CHAPTER XXIV SHADOWS DEEPEN

AFTER this things are vague in my mind, only an impression of distress and gloom. I got a letter from my cousin and friend, Hal Lesesne, telling of the successive falling back which was so terrible to them all. He had been so long in the forts around Charleston, and so greatly desired to see active service in Virginia, and now, alas, things were so black, no one could help fearing. “But be assured,” he said, “we are fighting every step of the way, and make the enemy pay dearly for their gain.” When I got that letter he had already fallen, killed in the very last battle of the war, Averysboro, I think. This was a great sorrow to me; and the surrender was just crushing and numbing to all my being. Men began to come in on their way home from the front, worn, weary, gaunt, and hungry. They had lived days and days and fought on a handful of parched corn. Their shoes were worn out, their uniforms ragged; only their spirit was undimmed, and that made them suffer so in the sense of failure.{249}

My dear brother Charley finally came, a ghost of his former self, shoulders bowed down by marching with his heavy knapsack. He looked so ill and changed, we were not surprised when we found he had typhoid fever. He had been taken in and kindly nursed by friends on his way home, but he was a pitiful sight.