THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
would have elicited a satisfactory explanation. The question was not asked. Five minutes' conversation with his own aides, Lieutenant Oliver and Captain Hall, would have removed the error. Was the error so dear to him that he shielded it with silence against the truth? But to me it is a mystery how that error could stand against the force of his own recollections. Were they, too, shut out when that paragraph was penned? They would, indeed, have ill-comported with the sensational dash with which the verbiage of the censure is flavored.
“You will admit that this is not the way in which troops should be declared destitute of courage and valor; troops belonging to a division which on three battlefields lost far more killed and wounded than it counted men when I was put in command, and than it counts men to-day; and this is not the way to treat an officer, not one of whose subordinates will say that when he was in a place of danger his general was not with him. This is a levity which would not be admissible in the ordinary walks of life, much less in the military world, where every question of honor is weighed with scrupulous nicety. When looking at this most strange transaction, every impartial observer will ask himself, 'What can have been the motive of this?' If the battle had been lost, we might have found the motive in the desire of the commander to throw the responsibility upon some subordinate whom he might select as the unfortunate victim of his embarrassments. This, indeed, would not be noble nor even excusable; yet we can find the springs of such actions among the ordinary weaknesses of human nature. But we were victorious; the results of the action were uncommonly gratifying, and that General Hooker should then sit down and coolly endeavor to consign a fellow-soldier and part of his command to shame, and affectingly ornament the scene with the fanciful pyrotechnics of a terrific infantry fire flam-
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