Chapter XVIII: A Personal Sorrow

After my return from this fight, it was my lot to undergo the saddest experience of my war life.

My brother, one year my junior, had just joined the command, when we went with a scouting party toward the railroad and met a small party of Union soldiers. It was the first time my brother had been on the firing line. He and I were on the extreme left of the line on the edge of a road, in touch with each other, and we received the first fire from the enemy. He was killed instantly and never spoke, but looked straight at me, with a silent understanding reflected in his eyes, and I caught him as he fell. The ball that killed him struck near his heart and passed through his body. I wrapped his body in a blanket and carried it sixty miles until I reached the main column. Then Gen. S. D. Lee furnished me an ambulance, and I carried the body to Pontotoc, Miss., for burial. After the war I placed a monument over the grave of this beloved brother and youthful soldier.

We had always been as twins, being so nearly the same age, and his tragic and pathetic passing from life left in my heart a burning scar which the long years, with their submerging floods of joy and sorrow, have never wiped out.

This tragedy also left within me a question which time has never answered: Was it by unguided chance or the immutable decree of an unknown Fate that I was permitted to live through fifty-two battles--to survive every kind of danger to which a soldier may be subjected--while this boy by my side, found swift death in his first battle line? Only the Great Commander of all life knows the deep secret of this sad disparity. Speaking from the earthly standpoint from which we judge the tragedies of this world, I was the favored one, as I stood unscathed beside the crumpling body of my beloved brother on that far-distant day, now nearly sixty years gone; but when the light eternal shall unveil the secrets of this fleeting existence, perchance I shall learn that it was a stern Fate that, on that eventful morning, left me the long, long road to travel, while the gentle soul of that boy was borne from the spot of his patriotic sacrifice, to the rewards that are promised, on wings far swifter than the bullet which dissolved the functions of his bodily life.