A Bivouac of the Dead
A way up in the heart of the Allegheny mountains,
in Pocahontas county, West Virginia, is a beautiful little valley
through which flows the east fork of the Greenbrier river. At a
point where the valley road intersects the old Staunton and
Parkersburg turnpike, a famous thoroughfare in its day, is a post
office in a farm house. The name of the place is Travelers’ Repose,
for it was once a tavern. Crowning some low hills within a stone’s
throw of the house are long lines of old Confederate
fortifications, skilfully designed and so well “preserved” that an
hour’s work by a brigade would put them into serviceable shape for
the next civil war. This place had its battle—what was called a
battle in the “green and salad days” of the great rebellion. A
brigade of Federal troops, the writer’s regiment among them, came
over Cheat mountain, fifteen miles to the westward, and, stringing
its lines across the little valley, felt the enemy all day; and the
enemy did a little feeling, too. There was a great cannonading,
which killed about a dozen on each side; then, finding the place
too strong for assault, the Federals called the affair a
reconnaissance in force, and burying their dead withdrew to the
more comfortable place whence they had come. Those dead now lie in
a beautiful national cemetery at Grafton, duly registered, so far
as identified, and companioned by other Federal dead gathered from
the several camps and battlefields of West Virginia. The fallen
soldier (the word “hero” appears to be a later invention) has such
humble honors as it is possible to give.
His part in all the pomp that fills
The circuit of the Summer hills
Is that his grave is green.
The circuit of the Summer hills
Is that his grave is green.
True, more than a half of the green graves in the
Grafton cemetery are marked “Unknown,” and sometimes it occurs that
one thinks of the contradiction involved in “honoring the memory”
of him of whom no memory remains to honor; but the attempt seems to
do no great harm to the living, even to the logical.
A few hundred yards to the rear of the old
Confederate earthworks is a wooded hill. Years ago it was not
wooded. Here, among the trees and in the undergrowth, are rows of
shallow depressions, discoverable by removing the accumulated
forest leaves. From some of them may be taken (and reverently
replaced) small thin slabs of the split stone of the country, with
rude and reticent inscriptions by comrades. I found only one with a
date, only one with full names of man and regiment. The entire
number found was eight.
In these forgotten graves rest the Confederate
dead—between eighty and one hundred, as nearly as can be made out.
Some fell in the “battle”; the majority died of disease. Two, only
two, have apparently been disinterred for reburial at their homes.
So neglected and obscure in this campo santo96
that only he upon whose farm it is—the aged postmaster of
Travelers’ Repose—appears to know about it. Men living within a
mile have never heard of it. Yet other men must be still living who
assisted to lay these Southern soldiers where they are, and could
identify some of the graves. Is there a man, North or South, who
would begrudge the expense of giving to these fallen brothers the
tribute of green graves? One would rather not think so. True, there
are several hundreds of such places still discoverable in the track
of the great war. All the stronger is the dumb demand—the silent
plea of these fallen brothers to what is “likest God within the
soul.”
They were honest and courageous foemen, having
little in common with the political madmen who persuaded them to
their doom and the literary bearers of false witness in the
aftertime. They did not live through the period of honorable strife
into the period of vilification—did not pass from the iron age to
the brazen—from the era of the sword to that of the tongue and pen.
Among them is no member of the Southern Historical Society. Their
valor was not the fury of the non-combatant; they have no voice in
the thunder of the civilians and the shouting. Not by them are
impaired the dignity and infinite pathos of the Lost Cause. Give
them, these blameless gentlemen, their rightful part in all the
pomp that fills the circuit of the summer hills.
1903.