Much he suffered during this last campaign from a grievous malady, yet the vigor of his soul disdained to consider the weakness of his body, and accepting without a murmur the privations of that terrible winter, he remained steadfast to his duty until the fatal bullet stilled the beatings of a noble heart which had so often throbbed responsive to the music of victory.
No more splendid monument, no nobler epitaph, than of that Latour d'Avergne, "the first grenadier of France," to whose name every morning at roll-call in the French army, answer was made, as the front-rank man on right of his old company stepped forward and saluted: Mort sur le champ de bataille—"dead upon the field of battle." Such monument, such epitaph, at least, is that of
A. P. HILL,
and the men of his old corps remember with sorrowful pride that his name lingered last upon the dying lips of Lee and of Jackson.[1]
Of the other, who fell but the evening before at Five Forks, I almost fear to speak, lest I should do hurt to that memory which I would honor. For to those who knew him not, the simplest outline of a character so finely tempered by stern and gentle virtues, would seem but an ideal picture touched with the tender exaggeration of retrospective grief; while to so many of you who knew him as he was—the gentle comrade and the brilliant fighter—any portrait must prove, at best, but a blurred semblance of the young soldier, whose simple, heroic, godly life rejects, as it were, all human panegyric. Yet even the coldest must allow that it was a life which afforded a notable example of how great a career may be crowded within the compass of few years. In the spring of '61, a youth of modest demeanor, he entered the military service as a private soldier—in the spring of '65, still a mere lad, he fell in action, Colonel of Artillery, mourned by an army.
More than once in desperate and critical events were grave trusts confided to his prudence, skill and courage; more than once did he win emphatic praise from Hill, from Jackson, and from Lee. Thus, it was his lot to be tried in great events, and his fortune to be equal to the trial, and having filled the measure of perfect knighthood, "chaste in his thoughts, modest in his words, liberal and
- ↑ "Tell Hill he must come up." Colonel Wm. Preston Johnston's account of Lee's last moments—Rev. J. Wm. Jones' Personal Reminiscences of General R. E. Lee, p. 451.
"A. P. Hill, prepare for action."—Dabney's Life of Jackson, p. 719.
