the sons of Harvard, you will read these volumes from first to last with intense interest and proud emotion, and you will be astonished that such a magnificent library of adventure has received so little attention from the press.
Here you will learn of one dead hero that he came of a long line of Harvard scholars; of another that he was sprung from excellent fighting stock; of another that his grandfather fought in the Civil War; of still another that his ancestors distinguished themselves in the Revolution and in the French and Indian wars. This young officer's father was a Mayor; that one's a President of the United States; the sire of this one was a famous New York clergyman; the grandfather of this one was Lincoln's Secretary of War; this boy was of the tenth generation from Elder Brewster; this "ace of aces" was descended from the colonel who crawled into the den after the wolf. They bred true, these fine old stocks. There are memoirs here which read like Pindaric odes, pouring a splendor of death and glory upon ten generations.
Here you will find, on the part of soldiers and their fathers and mothers, expressions of faith, of dedication, and of solemn sacrifice—sometimes even of joyous sacrifice. So great a hope, so clear a sense of duty, animated most of these volunteers that they felt bitterness only when the influenza or the pneumonia, more deadly than the bullet, made their free-will offering unavailing. "For many of them," says Mr. Howe, "Howard Rogers Clapp spoke when he wrote:
