Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 12.djvu/189

Rh A noble fellow who fell at Games' Mill, the 27th of June, 1862, said to comrades who offered to bear him to the rear: "No! I die. Tell my parents I die happy. On! on to victory! Jesus is with me, and will give me all the help I need." A Georgian captain, who was shot in the mouth and unable to speak, wrote in my diary, when I visited him in the field hospital at the Wilderness: "I do not know how it will be with me, whether I shall die or recover, but my full trust is in Christ, and I am perfectly resigned to God's will." Maj. Augustus M. Gordon, who fell at Chancellorsville, said (they were his last words): "Lay me down now, Captain, for I am dying. I am not afraid to die, for I know I am going to be with Jesus." We read in one of the Georgia papers of a Georgia soldier, who, at Chancellorsville, had his left leg shattered from the ankle to the knee, but who, hearing that a comrade was wounded, said to those who were about to bear him to the rear, "He is worse wounded than I am, carry him off; I can wait here!" Before the ambulance corps could get back, a minie ball had passed through his unselfish, generous heart. A writer who visited our wounded on a field of blood says: "As you pass from one to another, washing their wounds and administering some cordial or food, you will hear such petitions as these: 'Will you write to my mother that I trust in Jesus, her Jesus?' 'Oh, sir, can you get one brief message to my wife in Virginia? Tell her to train up the children for heaven. 'Here is a soldier just breathing his last. You kneel and whisper in his ear, 'Jesus, Saviour.' He smiles and ceases to breathe." We find accounts of two soldiers at the point of death. With the first the following conversation occurred: "Are you willing to die here among strangers?" "Perfectly." "Have you a wife?" "Yes." "Are you willing to die without seeing her?" "If God wills it, I am." "Have you children, and if so, how many?" "Five." "Can you trust them in the hands of Jesus?" "Yes; He is all my