Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 16.djvu/211

 Pegram Battalion Association. 205

that stout-hearted soldier was putting forth in petition all the energies of his indomitable spirit which on the morrow would be thrown into action.

As with the leaders, so with the rank and file. Soldiers, veterans of many a bloody field, as your memory goes back to those days, what are the scenes which you love to recall in your tenderest moments ? Are any pictures graven deeper in your recollection than the evening prayer-meeting, the group around the camp-fire singing the grand old hymns of the Christian religion, and the Sunday ser- vices, when your faithful chaplains told you of the love of Jesus, and exhorted you, by all you held most dear, to patient endurance and valiant bearing ? I do not know ; but it seems to me those are the things which would outlive the memory of the charge and counter- charge of stern resistance and fierce fight.

Let me show you a scene. The battle is raging far and near. There, in an advanced and exposed position, is a line of sharp- shooters thrown out to check the onset of a furious charge. The ammunition of one of those men is exhausted. He can fight no more. He lies there with the storm of shot and shell bursting over his head, and he takes from his pocket a little Bible and reads. He shuts the book and his eyes close in prayer. Storm on, ye fiends of war! rage on, ye hurtling hurricanes of battle! Behold there, in the midst of your din and turmoil and wild uproar, the unshaken heart of a soldier is communing with his God communing low and softly as the sweet prattle of a child in twilight prayer!

Where was it ? At Frasier's Farm, was it not, that a passing officer saw a soldier kneeling? He approached him, touched him, when, lo! he was dead, stark and cold, and stiffened in the attitude of prayer.

Tell me, O thou sainted spirit, what was the swift petition which winged its way from thy dying lips ?

I know it was brief, terse, incisive: " O God grar.t victory to our arms this day : O God bless the loved ones far away in the home on the hillside: O God receive my spirit;" and the brave head fell for- ward, and the lips that never quivered were stilled forever, and the light was quenched in a dauntless eye.

Ask the devoted priests of this religion, who ministered in camp, in hospital, ami under the shade of the trees where the wounded *ere borne out of the thick of the fight; ask a Jones, a Bennett, a Dun- can, a Granbery, a Quintard, and the host of kindred spirits who went up and down through the armies of the Confederacy preaching