War Reminiscences by the Surgeon of Mosby's Command Volume 10 - Softcover

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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1890 edition. Excerpt: ... HE sands in the hour-glass of the doomed Confed eracy were fast fading from the anxious gaze of her devoted and chivalrous defenders. The last faint ray of hope was descending rapidly below the horizon. Fate, with the blackness of an Arctic night, filled the Southern soul with unutterable gloom. Solitary, dismal, blackened chimneys and deserted homesteads marked the decline and fall of our ill-fated system of self-government. To those brave spirits that had followed the varying fortunes of our cherished cause through, sunshine and storm, through victory and defeat, through evil and through good report, the ordeal was-indeed one of unprecedented and transcendental cruelty. When the endurance of the soldier is submitted to the severe test of physical pain, hardship, privation, want and peril; when in the heat and hell of battle he is nerved by dauntless courage and patriotic impulse, the better elements of his nature predominate over the baser emotions, and the latent philosophy of his being overcomes alike the cowardice of fear and the sense of pain. "There is something of pride in the perilous hour, Whate'er be the shape in which death may lower; Fame is there to see who bleeds, CHAPTER XXII. And honor's eyes on daring deeds. But, when that is done, it is humbling to tread, Over the weltering field of the tombless dead; While worms of the earth, birds of the air, And beasts of the forest all gathering there--All regarding man as their prey--All rejoicing in his decay." When the undue strain and tension of a terrible and protracted struggle against fearful odds for four long years gives away suddenly to the abnormal reaction of hopeless defeat, relaxation assumes the form of mental torture that the most cruel savage might envy in his...

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