Page:The Story of Aunt Becky's Army-Life .djvu/113

Rh hot sun, and exposure to storms and disease, were the fell agents which laid them in the shallow, uncoffined graves, over which a nation mourns to-day.

Their names are inscribed with the band of martyred ones; shall their memory ever fade from the long roll of honor?

We lost our colors and our color-bearer, Grisel, was taken to Andersonville, and in that lonesome pen thought of his wife, and children, and home, till the soul went out of the starved wreck of mortality. They buried him in a grave amongst the murdered dead on that awful field, over which no smoke of battle rolled to make it seem "sweet to die for one's country."

Only one man of all the long list of captured ever returned to tell the tale of woe—Private O. P. Carmer, of Co. F., who lay in the pen of Andersonville, and whose hopeful spirit kept the soul within his emaciated body till the release came; and he returned like one raised from the dead, a wreck of manhood, unable to join his regiment, and scarcely able to endure the journey home.

I thought in the bitterness of my heart, while listening to the horrible details of the treatment of our prisoners by the rebels, and when I knew that my brothers might any day share the same fate, that I could never minister to the wants of their wounded again. But when I saw them suffering in the agony of fever, thirsting for water, now deliriously raving of the fierce charge of battle—then whispering low of the peaceful home which the invader had profaned