Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 12.djvu/142

128 Virginia regiment about to go into action, and rushing up to the Louisa company, he said to the captain, whom he knew well: "I want you to put me in the file in which my brother would be if he were here to-day, I cannot find my own regiment, and I want to take his place and avenge his death. "The brave fellow was wounded three times, but refused to leave the field until he received another wound which rendered him unconscious. Not being able to march any longer, even when partially recovered from his wounds, he joined a cavalry company and served to the close of the war with conspicuous gallantry. He survived the war but became almost totally blind from the effects of his wounds, and yet he continued bright and cheerful in the consciousness of having done his duty in the great struggle for constitutional freedom. On the same day two others of the brothers fell dead in that historic charge which Stonewall Jackson ordered and the men made with such heroic impetuosity that, despite Fitz John Porter's skillful and gallant resistance, they carried every position north of the Chickahominy and fully convinced General McClellan that it would be wise for him to "change base." The fifth brother was badly wounded (he was afterward killed), and one of the saddest sights I saw the next morning when moving among the dead and wounded, was this boy of sixteen preparing his two brothers for their burial "on the field of glory." The news went to the mother of these young soldiers, a widow who had been running the little farm while all of her sons were at the front, that the remaining four had been killed. In her great but not rare affliction she said: "They were noble boys, and how I can do without them I do not know. But I am proud of the fact that they were not cowards, but that all five of them fell bravely doing their duty in the cause of Southern independence. And, bitter as is my affliction, my chief regret is that I have not five more boys to put in their places." Did Spartan women, Roman matrons