The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America and Europe by James Kendall Hosmer
page 46 of 258 (17%)
page 46 of 258 (17%)
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that we loved him still. The most cordial meetings I have ever known
have been those between men who had fought each other bitterly, each with an honest conviction that he was in the right, but who at last have come out on common ground. Among the Harvard soldiers three stand out in my thought as especially interesting, William Francis Bartlett, Charles Russell Lowell, and Francis Channing Barlow. Bartlett was younger than I, entering service when scarcely beyond boyhood, losing a leg at Ball's Bluff, and when only twenty-three Colonel of the 49th Massachusetts. I remember well a beautiful night, the moon at the full, and the hospital on the river bank just below Port Hudson where hundreds of wounded men were arriving from a disastrous battle-field close at hand. Bartlett had ridden into battle on horseback, his one leg making it impossible for him to go on foot, and he was a conspicuous mark for the sharpshooters. A ball had passed through his remaining foot, and still another through his arm, causing painful wounds to which he was forced to yield. He lay stretched out, a tall, slender figure with a clear-cut patrician face, very pale and still but with every sign of suffering stoically repressed. He was conscious as I stood for a moment at his side. It was not a time to speak even a word, but I hoped he might feel through some occult influence that a Harvard brother was there at hand, full of sympathy for him. He afterwards recovered in part, and, with unconquerable will, though he was only a fragment of a man, went in again and was still again stricken. He survived it all, and to me it was perhaps the most thrilling incident of the Harvard commemoration of 1865 to see Bartlett, too crippled to walk without their support, helped to a place of honour on the stage by reverent friends. |
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