Harvard memorial biographies ...

466 Harvard Memorial Biographies.
ment, and the answer was, "No, but you may straighten me
out." As his friend, true to the end, was rendering this last
service, a bullet pierced his breast, and his dead body fell
over the dying.
Some of his soldiers offered to carry him off, but his last
order was, "Do not touch me, move on, men; follow your
colors "; and they left him. He was not quite nineteen, and
he was breathing his spirit out in suffering, in the darkness
of night, amid the roar of musketry and cannon. But he
lay by the side of a dear friend, in the steps where his hero
leader had fallen, and surrounded by hundreds whom he had
helped to raise to be men and fellow-soldiers. There was
no one there to receive his last words of affection, but his
generous impulses in behalf of his country and his fellowmen were becoming through his blood an element of the
nation's life. No stone need mark the place where his bones
moulder, for future generations will reverently point to the
holy ground where the colonel and two captains of the Fiftyfourth Massachusetts were buried with their soldiers.