the rash vows and all the old hatreds.'

"'Yes,' Janney agreed, that is my view too. I consider that vow as completely annulled as if I had never taken it. But if we had captured you, Bowe, among the prisoners we made out of the stragglers then, and if I had known you for the man who burnt Tower Hill, I'd have shot you like a dog, sir; murdered you in cold blood without a qualm, sir!""

Wade sat silent. The near horse pawed at the turf-grown carriage track and turned his head toward the buggy, wickering softly.

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'And what followed?" Des Pertuis queried.

"I don't remember any more that evening," Wade replied. "But next day the nine of them walked down here, arm in arm, Humphreys with Melrose, Rhett with Tupper, Janney with Bowe, and Captain Spence and Parks and Uncle Wade, with seven or eight more veterans. Colonel Melrose stuck that flag on Colonel Spence's grave, himself."

René looked at the flag as if he had never seen it before.

"I perceive the point," he said. "Your experiment is entirely successful. I agree with you. I have seen nothing in America as wonderful as that little faded flag. I understand what it is of which you especially boast. You conceive that here in the United States exists a kind of fraternity more genuine than anything anywhere else in the world. It is this of which you brag."

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'Exactly so," Wade affirmed. "That's what I brag of, that's worth bragging of, you understand. What do area and population and wealth and manufactures and trade-balances and prosperity and all that sort of thing amount to, after all? Other nations have had them, and have them, and will have them. But what other nation ever had what that flag stands for? I don't know much history, you understand, but my wife spends her life reading, and I listen when she talks. I'm dead sure no nation ever produced anything to compare with the spirit in which our differences have resulted. I'm sure no nation has it to-day. And if it ever overspreads the world in the future, we made it, we started it, we had it first. That's something worth being proud of."

"I comprehend indeed," René told him. "And I do not wonder at your pride in it."

"Bully for you," Wade cried. "It's some satisfaction talking to somebody who is appreciative, you understand. Now I don't mean to run down the old countries. I acknowledge their culture

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