IV

This paper is rapidly becoming what life is,--a series of

renunciations,--and the reader is by this time sufficiently enlightened

as to the reasons why I gave up the ambitious title Two Wars, and

substituted A Southerner in the Peloponnesian War. If I were a military

man, I might have been tempted to draw some further illustrations from

the history of the two struggles, but my short and desultory service in

the field does not entitle me to set up as a strategist. I went from my

books to the front, and went back from the front to my books, from the

Confederate war to the Peloponnesian war, from Lee and Early to

Thucydides and Aristophanes. I fancy that I understood my Greek history

and my Greek authors better for my experience in the field, but some

degree of understanding would have come to me even if I had not stirred

from home. For while my home was spared until the month preceding the

surrender, every vibration of the great struggle was felt at the foot of

the Blue Ridge. We were not too far off to sympathize with the scares

at Richmond. There was the Pawnee affair, for instance. Early in the war

all Richmond was stirred by the absurd report that the Pawnee was on its

way up James River to lay the Confederate capital in ashes, just as all

Athens was stirred, in the early part of the Peloponnesian war, by a

naval demonstration against the Piræus. The Pawnee war, as it was

jocularly called, did not last long. Shot-guns and revolvers, to which

the civilian soul naturally resorts in every time of trouble, were soon

laid aside, and the only artillery to which the extemporized warriors

were exposed was the artillery of jests. Even now survivors of those

days recur to the tumultuous excitement of that Pawnee Sunday as among

the memorable things of the war, and never without merriment. Perhaps

nobody expected serious resistance to be made by the clergymen and the

department clerks and the business men who armed themselves for the

fray. Home guards were familiar butts on both sides of the line, but

home guards have been known to die in battle, and death in battle is

supposed to be rather tragic than otherwise. Nor is the tragedy made

less tragic by the age of the combatant. The ancients thought a young

warrior dead something fair to behold. To Greek poet and Roman poet

alike an aged warrior is a pitiable spectacle. No one is likely to

forget Virgil's Priam, Tyrtæus' description of an old soldier on the

field of battle came up to me more than once, and there is stamped

forever on my mind the image of one dying Confederate, "with white hair

and hoary beard, breathing out his brave soul in the dust" on the

western bank of the fair Shenandoah. Yet a few weeks before, that same

old Confederate, as a member of the awkward squad, would have been a

legitimate object of ridicule; and so the heroes of the Pawnee war, the

belted knights, or knights who would have been belted could belts have

been found for their civic girth, were twitted with their heroism.

[Note: Tyrtæus Fr. 8, 23:

[Greek: êdê leukon echonta karê polion te geneion thymon apopneiont'

alkimon en koniê].

The first line is taken from Il. 22, 74. I do not continue the citation

because the Homeric passage has not been subjected to the refining

process of Mr. MURRAY'S redactors of the Iliad.]

[Note: The Bloody Angle, May 12, 1864, an unforgettable date.]

[Note: Girl in the Carpathians and Scholar in Politics are titles of

current publications taken at random to illustrate the personal element

and its unfitness.]

But our scares were not confined to scares that came from Richmond. One

cavalry raid came up to our very doors, and Custer and his men were

repelled by a handful of reserve artillerymen. Our home guard was

summoned more than once to defend Rockfish Gap, and I remember one long

summer night spent as a mounted picket on the road to Palmyra. Every

battle in that "dancing ground of war" brought to the great

Charlottesville hospital sad reinforcements of wounded men. Crutch-races

between one-legged soldiers were organized, and there were timber-toe

quadrilles and one-armed cotillions. Out of the shelter of the Blue

Ridge it was easy enough to get into the range of bullets. A semblance

of college life was kept up at the University of Virginia. The students

were chiefly maimed soldiers and boys under military age; but when

things grew hot in front, maimed soldiers would edge nearer to the hell

of battle and the boys would rush off to the game of powder and ball.

One little band of these college boys chose an odd time for their

baptism of fire, and were put into action during the famous fight of

"the bloody angle." From the night when word was brought that the

Federals had occupied Alexandria to the time when I hobbled into the

provost marshal's office at Charlottesville and took the oath of

allegiance, the war was part of my life, and it is not altogether

surprising that the memories of the Confederacy come back to me whenever

I contemplate the history of the Peloponnesian war, which bulks so

largely in all Greek studies. And that is all this paper really means.

It belongs to the class of inartistic performances of which Aristotle

speaks so slightingly. It has no unity except the accidental unity of

person. A Southerner in the Peloponnesian War has no more artistic right

to be than A Girl in the Carpathians or A Scholar in Politics, and yet

it may serve as a document. But what will not serve as a document to the

modern historian? The historian is no longer the poor creature described

by Aristotle. He is no annalist, no chronicler. He is not dragged along

by the mechanical sequence of events. "The master of them that know" did

not know everything. He did not know that history was to become as

plastic as poetry, as dramatic as a play.

V

[Note: [Greek: akoueis Aischinê]; Dem. 18, 112. My Millwood friend was a

scholar of the old times and would not have paused to consider whether

the omission of [Greek: ô] was due to scorn of Æschines or dread of the

hiatus.]

The war was a good time for the study of the conflict between Athens and

Sparta. It was a great time for reading and re-reading classical

literature generally, for the South was blockaded against new books as

effectively, almost, as Megara was blockaded against garlic and salt.

The current literature of those three or four years was a blank to most

Confederates. Few books got across the line. A vigorous effort was made

to supply our soldiers with Bibles and parts of the Bible, and large

consignments ran the blockade. Else little came from abroad, and few

books were reprinted in the Confederacy. Of these I recall especially

Bulwer's Strange Story; Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, popularly

pronounced "Lee's Miserables"; and the historical novels of Louise

Mühlbach, known to the Confederate soldier as "Lou Mealbag." All were

eagerly read, but Cosette and Fantine and Joseph the Second would not

last forever, and we fell back on the old stand-bys. Some of us exhumed

neglected treasures, and I remember that I was fooled by Bulwer's

commendation of Charron into reading that feebler Montaigne. The

Southerner, always conservative in his tastes and no great admirer of

American literature, which had become largely alien to him, went back to

his English classics, his ancient classics. Old gentlemen past the

military age furbished up their Latin and Greek. Some of them had never

let their Latin and Greek grow rusty. When I was serving on General

Gordon's staff, I met at Millwood, in Clarke County, a Virginian of the

old school who declaimed with fiery emphasis, in the original, choice

passages of Demosthenes' tirade against Æschines. Not Demosthenes

himself could have given more effective utterance to "Hearest thou,

Æschines?" I thought of my old friend again not so very long ago, when I

read the account that the most brilliant of modern German classicists

gives of his encounter with a French schoolmaster at Beauvais in 1870,

during the Franco-Prussian war, and of the heated discussion that ensued

about the comparative merits of Euripides and Racine. The bookman is not

always killed in a man by service in the field. True, Lachmann dropped

his Propertius to take up arms for his country, but Reisig annotated his

Aristophanes in camp, and everybody knows the story of Courier, the

soldier Hellenist. But the tendency of life in the open air is to make

the soul imbody and imbrute, and after a while one begins to think

scholarship a disease, or, at any rate, a bad habit; and the Scythian

nomad, or, if you choose, the Texan cowboy, seems to be the normal,

healthy type. You put your Pickering Homer in your kit. It drops out by

reason of some sudden change of base, and you do not mourn as you ought

to do. The fact is you have not read a line for a month. But when the

Confederate volunteer returned, let us say, from Jack's Shop or some

such homely locality, and opened his Thucydides, the old charm came

back with the studious surroundings, and the familiar first words

renewed the spell.

"Thucydides of Athens wrote up the war of the Peloponnesians and

Athenians." "The war of the Peloponnesians and Athenians" is a somewhat

lumbering way of saying "the Peloponnesian war." But Thucydides never

says "the Peloponnesian war." Why not? Perhaps his course in this matter

was determined by a spirit of judicial fairness. However that may be,

either he employs some phrase like the one cited, or he says "this war"

as we say "the war," as if there were no other war on record.

"Revolutionary war," "war of 1812," "Seminole war," "Mexican war,"--all

these run glibly from our tongues, but we also lumber when we wish to be

accurate. The names of wars, like the names of diseases, are generally

put off on the party of the other part. We say "French and Indian war"

without troubling ourselves to ask what the French and Indians called

it, but "Northern war" and "Southern war" were never popular

designations. "The war between the States," which a good many

Southerners prefer, is both bookish and inexact. "Civil war" is an utter

misnomer. It was used and is still used by courteous people, the same

people who are careful to say "Federal" and "Confederate." "War of the

rebellion," which begs the very question at issue, has become the

official designation of the struggle, but has found no acceptance with

the vanquished. To this day no Southerner uses it except by way of

quotation, as in Rebellion Record, and even in the North it was only by

degrees that "reb" replaced "secesh." "Secession" was not a word with

which to charm the "old-line Whigs" of the South. They would fight the

battles of the secessionists, but they would not bear their name. "The

war of secession" is still used a good deal in foreign books, but it has

no popular hold. "The war," without any further qualification, served

the turn of Thucydides and Aristophanes for the Peloponnesian war. It

will serve ours, let it be hoped, for some time to come.