Sword and Pen: Ventures and Adventures of Willard GlazierOwens, John Algernon
History
Sword and Pen: Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier
Owens, John Algernon
Glazier, Willard W., 1841-1905; United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Personal narratives
"I cannot forget," he adds, "the sea of emotion that well-nigh
overwhelmed me, as soon as I could realize the fact that I was no longer
a prisoner, and especially when I beheld the starry banner floating
triumphantly over the invincibles who had followed their great General
down to the sea."
Our hero and his friend became objects of much curiosity, while their
eventful escape was the subject of general conversation and comment by
the brave boys who pressed around them, and who proved to be a
detachment of the One Hundred and First Illinois Volunteers, Twentieth
Army Corps. Their most intimate friends would have failed to recognize
them. Glazier was clad in an old gray jacket and blue pants, with a
venerable and dilapidated hat which had seen a prodigious amount of
service of a nondescript kind; while a tattered gray blanket that had
done duty for many a month as a bed by day and a cloak by night, and was
now in the last stage of dissolution from age and general infirmity,
completed his unmilitary and unpretentious toilet. Having at first no
one to identify them, Glazier and his companion were as strangers among
friends, and necessarily without official recognition. At length,
however, after much searching, they found Lieutenant Wright's old
company, and thus the refugees became officially identified and
recognized as Federal officers.
In company with Lieutenant E. H. Fales, who had been his fellow-prisoner
at Charleston, and effected his escape, Glazier proceeded on horseback
to the headquarters of General Kilpatrick. The General, cordially
welcoming and congratulating Glazier on his happy escape, at once
furnished him with the documents necessary to secure his transportation
to the North. His term of service having expired, he was anxious to
revisit his family, who thought him dead, and bidding an affectionate
adieu to his friend Wright, he and Lieutenant Fales embarked on a
steamship on December twenty-ninth for home. After experiencing the
effects of a severe storm at sea, the vessel arrived at the wharf of
the metropolitan city, and our hero adds: "I awoke to the glorious
realization that I was again breathing the air of my native State. There
was exhilaration and rapture in the thought, which I could not repress,
and that moment is fixed as a golden era in my memory. I hope never to
become so hardened that that patriotic and Christian exultation will be
an unpleasant recollection."
There have probably been few hearts that beat higher with martial ardor,
than that of Willard Glazier; but at that moment the thought of
"Battle's red carnival" was merged in the gentler recollection of
kindred and friends, rest and home.
CHAPTER XXVI.
GLAZIER RE-ENTERS THE SERVICE.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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