The evening performance had, if not an appreciative, certainly a grimly critical audience. A veteran in the adjoining regiment calmly proceeds with the all-important business of boiling his coffee until a shell explodes uncomfortably close. Then you hear his disgusted growl: "The damned rascals! They spoil my supper every night!" and the answering jeer of his comrades: "Jim, did you hear what that one said? It said, 'Which 'un, which 'un, which 'un, _you_!'" The ring of the bursting shells was not the least impressive of the notes of the Song. It is hard to describe; but strange as it may seem to say so it was certainly music, often with absolutely sweet tones like the sudden stroke of a bell, followed by the singing hum, in curious harmony of the rushing of jagged iron fragments through the air. One of the friends of my boyhood was a musical genius, a pianist of no mean power who had studied his profession in Germany. The democratic makeup of our army is illustrated by the fact that, in the early sixties this man enlisted as a private soldier. And he used to amuse himself while lying in the trenches by noting the varying keys of the music of moaning and bursting shells. But the Song was not always harmless or ineffectual. No one knows precisely how many men suffered wounds and death beside the banks of the pretty, placid Rappahannock. It is within bounds to put the number at fifty thousand. The war history of that region is peculiar. It is a tale of incessant and resultless strife, seldom without at least the intermittent fire of opposing picket lines. Three of the greatest, most deadly, yet most indecisive battles of the war were fought there. The veil of time has begun to fall over the actual agonies of the nation while the fury of that great war tempest lingered; but some of us remember how real it was, and the Song of the Rappahannock seems its very voice. It was Delphic in the ambiguity of its utterance. Neither the pæan of victory nor the wail of the conquered, it was the breath of the Titanic struggle with its bitter pain, its dark suspense, its grim and terrible stress and strain.