Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 115, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 May 1915 — Memorial Day Lessons. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Memorial Day Lessons.

HE survivors from a great tragedy are always * ■Afj looked upon with inter- * Isl est, especially when > ears have P assed since w JBRBv- the event - This disposition of the public will explain a part of the attention which will be given to the Grand Army on Memorial day. The men who will ride or march on that day are survivors of a war which to the younger generations has become almost ancient historyl They are all old men, though many of them will not admit it.

There is this strange thing about the celebration of the day. The Civil war became, before it ended, an antislavery war, but the men who were prominent in the antislavery movement will not appear in the processions. They are gone. One can almost count upon his fingers those who remain. But the men who fought the battles that were brought on by their agitations still live, by hundreds of thousands.

The explanation Is a simple one. The antislavery agitators were mature men—some of them old men. The Civil war was fought, largely, by young men and youth. More than 800,000 enlisted at seventeen or below that age; more than 2,000,000 were not more than twenty-one Only 618,511 were twenty-two and above, and only 46,026 of these were twentylive or above.

And so it happens that among the marchers will be seen many who, nearly fifty years after the close of the war, will not appear to be old. So, also, it happens that the pension rolls contain the names of more than 400.000 veterans of the Civil war, who are still living.

If one cares to compare these selected men with those who were rejected as physically unfit or defective, he will be interested in noticing the Grand Army button on the lapels of the coats of gray-headed men, as he passes them in the street The little bronze button, or the smaller red, white and blue button of the Loyal Legion, appear very frequently, and that in spite of the fact that hundreds of thousands of the men selected as fit were killed in battle or died of wounds during the war, and many others have since died from disease contracted during the contest. The youthfulness of those who made up the army of those days suggests a thought not often made prominent in discussions of the pension question. While a pension is not designed to recompense pecuniary losses incurred by the pensioner in his service, it is well to remember that the boy or young man, from sixteen to eighteen, who left school for three years in the formative period of his life, was never able to make up what he lost in education. and that those who were above eighteen, many of whom were just taking the first steps in promising careers, by giving up their opportunities lost their chances in life. The prooession closed up, and when they returned at he close of the war they were obliged to take a place in the rear, if they got into it at aIL Decoration of the graves of the fallen heroes of the civil strife and of those who have subsequently joined the ranks of the departed In the noblest war that Ims ever been waged, is Indication of the country's reverence for Die valor of the slain

and appreciation of the vast bestowment that the blood of the fallen contributed to the nation and to the world. Freedom unfurled her banner once more, and this time it was over the gory fields of fratricidal warfare; this time it was not to the trumpeting of a declaration of independence, but to the sonorous sound of the proclamation of freedom for the servile classes of the population. The South was freed from its trammels and blossomed out as the section of the country most American and endowed with the greatest wealth of unrealized resources. The country blossomed out in the new power and Influence of a union indissoluble, of a house no longer divided against Itself. The world paid tribute to the heroes of battlefields as sacred as any of those which, in Holy Writ, set forth the epochs in the progress of mankind in the theocracies of the past. Freedom had given it a new content and civilization had bestowed upon it a new dignity, and life, and valor were given fresh glory in the tremendous struggle which is commemorated on Decoration day—the day of solemn hush, yet of glorious recollection, the day when the tears of sad recollection are, shot through with the rainbows of a perennial rejoicing.

The commission of liberty cannot be laid aside, even if the nation that has set up the standard of freedom for mankind could discharge its obligations to the world otherwise. Wherever there are oppressed there is felt the magnet of the influence of American freedom; and so from the serf-afflicted land of Russia, from the life-burdened lands of Europe, come the slaves of oppression and of harsh discrimination, the subjects of the curse of inequality, that they may join in the song of those redeemed from such conditions or those whose birthright it is to enjoy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. No wonder that the country is virtually at pause as the observation of the sacred day of reverence for the nation's slain uplifts to the view of mankind the dignity and power of ideals that are woven Into the life and character of a free people. No wonder that from the highest to the lowliest the officers of state and the citizens pay tribute to the men who remade the nation. Animosity, resentment, schism are all in the past and a united people rejoice in the outcome of a fiercely dividing struggle. To the world of today, this great tragedy of half a century ago is but tradition and not a living memory, but the passing years can never efface that record from the very souls of those who went through that fiery furnace in the great struggle for the nation’s life with its frightful toll of precious young lives sacrificed to the Moloch of one of the world’B greatest wars. Costly indeed was the price with which the dawning peace was bought: Fourteen thousand men killed and wounded at Shiloh; 15.000 went down at Chlckahominy; 13,000 at Antietam, and 13i000 more at Fredericksburg; 17,000 killed or crippled at Chancellorsvtlle; 23,000 lives sacrificed on the field at Gettysburg; 16,000 at Chlckamauga; 18,000 at Spottsylvania, while 17,000 fell in the Battle_of the Wilderness.

In those four years of blood and carnage, 93.000 men perished by the bullet, 186,000 by disease, and 25,000 died from other causes — a total of

304,000 dead —one man for every nine who wore the blud.

From the lips of thoughtless youth we sometimes hear the flippant charge that the “old soldiers are still fighting the old battle of the Civil war," little realizing what they mean to the scarred survivors of those epoch-mak-ing days. Who that “marched with Sherman to the sea” can ever forget? Who that came back from the slippery slopes of Gettysburg can ever forget the bloody tragedy which for three long days turned its peaceful quiet into a seething hell of shot and shell?

Who that witnessed the destruction by the Confederate army itself, of its last hope and Btronghold, the city of Richmond, in that memorable April of ’65, will ever forget the indescribable scene of horror, with the roar of an immense conflagration sounding in their ears, while the explosion of the gunboats shook the doomed city to its very foundation? Thirty city blocks swept out of existence by the spreading flames, 1,000 houses destroyed, while hundreds of hospitals and almshouse Inmates were said to have been blown into eternity. Such is war! God forbid that our land shall ever know another, but let us forevermore remain one people, loyal to one flag, and united in one earnest effort to make this nation the grandest ever risen on the tides of time.

Memories like these are ineffaceable, and who has a better right to live again—“fight,” if you will—the battles of that fast-receding period, than the proud heroes of that day? But the honored ranks of that once powerful army are rapidly thinning. Day by day in ever increasing numbers slowly winds the funeral cortege through the streets of Washington to that vast, silent encampment on the wooded heights of Arlington, that consecrated spot whose silence is only Intensified by the dropping of Ail' acorn or the whir of a wild bird e wing. Not many are the years before other hands must deck our soldiers’ graves with the flowers of spring, but when the last soldier of that great war shall have followed comrade and commander to that land which knows no bugle call to arms, may these lowly graves be still the shrine whereon an unforgetting people ghall lay their tribute of bloom and blbssom, and be forever guarded by that emblem of the world’s best hopes, and the heritage of a people yet to be—that splendid, costly flag for whose Every stripe of crimson hue. And every star on field of blue. Ten thousand of our brave and true Have laid them down and died.