In the fatal battle a week ago, Putnam fell while
endeavoring to save a wounded companion, — fell, soiled with no ignoble dust — “non
indecoro pulvere sordidum.” Brought
to the hospital-tent, he said to the surgeon, who came to dress his wound, “Go
to some one else, to whom you can do more good; you cannot save me,” — like
Philip Sydney, giving the water to the soldiers who needed it more than
himself. And still more striking, as showing his earnest conscientiousness, is
the fact that he refused to allow Sturgis to remove him, saying: “It is your duty
to leave me. It is your duty to go to your own men, and leave me
here.” And his friend was obliged to carry him away in spite of this protest.
How hard that these precious lives should be thus wasted,
apparently for naught, through the ignorance or the carelessness of those whose
duty it was to make due preparation, before sending them to the field! How can
we bear it?
We could not bear it, unless we believed in God. But it is
not any blind chance, nor yet any human folly, which controls these events. All
is as God wills, who knows what the world needs, and what we need, better than
we can know it. And the death of Christ has taught us that it is God's great
law that the best shall be sacrificed to save the worst, the innocent suffering
for the good of the guilty. This is the law, ordained before the earth was
made; and every pure soul sacrificed in a struggle with evil is another “lamb
slain from the foundation of the world.”
And do we not see, in these great sacrifices, that the
heroism itself is already a great gain? Is it not something to know that we do
not belong to a degenerate race? Is it not a great blessing to know that we
also, and our sons, are still as capable as our fathers were of great and noble
sacrifices, — that Massachusetts still produces heroes, — that these boys of
yours, trained perhaps in luxury, can, at the call of their country, die
cheerfully for their land?
SOURCE: Edwin Everett Hale, Editor, James Freeman
Clarke: Autobiography, Diary and Correspondence, p. 274-5
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