a reflection of great glory, I now missed.  It seemed as if they were yet revengeful and unsatisfied; their countenances not yet relaxed from the tension of the fierce struggle, their eyes yet gleaming with the fires of battle.  The tales they told made me shudder:  Of men, maddened by the horrible butchery going on around them, mounting the horrible barricade (trampling out in many instances the little sparks of life which might have been rekindled), only to add their own bodies to the horrid pile, and to be trampled in their turn by comrades who sought to avenge them; of soldiers on both sides, grappling hand to hand, tearing open each other’s wound, drenched with each other’s blood, dying locked in a fierce embrace.  It turns me sick even now when I remember the terrible things I then heard, the awful wounds I then saw.  During the whole period of my service, I never had a harder task than when striving to pour oil upon these troubled waters, to soothe and reconcile these men who talked incessantly of “sacrifice” and useless butchery.  This was particularly the case with General Clebourne’s men, who so loved their gallant leader that, at his death, revenge had almost replaced patriotism in their hearts.

I do not consider myself competent, nor do I wish to criticise the generals who led our armies and who, since the war, have, with few exceptions, labored assiduously to throw the blame of failure upon each other.  I have read their books with feelings of intense sorrow and regret,—­looking for a reproduction of the glories of the past,—­finding whole pages of recrimination and full of “all uncharitableness.”  For my own part, I retain an unchanged, unchangeable respect and reverence for all alike, believing each to have been a pure and honest patriot, who, try as he might, could not surmount the difficulties which each one in turn encountered.

A brave, vindictive foe, whose superiority in numbers, in arms, and equipment, and, more than all, rations, they could maintain indefinitely.  And to oppose them, an utterly inadequate force, whose bravery and unparalleled endurance held out to the end, although hunger gnawed at their vitals, disease and death daily decimated their ranks, intense anxiety for dear ones exposed to dangers, privations, all the horrors which everywhere attended the presence of the invaders, torturing them every hour.

While yielding to none in my appreciation of the gallant General Hood, there is one page in his book which always arouses my indignation and which I can never reconcile with what I know of the history of the Army of Tennessee, from the time General Hood took command to the surrender.  Truly, they were far from being like “dumb driven cattle,” for every man was “a hero in the strife.”  It seems to me that the memory of the battle of Franklin alone should have returned to General Hood to “give him pause” before he gave to the public the page referred to: