279. The Sword Sheathed in Flowers

The Sword Sheathed in Flowers

Isa_47:4 : ’93The Lord of hosts is his name.’94

Under the God of armies we meet today. He has been on one or the other side of the great fights of the ages. He was present with indignation and pity at the great hemorrhages of the world, Salamis, Marathon, Cann’e6, Navarre, Leipzig, Sedan, Waterloo, Gettysburg. He saw all the armies of the ages march and where they fell. He presides over all grave trenches and all the national cemeteries, and not a private soldier that was sacrificed in all the wars of the centuries but God knows where his dust is as well as though for every man there had been built a monument of marble, glorified from base to top with epitaph and eulogium. Over all the armies of the living and over all the armies of the dead! ’93The Lord of hosts is his name.’94

In this springtime the American nation kneels with cool bandage of garlands to bind up the wounds of battle. War is more ghastly now than once, not only because of the greater destructiveness of its weaponry, but because now it takes down the best men, whereas once it chiefly took down the worst. Bruce in 1717, in his Institutions of Military Law, said of the European armies of his day: ’93If all infamous persons and such as have committed capital crimes, heretics, atheists, and all dastardly and feminine men, were weeded out of the army, it would soon be reduced to a pretty moderate number.’94 Flogging and mean pay made them still more ignoble. Officers were appointed to see that each soldier drank his ration of a pint of spirits a day. There were noble men in battle, but the moral character of an army then was ninety-five per cent. lower than the moral character of an army today. By so much is war now the more detestable because it destroys the picked men of the nations.

The South last week and the North this week, in great and solemn ceremony of decoration, first of all deplore the desolation of war. I know there are those who intimate that blood-letting is healthful for nations and that nothing but the lancet can keep them from plethora and that frequent wars are necessary in order to kill off the useless and bad populations of the earth. That heathenish idea is utterly loathsome to me, especially when I remember that war is indiscriminate and takes down the good as well as the bad. Then I think the time has come when Christian nations ought to substitute arbitration and treaty in the place of wholesale massacre.

A glance at isolated facts will show the waste, the desolation, the suffering, the extermination of war. When Napoleon’92s army marched up toward Moscow they burned every house for one hundred and fifty miles. Our Revolutionary war cost the English Government six hundred and eighty million dollars. The wars growing out of the French revolution cost England three thousand million of dollars. Christendom, or as I might mispronounce it in order to make the fact more appalling Christendom, has paid in twenty-two years fifteen thousand million dollars for battle. Those were the twenty-two years, I think, ending in 1820 or thereabout. The exorbitant and exhausting taxes of Great Britain and the United States are for the most part resultant from conflicts. When we complain about our taxes we charge the fault upon this administration or that administration, upon this line of policy or upon that line of policy, but it is a simple fact that today we are paying for the shot and the shell, and the ambulances and the cavalry horses and the batteries and the exploded fortresses and the broken bones and the digging of the grave trenches, and for four years of national martyrdom. Edmund Burke estimated that the nations of this world had expended thirty-five thousand million dollars in war, but he did his ciphering before our great American and European wars were plunged into. He never dreamed that in this land, in the latter part of this century, in four years we should expend in battle three thousand million dollars.

But what was all the waste of treasure when compared with the waste of human life? The story is appalling beyond everything. In one battle under Julius C’e6sar four hundred thousand fell. Under Xerxes in one campaign five millions were slain; under Genghis Khan at Herat, one million six hundred thousand were slain; at Nishar one million seven hundred and forty-seven thousand were slain; at the siege of Ostend one hundred and twenty thousand; at Acre three hundred thousand. At the siege of Troy one million eight hundred and sixteen thousand fell. The Tartar and two African wars cost one hundred and eight million lives. The wars against the Turks and the Saracens cost one hundred and eighty million lives. Added to all these the million who fell or expired in hospital in our own conflict. It might seem to some a small addition, but a vast addition it seems to me, because it comes so near our own hearts. Then take the fact that thirty-five times the present population of the earth have fallen in battle. Looking on these things, am I not right in charging you, O Christian men and women, to pray every day of your lives that the Lord will hasten on the day when war shall cease? Enough the tears. Enough the blood. Enough the bereavement. Enough the martyrdom.

Again, by this annual ceremony we propose vividly to impress the rising generation. Subtract 1865 when the war ended from our 1883, and you will realize what a vast number of people were born since the war, or were so young as to have no vivid appreciation. No one under twenty-eight years of age has any adequate memory of that prolonged horror. Young man, do you remember it? ’93Well,’94 you say, ’93I only remember that mother swooned away while she was reading the newspaper, and that they brought my father home wrapped in the flag, and that a good many people came in the house to pray, and that mother faded away after that until again there were many people in the house, and they told me she was dead.’94 There are others who cannot remember the roll of the drum or the tramp of the regiment or a sigh or a tear of that tornado of woe that swept the nation again and again until there was one dead in each house. Now it is the religious duty of those who do remember it to tell those who do not. My young friends, there were such partings at rail-car windows and steamboat wharves and at front doors of comfortable homes as I pray God you may never witness. Oh, what a time it was when fathers and mothers gave up their sons, never expecting to see them again, and never did see them again until they came back mutilated and crushed and dead. Four years of hostile experiences. Four years of ghastliness. Four years of grave-digging. Four years of funerals, coffins, shrouds, hearses, dirges. Mourning! Mourning! Mourning! It was hell let loose.

What a time of waiting for news! Morning paper and evening paper scrutinized for intelligence from the boys at the front. First, announcement that the battle must occur the next day. Then the news of the battle’92s going on. On the following day still going on. Then news of thirty thousand slain, and of the names of the great generals who had fallen, but no news about the private soldiers. Waiting for news! After many days a load of wounded going through the town or city, but no news from our boy. Then a long list of wounded and a long list of the dead and a long list of the missing, and among the last list our boy. When missing? How missing? Who saw him last? Missing! missing! Was he in the woods or by the stream? How was he hurt? Missing! missing! What burning prayers that he may yet be heard from! In that awful waiting for news many a life perished. The strain of anxiety was too great. That wife’92s brain gave way the first week after the battle, and ever and anon she walks the floor of the asylum or looks out of the window as though she expected some one to come along the path and up the steps as she soliloquizes: ’93Missing! missing!’94

What made matters worse, all this might have been avoided. There was no more need of that war than that this moment I should plunge a dagger through your heart. There were a few Christian philanthropists in those days scoffed at both by North and South, who had the right of it. If they had been heard on both sides we should have had no war and no slavery. It was advised by those Christian philanthropists, ’93Let the North pay in money for the slaves as property and set them free.’94 The North said, ’93We cannot afford to pay.’94 The South said, ’93We will not sell the slaves anyhow.’94 But the North did pay in war expenses enough to purchase the slaves, and the South was compelled to give up slavery anyhow. Might not the North better have paid the money and saved the lives of five hundred thousand brave men, and might not the South better have sold out slavery and saved her five hundred thousand brave men?

I swear you by the graves of your fathers and brothers and sons to a new hatred for the champion curse of the universe’97war! O Lord God, with the hottest bolt of thine indignation strike that monster down forever and ever. Imprison it in the deepest dungeon of the eternal penitentiary. Bolt it in with all the iron ever forged in cannon or molded into howitzers. Cleave it with all the sabers that ever glittered in battle, and wring its soul with all the pangs which it ever caused. Let it feel all the conflagration of the homesteads it ever destroyed. Deeper down let it fall, and in fiercer flame let it burn, till it has gathered into its heart all the suffering of eternity as well as time. In the name of the millions of graves of its victims, I curse it! The nations need more the spirit of treaty and less of the spirit of war, less of the Disraelian and more of the Gladstonian.

Again, by this national ceremony we mean to honor courage. Many of these departed soldiers were volunteers, not conscripts; and many of those who were drafted might have provided a substitute or got off on furlough or have deserted. The fact that they lie in their graves is proof of their bravery. Brave at the front, brave at cannon’92s mouth, brave on lonely picket duty, brave in cavalry charge, brave before the surgeon, brave in the dying message to the home circle. We put a garland on the brow of courage. The world wants more of it. The Church of God is in woeful need of men who can stand under fire. The lion of worldly derision roars and the sheep tremble. In great reformatory movements at the first shot how many fall back! The great obstacle to the Church’92s advancement is the inanity, the vacuity, the soft prettiness, the namby-pambyism of professed Christians. Great on a parade, cowards in battle. They go into battle not with warriors’92 gauntlet, but with kid gloves, not clutching the sword-hilt too tight lest the glove split at the back. In all our reformatory and Christian work the great want is more backbone, more mettle, more daring, more prowess. We would in all our churches like to trade off a hundred do-nothings for one do-everything. ’93Quit yourselves like men; be strong.’94

Thy saints in all this glorious war

Shall conquer, though they die;

They see the triumph from afar,

And seize it with their eye.

Again, we mean by this national observance to honor self-sacrifice for others. To all these departed men home and kindred were as dear as our home and kindred are to us. Do you know how they felt? Just as you and I would feel starting out tomorrow morning with nine chances out of ten against our returning alive; for the intelligent soldier sees not only battle ahead but malarial sickness and exhaustion. Had these men chosen, they could have spent last night in their homes, and today have been seated where you are. They chose the camp, not because they liked it better than their own house, and followed the drum and fife, not because they were better music than the voices of the domestic circle. South Mountain and Murfreesboro and the swamps of Chickahominy were not playgrounds. These heroes risked and lost all for others. There is no higher sublimity than that. To keep three-quarters for ourselves and give one quarter to others is honorable. To divide even with others is generous. To keep nothing for ourselves and give all for others is magnanimity, Christlike. Put a girdle around your body, and then measure the girdle and see if you are fifty or sixty inches round. And is that the circle of your sympathies’97the size of yourself? Or, to measure you around the heart, would it take a girdle large enough to encircle the land and encircle the world? You want to know what we dry theologians mean when we talk of vicarious suffering. Look at the soldiers’92 graves on Decoration Day and find out. Vicarious! pangs for others, wounds for others, homesickness for others, blood for others, sepulcher for others.

Those who visit the national cemeteries at Arlington Heights and at Richmond and Gettysburg will see one inscription on soldiers’92 tombs oftener repeated than any other’97’94Unknown.’94 When, several years ago, I was called to deliver the oration at Arlington Heights, Washington, I was not as much impressed with the minute guns that shook the earth, or with the attendance of President and Cabinet and foreign ministers and generals of the army and commodores of the navy, as with the pathetic and overwhelming suggestiveness of that epitaph on so many graves at my feet. ’93Unknown!’94 ’93Unknown!’94 It seems to me that the time must come when the Government of the United States shall take off that epitaph. They are no more unknown! We have found them out at last. They are the beloved sons of the Republic.

Would it not be well to take the statue of the heathen goddess off the top of the Capitol at Washington (for I have no faith in the morals of a heathen goddess) and put one great statue in all our national cemeteries’97a statue of liberty in the form of a Christian woman with her hand on an open Bible and her foot on the Rock of Ages, with the other hand pointing down to the graves of the unknown, saying, ’93These are my sons who died that I might live.’94 Take off the misnomer. Everybody knows them. It is of comparatively little importance what was the name given them in baptism of water. In the holier and mightier baptism of blood we know them, and on Decoration Day the Nation puts both arms around them and hugs them to her heart, crying: ’93Mine forever!’94

Again, by this national ceremony we propose the future defense of this nation. By every wreath of flowers on the soldiers’92 graves we say, ’93Those who die for the country shall not be forgotten,’94 and that will give enthusiasm to our young men in case our nation should in the future need to defend itself in battle. We shall never have another war between North and South. The old decayed bone of contention, American slavery, has been cast out, although here and there a depraved politician takes it up to see if he can gnaw something off it.

We are floating off farther and farther from the possibility of sectional strife. No possibility of civil war. But about foreign invasion I am not so certain. When I spoke against war I said nothing against self-defense. An inventor told me at Washington that he had invented a style of weapon which could be used in self-defense but not in aggressive warfare. I said, ’93When you get the nations to adopt that weapon you have introduced the millennium.’94 I have no right to go on my neighbor’92s premises and assault him, but if some ruffian break into my house for the assassination of my family, and I can borrow a gun and load it in time and aim it straight enough, I will shoot him.

There is no room on this continent for any other nation’97except Canada, and a better neighbor no one ever had. If you do not think so, go to Montreal and Toronto, and see how well they will treat you. Other than that there is absolutely no room for any other nation. I have been across the continent again and again, and know that we have not a half inch of ground for the gouty foot of foreign despotism to stand on. But I am not so sure that some of the arrogant nations of Europe may not some day challenge us. I do not know that those forts around New York Bay are to sleep all through the next century. I do not know that Barnegat lighthouse will not yet look off upon a hostile navy. I do not know but that a half dozen nations, envious of our prosperity, may want to give us a wrestle. During our Civil War there were two or three nations that could hardly keep their hands off us. It is very easy to pick national quarrels, and if our nation escapes much longer it will be the exception. If foreign foe should come, we want men like those of 1812 and like those of 1862 to meet them. We want them all up and down the coast, Pulaski and Fort Sumter in the same chorus of thunder as Fort Lafayette and Fort Hamilton’97men who will not only know how to fight, but how to die. When such a time comes, if it ever does come, the generations on the stage of action will say, ’93My country will care for my family as they did in the soldiers’92 asylums for the orphans in the Civil War, and my country will honor my dust as it honored those who preceded me in patriotic sacrifice, and once a year at any rate, on Decoration Day, I shall be resurrected into the remembrance of those for whom I died. Here I go for God and my country! Hurrah!’94

If foreign foe should come, our old sectional animosities would have no power. Here go our regiments into the battle-field: Fifteenth New York Volunteers, Tenth Alabama Cavalry, Fourteenth Pennsylvania Riflemen, Tenth Massachusetts Artillery, Seventh South Carolina Sharpshooters. I have no faith in the cry, ’93No North, no South, no East, no West.’94 Let all four sections keep their peculiarities and their preferences, each doing its own work and not interfering with each other, each of the four carrying its part in the great harmony’97the bass, the alto, the tenor, the soprano’97in the grand march of Union.

Once more, this great national ceremony means the beautification of the tombs, whether of those who fell in battle or accident, or who have expired in their beds or in our arms or on our laps. I suppose you have noticed that many of the families take this season as the time for the adornment of their family plots. This national observance has secured the arboriculture and floriculture of the cemeteries, the straightening up of many a slab planted thirty or forty years ago, and has swung the scythe through the long grass, and has brought the stonecutter to call out the half-obliterated epitaph. This day is the benediction of the resting place of father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister. It is all that we can do for them now. Make their resting places attractive, not absurd with costly outlay, but in quiet remembrance. You know how. If you can afford only one flower, that will do. It shows what you would do if you could. One blossom from you may mean more than the Duke of Wellington’92s catafalque. We cannot afford to forget them. They were so lovely to us. We miss them so much. We will never get over it. Blessed Lord Jesus, comfort our broken hearts. From every bank of flowers breathes promise of resurrection. In olden times the Hebrews, returning from their burial-place, used to pluck the grass from the field three or four times, then throw it over their heads, suggestive of the Resurrection. We pick not the grass, but the flowers, and instead of throwing them over our heads we place them before our eyes, right down over the silent heart that once beat with warmest love toward us or over the still feet that ran to serve us or over the lips from which we took the kiss at the anguish of the last parting. But stop! We are not infidels. Our bodies will soon join the bodies of our departed in the tomb, and our spirits shall join their spirits in the land of the rising sun. We cannot long be separated. Instead of crying with Jacob for Joseph, ’93I will go down into the grave unto my son, mourning,’94 let us cry with David, ’93I shall go to him.’94

On one of the gates of Greenwood is the quaint inscription, ’93A night’92s lodging on the way to the City of the New Jerusalem.’94 Comfort one another with these words. May the hand of him who shall wipe away all tears from all eyes wipe your cheek with its softest tenderness. The Christ of Mary and Martha and Lazarus will enfold you in his arms. The white-robed angels who sat at the tomb of Jesus will yet roll the stone from the door of your dead in radiant resurrection. The Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout and the voice of the archangel. So the Dead March in Saul shall become the Hallelujah Chorus.

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage