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Chapter 26: analysis of the soldier-life
My story is told.
If it has failed to interest and to stir you deeply, the fault is in the telling.
And yet I cannot but hope — that, in spite of feeble and inadequate portrayal, the great outlines of the picture have so impressed themselves upon you that you are ready to admit the life of Marse Robert's boys, from 1861 to 1865, to have been a higher and greater life than you had imagined.
It would seem as if this must be so, if you have credited the writer with a fair average of intelligence and conscientiousness.
I can well understand, however, that, without reflecting upon me in any offensive sense, some of those who have done me the honor to read these reminiscences may feel that I have unconsciously and very naturally idealized my comrades of the long ago and the vivid life we lived together in our golden youth.
It is difficult to meet such a suggestion.
I believe the strongest and most satisfactory way to meet it and, at the same time, the fittest way to end this book, will be to close with an analysis of the Soldier-Life, from which it will appear how natural and normal it is, that elements and forces, such as characterize that life, should produce men and deeds and scenes and incidents such as I have endeavored to portray in the foregoing pages.
It is also, just now, specially to be desired that the essential character and training of the military life should be better and more generally understood.
However we may differ as to the advisability of the new career of foreign complication and conquest upon which this country seems to have entered, and which has resulted and must necessarily result in such an expansion of its military establishment, yet we
