“It is the same winter along the Rappahannock and the Rappidan. The snow, like a measureless shroud, covers the numberless dead of the debatable land between the Potomac and the James. There is another soldier, a mere boy, a young artilleryman from the Shenandoah, who is one of the thousands who hold Lee’s unbroken lines. His battery long since won its title to glory. It helped to clear the mountain gaps of the Blue Ridge; its red guns helped feed the fires which lighted up the valley of death for Pickett’s dauntless charge. Ill fed, ragged, but inbred with the chivalry of the South, he is in it all. There is victory at Chancellorsville, but defeat at Gettysburg; but St. Andrew’s cross still gleams blood red on the breast of the South, The Stars and Bars still flash defiance from Marye’s Hill. “The young artilleryman also has a comrade from the valley, a young trooper who rides with Ashby’s cavaliers in all their wild forays. “Two flags, two oaths of allegiance, the culminating hates of a hundred years, separate these two young soldiers of the North and the South. But they are not alien in blood, they are brothers of the same race, Anglo-Saxon from the first Americans to the last. They speak the same tongue, their mothers read the same Bible, prayed to the same God; their forefathers fought for the same country—Nathaniel Greene at Yorktown, Washington on Cambridge Heights. “It is midsummer of 1904. The cavalryman of ’63 is dying; not in the weary hospital of pain; not on the perilous edge of battle. More than forty years have passed since the grim midwinter of east Tennessee. “It is the home he has made for his declining years. The rooms are cool and sweet, a broad porch looks down a quiet street, familiar books are everywhere; his escutcheon over the mantel shows his soldier record from ’62 to ’65—the old, old story of duty and glory. A blue book on the table tells briefly his struggle from the farm to the halls of Congress; the faces of statesmen, kinsmen, and friends look down from their appropriate places on the walls. “The good right hand of the veteran lies in that of another; grief-stricken she keeps her vows, ’till death do us part.’