Page:Journal history of the Twenty-ninth Ohio veteran volunteers, 1861-1865.djvu/159



formally discharged from the service on the 22d and 23d days of July, 1865.

We have now followed the regiment through nearly four years of the most arduous service which ever fell to the lot of any organization of this character, marching and fighting through most of the States in rebellion, its pathway marked by the graves of our comrades who fell. In the interim, hundreds of the brave 1540 who were upon its rolls, pass under the charge of the worse than fiends of hell, who presided at Libby, Belle Isle, Andersonville, and other courts of death, by courtesy called rebel prisons, where, after being robbed of all they possessed, and even stripped of necessary clothing, they were subjected to a systematic course of starvation (and that, too, under the immediate supervision of that foul blot upon humanity, Jeff Davis) until their brave spirits went out to the God who gave them. In the army of the East, with the army of the West, with Sherman in the glorious march to the sea, and the brilliant campaign of the Carolinas—where there was danger and death—shone the "white star" of the Twenty-ninth. The skirmish line and the advance became so nearly the normal condition of the regiment that assignment to positions less dangerous elicited exclamations of surprise from the "boys."

At length the last ditch, so frequently referred to by the braggart rebels, was reached—chivalrous Jeff Davis in hoc and crinoline begged that mercy be shown to "woman and children." The bubble secessia burst, and the command, now reduced to a mere handful, turn sadly northward, its columns "gaping from the havoc of shot and shell, and the disease of the camp, and prison pen, its colors ragged and torn, but proud and defiant as ever—one grand ovation to the living, a sad wailing requiem