Page:Lippincotts Monthly Magazine-39.djvu/528

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518
GENERAL JOHN A. LOGAN.

and forth, in and out, trying to pierce the column of smoke. Above some evergreen shrubbery in a bend of the road was seen the yellow drapery in the window of a log cabin. One side of the cabin had been cleft in by a shell, and as General Logan and his officers rode up they saw framed in the disjointed door-way the figure of an old woman, whose face, pale and wrinkled, looked as though wistfully searching for human aid or relief. General Logan immediately rode up and asked her whether she was in trouble.

She lifted her sallow, anxious face, sweeping the soldierly form with a glance at first contemptuous and then appealing. "Come in, sir," she said, and led the way into the wretched cabin, pointing with dumb misery at a mattress laid where the shell had burst in the roof. Stretched upon this perilous couch was the figure of a young girl, the widow of one of the Confederate soldiers killed at Atlanta. Half an hour before, she had become the mother of a child. The baby lay beside her, sleeping, but uncared for, and the young mother looked as though she might be drifting away forever out of this strange battlefield in whose din and terror her fatherless child had been born. General Logan at once gave orders for the care of the desolate little family, saw to their safe removal, and a day or two later, although nearly broken down by fatigue and anxiety, rode eight miles to insure their safety. On this occasion the grandmother declared her intention of having the baby baptized, and General Logan stood godfather, the staff selecting the name of "Shell-Anna."

General Logan, after the battle of Ezra Church, and when the fierceness of activity lulled, returned home to take part in the Presidential campaign; but he was once more with his corps when they made that terrible march through the Carolinas of which General Sherman has said that none could form an idea of its perils and privations save those who had endured them. Glaring emergencies and brilliant conflicts carry excitement with them, but these dreary hours in swamp and morass, this breasting of the waters under a pitiless rain, this period of almost starvation and lonely physical misery, test the commander's real heroism; and Logan during that terrible time was always alert and always keen, forgetting no one but himself. Breakfasting by the light of the camp-fire, often with the storm of sleet and hail pouring down upon him, his food dry corn and wretched coffee, it was generally midnight before he again broke his fast; and yet—I have it from the men who served with and under him—his courage never deserted him. General Clark, in speaking of this period, says that the remembrance is like a nightmare to him. For sixty hours he and his men ploughed their way through the watery swamps, dragging artillery-trains out towards the