“I don’t believe this army can be defeated,” said I.

“It cannot.  It may suffer great losses, and be forced to retreat,—­indeed, I think that consequence a natural inference from the situation,—–­ but it cannot be badly defeated; it cannot be disorganized.  It would take mouths to overcome it.”

“Then you really believe that we shall retreat?”

“Yes; I believe we shall fight, and we shall fight hard, and have losses, but the enemy will be very cautious of attack, and those of us who are able to march shall see Virginia again.”

“Those who are able to march?  Could we leave our wounded here?”

“I was thinking only of the fallen.  If ever the history of this war is truly written, the greatest honours of all will be paid to the common soldiers, men who, without a particle of interest in slaves, give their lives for independence—–­ the independence of their States.  Yet it is useless to grieve in anticipation.”

“A soldier’s death should not be a thing to grieve over,” said I; “at least, so it seems to me.  I think I should prefer death in battle to death by disease.”

“True; and death must come, sooner or later, to all of us.

     “’On two days it steads not to run from the grave,
       The appointed and the unappointed day;
       On the first, neither balm nor physician can save,
       Nor thee, on the second, the Universe slay.’”

“Who is that, Captain?”

“The Persian Omar Khayyam, followed by Emerson.”

“How do you spell that Persian’s name, Captain?”

“K-h-a-y-y-a-m.”

“And you pronounce it Ki-yam?”

“That is the way I pronounced it; is it not correct?”

“I don’t know.  I never heard of him before, but the name seems not unfamiliar.  Is he living?”

“Oh, no; dead centuries since.  Were you hoping to find one of your old personal friends?”

“Don’t laugh, Captain.  Somehow the name seems to carry me back somewhere.”

“Maybe you knew him in a previous existence.”

“Don’t laugh, Captain.  It is not the words, but merely the name that strikes me.  You don’t believe the words yourself.”

“I do and I do not.  I believe them in a sense.”

“In what sense, Captain?”

“In the sense in which the poet taught.  The religion of the East is fatalism.  A fatalist who endeavours to shun death is inconsistent.”

“But you are not a fatalist.”

“No, and yes.  Another poet has said that divinity shapes the ends that we rough-hew; I should reverse this and say that life is blocked out in the large for us by powers over which we can have no control, but that within certain limits we do the shaping of our own lives.”

“A new and better version,” said I; “to-morrow some shaping will be done.  What effect on the general result to nations and the world does one battle, more or fewer, have?”