Under the Stars and Bars

From the preface... For the gratification of my old comrades and in grateful memory of their constant kindness during all our years of comradeship these records have been written. The writer claims no special qualification for the task save as it may lie in the fact that no other survivor of the Company has so large a fund of material from which to draw for such a purpose. In addition to a war journal, whose entries cover all my four years service, nearly every letter written by me from camp in those eventful years has been preserved. Whatever lack, therefore, these pages may possess on other lines, they furnish at least a truthful portrait of what I saw and felt as a soldier. It has been my purpose to picture the lights rather than the shadows of our soldier life. War is terribly serious business and yet camp life has its humor as well as its pathos, its comedy as well as its tragedy, its sunshine as well as its shadows. Aside from the motive already named, there is another which has had some influence in inducing me to publish these memories. In the generation that has grown up since the '60s, there is a disposition to undervalue the merits of the "Old South" and to discount the patriotism and the courage, the sacrifice and the suffering of those, who wore the grey. If these pages shall recall to my old comrades with any degree of pleasure, the lights and shadows of our soldier life, or shall bring to the younger generation, to whom the Old South is not even a memory, a truer conception of "the tender grace of a day that is dead" I shall be more than repaid for the labor involved in their preparation.