He had enlisted in the very first days
of the war as a private, with no military knowledge
whatever, had been made first-sergeant of his com-
pany on account of his education and engaging
manner, and had been lucky enough to lose his cap-
tain by a Confederate bullet; in the resulting promo-
tions he had gained a commission. He had been in
several engagements, such as they were--at Phi-
lippi, Rich Mountain, Carrick's Ford and Green-
brier--and had borne himself with such gallantry
as not to attract the attention of his superior of-
ficers. The exhilaration of battle was agreeable to
him, but the sight of the dead, with their clay faces,
blank eyes and stiff bodies, which when not unnat-
urally shrunken were unnaturally swollen, had
always intolerably affected him. He felt toward them
a kind of reasonless antipathy that was something
more than the physical and spiritual repugnance
common to us all. Doubtless this feeling was due to
his unusually acute sensibilities--his keen sense of
the beautiful, which these hideous things outraged.
Whatever may have been the cause, he could not
look upon a dead body without a loathing which had
in it an element of resentment. What others have re-
spected as the dignity of death had to him no exist-
ence--was altogether unthinkable. Death was a
thing to be hated. It was not picturesque, it had no
tender and solemn side--a dismal thing, hideous in
all its manifestations and suggestions.
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