for glory, and I don't want a commission. I'd rather wear this plain uniform than even the the uniform you are wearing, sir."

"And in that, Simonson, you show your good sense," said the General, with a sigh, "but—

"Ours not to make reply,
Ours not to reason why,
Ours but to do and die-

"and I know you'll not fail me, or fall short of your duty. By the way, Captain Simonson, I want to become better acquainted with you. Come and see me often, that is

if I retain my command."

One afternoon General Garfield came into his chief's office and said, "General, I've been asked to accept the Republican nomination for Congress from the Ashtabula district. What ought I to do? Should I accept it? Can I honorably do so?"

Simonson was present and was eager to hear the great soldier's reply.

"I'm glad for your sake-and I certainly think you can accept with honor; and, what is more, I deem it your duty to do so."

Rosecrans said much more, all to the effect that strong men, loyal and true, were greatly needed at home; and that not unfrequently men who might be immensely useful as civilians, make very poor soldiers, especially officers, in the army. All of which made a very deep impression on the young lawyer's mind.

However, he was beginning to like the sound of Captain Samuel Simonson.

CHAPTER XXV

AT MISSIONARY RIDGE AND LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN-TAKEN

PRISONER

OOKOUT Mountain and Missionary Ridge are blood

emblazoned names, but the bitterest struggle and sorest defeat of those high eminences have never been recorded. On Missionary Ridge stood Jefferson Davis, gazing down on a land which neither himself nor his followers would ever possess.

The Chieftain had come from Richmond for two purposes: one most agreeable; the other most disagreeable.

The head of the Southern Confederacy was a trained soldier and had desired to be, not President, but Commander of the army. Not politics. but war, not statecraft but military science, were his great passions. Cæsar, rather than Cicero and Seneca; Charlemagne and Napoleon, rather than the great statesmen who adorned their reigns, were his most frequent themes of conversation.

And there were marvelous military possibilities about the cities of Knoxville and Chattanooga; Chattanooga and Lookout Valleys, Raccoon and Lookout Mountains, the Tennessee and two Chickamauga rivers; level plateaus rimmed by precipitous heights; grain fields embroidered with deep chasms whose declivities were dense with primeval forests; a vast variety of altitudes producing the most abrupt and diverse degrees of temperature and meteorological conditions, now suffocatingly hot, now exhilaratingly cool and crystallinely

clear; one moment tempestuous as the fabled realm of Pluto, the next "calm as a painted sea."

Here were massing titanic forces: on one side the armies of the Cumberland and the Tennessee, with mighty reënforcements from the Army of the Potomac, all under the command of Grant, that imperturbable and relentless ArchAngel of the Battlefield who never hesitated to wade through goriest slaughter, however hideous and appalling, to the goal of his desire; and having as his field-marshals a group of generals not unworthy of Napoleon-Sherman, Sheridan, Thomas, Hooker, Howard, Logan; the other side commanded by-ah, there was the rub! And therefore Davis had hastened thither from the Confederate Capital.

There were jealousies enough among Federal officers to have caused the defeat and damnation of the Union army had they not been more than counterbalanced by the yet fiercer jealousies of the officers of the Confederacy. Alas, alas! that great and good men like McClellan, Halleck, and Rosecrans, not to mention scores of lesser lights, should have yielded to such ignoble passions; as did also Bragg, Beauregard, Longstreet, J. E. Johnston, and many of their fellow-officers. Only two of the great generals seem to have risen above the petty passions of the green-eyed monsterGrant and Lee; and we now know that even they had their profound, though usually justifiable, likes and dislikes.

There was always, however, this difference between the Northern and Southern wranglers: the Northerners always buried their animosities at the first scent of peril to the cause; the Southerners sternly carried theirs with them ever, regardless of personal peril, or peril to their cause. Even the hopes and horrors of Gettysburg could not quell the passionate jealousy and animosity of Lee's greatest fieldmarshal, whose hearty coöperation might, probably would, have turned the tide of battle and made Gettysburg the

mightiest and completest victory of all history-for Lee, had he been the victor, would not have permitted the results to slip through his fingers.

Thus at Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge: while Grant and Sherman and Sheridan and Thomas and Hooker and Howard and Logan, with their seasoned troops from the East and the West, flushed with the victories of Vicksburg and Gettysburg, were moving with the accuracy and precision of a perfectly constructed, perfectly coördinated, and perfectly operating mechanism, Bragg and his partisans, and Longstreet with his partisans, were at swords' points; and their poor President, with all the prestige of his great name, acknowledged genius, and exalted position, could neither assuage their bitterness nor effect even a temporary

truce.

Nevertheless it was a wonderful battle-October 24 and 25-amid glorious scenery, and for a pawn worthy of the gods; and the victory won was not less strategic than that at Vicksburg; and, territorially, was more decisive and important than even Gettysburg.

And the victors exulting amid the splendors above the clouds, while the heroic vanquished were grimly retreating in the gloom below, constituted a vast spectacular drama that was prophetic of an approaching victory and defeat, coronation and de-coronation, that would be final; for after Vicksburg, Gettysburg, and Chattanooga-Chattanooga, the very heart of the Southern Confederacy-there was absolutely no hope for the Government at Richmond.

Throughout the two days' battle Simonson, at the head of Company K, was with Hooker, and there was "lovely fighting all along the line."

Even to himself the young lawyer seemed to have become a new man. War, war, war-it was glorious! The noise of

battle-it was music to his soul. "The morn the marshalling
in arms, the day battle's magnificently stern array"—

"Hand to hand, and foot to foot;
Nothing there, save death, was mute;
Stroke, and thrust, and flash, and cry
For quarter, or for victory

with the volleying thunder.

Oh, it was glorious-the music of motion, the poetry of passion, the high zest of achievement! Everywhere action, action; and always forward, forward-so unlike limping, retreating Chickamauga-now forward, forward, doublequick, away!

Instead of Rosecrans and Wood, Negley, McCook and Crittenden ever retreating, now it was Grant and Sherman and Sheridan and Thomas and Hooker and Howard and Logan-Logan, the genuine Thalassidrona, invincible stormpetrel-ever advancing; and Longstreet, Bragg, Polk, Wheeler and Buckner, and all their hosts, once thought to be invincible, broken here, crushed there, demoralized and panic-stricken at a dozen places at once; yielding now a stand of arms, now a park of artillery, and now losing a company, regiment, entire brigade; here horseless riders, and here riderless horses, and here headless horses and headless men-but the phalanx gray, on their own soil, among their own people, fighting, struggling unto death, dying for principles dearer than their very lives, yet ever confronted by overwhelming forces which they could never evade, or hoodwink, or deceive-ever yielding, falling back, retreating.

The Federal brigades, battalions, and army-corps that had come up from New Orleans and Vicksburg, and down from Gettysburg, Henry, Donelson, Corinth, and Shiloh, were so intoxicated with the wine of victorious patriotism their eyes fairly gleamed, as though the Goddess of War had kissed