Page:America Today, Observations and Reflections.djvu/132

 less creditable military picnic? It is especially the small scale of the conflict that excites their derision. "Did you ever hear of the battle of Dinwiddie Court-House?" one of them said to me. I confessed that I had not. "No," he said, "nor has any one else heard of the battle of Dinwiddie Court-House. It was one of the most insignificant fights in the war. But there were more men killed in half an hour in that almost forgotten battle than in all this mighty war we hear so much about." "Ah!" he continued, "they think we are vastly gratified when they 'fraternise' with us on our battlefields and decorate the graves of our dead. I don't know but I prefer the 'waving of the bloody shirt' to this flaunting of the olive-branch. They have their victory; let them leave us our graves."

An intense loyalty, not only to the political theories of the South, but to the memory of the men who died for them—"qui bene pro patria cum patriaque jacent"—still animates the survivors of the war. With a confessed but none the less pathetic illogicality, they feel as though Death had not gone to work impartially, but had selected for his prey the noblest and the best. One of these survivors, in a paper now before me, quotes from Das Siegesfest the line—

"Ja, der Krieg verschlingt die Besten!"

and then remarks: "Still, when Schiller says—