Page:Memoirs of Henry Villard, volume 2.djvu/397

 philosophic contemplation of the momentous events following each other so rapidly in our time.

He had chosen two fields for literary occupation. One he had entered upon long before his withdrawal from business life. Nearly twenty years before, during periods of rest, he began to write his personal memoirs. As soon as he had command of his time, from the summer of 1895 till the winter of 1899-1900, when his health began to be seriously affected, he devoted himself steadily to their preparation. As a means of reviving and fixing his recollections as a war correspondent, he made a careful study of the Official War Records so far as they related to the campaigns of the Civil War on land and sea which he had witnessed. This work proved very fascinating to him, as the Government publications contained the documentary history of the operations not only of the Northern but also of the Confederate armies. It revealed to him for the first time the whole, instead of but one side, of the bloody pictures of the battle-fields of the great struggle. He found it most absorbing work to test the accuracy of the statements of the loyal commanders by those made by their antagonists, and to unite their separate accounts into one complete, consistent, and comprehensible description. The flood of new light radiating from this double source led him to enlarge the scope of the narrative of his own observations of the great collisions of the war into full battle descriptions. He was untiring in the collation, sifting, and testing of his material from all available sources, and took the greatest pains to be impartial and accurate. It required many months to bring some of his battle stories into a shape that satisfied him. When he was obliged to stop work, he had got no further than the second day's fighting at Chattanooga. The next subjects would have been Grant's battles in the Wilderness and the siege of Petersburg. He was very anxious to describe these later episodes, and had revisited both scenes in 1897, going over the ground carefully with the Official Records and accounts of war historians in hand.