Dead on the Field of Battle

WE buried him to-day, the last day of the year, my old friend the veteran. To me he was never anything but the crippled old soldier whom I used to meet on the road between his home and the grocery at the corner, rarely elsewhere; that was his daily walk, the limit of his strength as he hobbled leaning on his cane. When he had done his errands at the grocery, or perhaps had been as far as the post-office, his day’s work was over. I cannot think of him as young, exultant, free from pain and bodily infirmity; I cannot think of him as like other men, free to choose his acts, free to undertake, to plan, to accomplish, even to fail.

But he must have been young once. Fifty years ago, when he marched off to war, he certainly was young and very much alive. They say he was seventy or more when he died — but time meant nothing to him; it drifted over him; you would have been surprised to see to-day how young his face was. Was he still but one and twenty, as when he marched off to war?

That’s the whole of it; life stopped there for him; it is fifty years since he came back, but to him they might have been fifty days or fifty centuries for all that he could do with them. There was no free life for him, no ambitions, no hopes, no plans, nothing but to eat and sleep and pass the time. Even a man in prison hopes to get out and whets his brain in planning an escape. For this man there was no escape but death. Many men in his condition would have married for their own satisfaction; he did not so. Some would have studied, winning an escape by thought: that was not his bent, and he lacked opportunity.

The din of the heavy artillery that he served had deafened him, so that he was deprived even of the pleasures of conversation: he would guess that his friends remarked upon the weather and, rain or shine, would tell them that it was a fine day. Can you imagine a life like that, stripped of everything, even of the irritations which make a man defiant against his fate? But this man seemed never to rebel.

Daily we met him and passed the greetings of the day, or just smiled and nodded. Daily we left him behind us, stationary, while we forged ahead. We grew up; we tried our wings; we took our flights; and when we came back to the old home it was to see him still hobbling to or from the grocery on his daily errands. In our youth we flouted him — not for us such a useless existence; not for us such an idle round; we forgot, if we ever knew, that at one and twenty he had marched off to the war, brave and hopeful. But as time wore on, we came to value our veteran more.

There was something appealing in his helplessness. There was something tragic in his patience. But his smile always defended him from our pity. We came to notice that we did not speak of him with patronage. A man who could always smile back into the face of a relentless fate could not be treated condescendingly, even if he never did any work in the world. But was not his work just to smile, never to complain, never to show disheartenment? He did not let even his deafness fret him. When he could not hear what we shouted into his ear, he would take down his cupped hand and shake his head and smile. ‘No use,’ he would say, as it if were a joke upon himself.

We came to depend upon that man. We depend just so upon the sun and the dew and the breeze. Only twice in all the years of our acquaintance, though I often saw the sadness in his face at rest, do I remember his uttering it in words. ‘There was not much glory in it for most of us,’ he said once, as we gazed at the procession on Memorial Day, referring to the fifty years which had followed his brief attempt to serve his country. His promotion to sergeant was something like a blank drawn in the lottery of war, and so long as his infirmities forbade his marching with the other veterans, many did not know why he was a cripple. The other time it was also Memorial Day, and we stood side by side before the tall Soldiers’ Monument, looking at the tablets filled with names. ‘I used to know every one of those boys,’ he said. And he added, with wistful reminiscence, looking off at the river, ‘We were all boys then.’ His voice broke, but his face told the story. They had been mercifully taken in their youth; they were heroes, their names carved for all the world to read. He was but a stranded wreck, no hero; and the tablets on the monument were already full; he had given all and had got nothing. But he did not utter the thought. A moment later he smiled and waved his hand in parting as he hobbled off; he did not envy even his comrades who had died on the field of battle.

But was he not all his life living on the field of battle? Was he ever mustered out to the ordinary duties and distractions of life? When we remember how he bore himself among us, how simple and sincere and blameless, how kind and cheerful and uncomplaining, when patience and cheerfulness were all that he was able to give his country, do we not feel that he was still serving her; that he had made of his own maimed life a battlefield and was fighting to the end without thought of retreat or surrender; that he fell at last in the same service he had entered in the flush of youth?

It would have pleased and surprised him if he could have known how many came to bid him farewell to-day: the church was needed for the service. He, of all persons, would have least expected such a tribute of respect and affection. True, a stranger praised him with harmless platitudes, trying not to say the wrong thing, not knowing how to utter the right one, which scores of us might have spoken for him. We who knew the man desired no generalities; there was nothing to evade; but only those who had known him long knew how much there was to say. Yet the occasion did not pass without its witness. Through the stained-glass window above him as he lay with the bright flag on his casket, the westering sun, in its decline, shot into the dark church a slanting, sidewdse ray that lingered long. All the other symbols of the faith avoiding, it fell fair and long on a crown of gold set in a blood-red field. It was his crown of martyrdom, bright and ready for him. Seeing, we understood that he was lying where he must so often have desired to be, dead on the field of battle.