Bøker av Walter A. Clark

For the gratification of my old comrades and in grateful memory of their constant kindness during all our years of comradeship these records have been written. It has been my purpose to picture the lights rather than the shadows of our soldier life. War is a terribly serious business and yet camp life has its humor as well as its pathos, its comedy as well as its tragedy, its sunshine as well as its shadows.In the generation that has grown up since the '60's, there is a disposition to undervalue the merits of the "Old South" and to discount the patriotism and the courage, the sacrifice and the suffering of those, who wore the grey. If these pages shall recall to my old comrades with any degree of pleasure, the lights and shadows of our soldier life, or shall bring to the younger generation, to whom the Old South is not even a memory, a truer conception of "the tender grace of a day that is dead" I shall be more than repaid for the labor involved in their preparation.

There are many books of many kinds and this volume properly classified would probably belong to the "sui generis," "sic trasit gloria mundi" variety. If the reader has grown a little rusty on classic Latin I do not mind saying to him further that the latter phrase has been sometimes translated, "My glorious old aunt has been sick ever since Monday," but I do not think that this revised version has been generally accepted as strictly orthodox. This book cannot be said to have been written without rhyme or reason for its pages hold more rhyme than poetry and three reasons at least, have conspired to give it literary existence. A hundred years and more from now it may be that some far descendant of the author, while fingering the musty shelves of some old library, may find some modest satisfaction in the thought that his ancient sire had "writ" a book.