Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 08.djvu/525

Rh The brother chaplain (Rev. A. J. Witherspoon) who sits beside me will bear me out in saying that ours, though often a sad service, was ever a useful and grateful office; and that our labors of love were richly repaid in the faith and affection of these men. No sweeter return ever rewarded time and toil than the welcome given with embracing arms and eyes weeping tears of joy by lonely men, lying in far away wards in hospitals in the rear, when their chaplain came from camp, with words and letters from home and comrades. Ah! as the scripture was read and the prayer made, the letter written and the message taken, it was a service that an angel might have envied.

And the men of that army gathered for worship, listened to the truth and responded to a preached gospel. Why, in a meeting of thirty days, held near Atlanta, one hundred and forty men professed faith in Christ and entered the various churches through the right hand of fellowship given to me, their chaplain. In that day difference in creeds was unnoted, Methodists, Baptists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians and Catholics, with and through these chaplains, holding brotherhood and communion. When kneeling (I think it was after the New Hope fight) beside a wounded Catholic, whose prayer-book lay upon his cot, I read from it one of his church's prayers to Christ (and was he not my Christ too?), that man and I in that act became brothers, and the hearts of the brave men of that faith, members of Mississippi's gallant Third, from the Gulf coast of that sister State, were grappled to mine with hooks of steel.

In many a march and on many a field did these Confederate men stamp the seal of their soldierly worth. But among these the Vicksburg siege, the Georgia retreat, the Tennessee advance and return, these were the campaigns that best showed what manner of men they were; of what stout stuff and noble strain.

When men march from victory to victory, or when in the heat and strife of the battle, the hot blood hisses through the veins in what the old Romans called the delight of the conflict, then it is easy to be a soldier, then courage communicates and bravery becomes contagious. But to be shut in behind works through hot and wearing weeks, to fall back from point to point in toilsome marches through wearying months, to sit in rifle pits set in frozen earth, and then repulsed, yes, routed, to return pursued along roads just passed over as pursuers, this tests men, and all this tested these men, and they stood the test.

As to their behavior in beleagured Vicksburg, its fame has filled the world. In their Georgia retreat from Dalton to Atlanta, fighting by day and withdrawing by night—and how it rained—preserving their