Uncle Isaac Randall was the last Grand Army man in our town. All the other old comrades had passed on. As a boy I used to try to imagine what “the last Grand Army man” would be like. Poets and artists have tried to picture him, but when he actually appears you know how far the real must travel to reach the ideal. For poet and artist would have us look upon some calm, man, carried by the wings of great achievement far above the mean and petty things of life which surround us like a thick fog in a narrow valley. For that, I fear, is what most of us find life to be unless the memory of some great sacrifice or some great devotion can lift our heads up into the perpetual sunshine. Those who knew Uncle Isaac saw little of the hero about him. He was just a little, thin, nervous man, very deaf, and disappointed. No one can play the part of a deaf man with any approach to success unless he be a genuine philosopher, and Uncle Isaac was unfitted by nature for that. Sometimes in Summer, when the sun went down, you would see the old man in the barn looking off to the West, over the purpling hills where the shadows came creeping up from the valley. A man with some poetry and philosophy would have seen in the darkening where the hills gave way, to let the road pass through, an approach to the beautiful gate through which wife and children and old comrades had passed on, to wait for him beyond the hills. But Uncle Isaac was cursed with that curiosity which is the torture of the deaf—he saw the hired man up on the hill talking to the neighbor’s boy, and his burning desire was to know what they were talking about as they stood in the .
The Great War came, and Uncle Isaac’s two grandsons volunteered. Before they shipped overseas they came back to the farm—very trim and in their brown uniforms. It irritated the old man to think that these boys—hardly more than babies—hardly to be trusted to milk a kicking cow—should be sent to fight America’s battles. And those little rifles! They were not much better than popguns, compared with his old army . The old man took the gun down from the nail where it had hung for years. He had kept it polished, and the lock with its cap was still working. He would show these young what real meant. So they went out in the pasture—the old soldier carrying his musket, carefully loaded with a round bullet—pushed in with the iron ramrod. In order to show these boy soldiers what real warfare might be, the old man sighted the musket over the fence and aimed at a board about 300 yards away. The bullet went at least five feet wide, while the old musket kicked back so hard that Uncle Isaac with the pain. Then one of the boys quietly raised his “popgun” and aimed at a bush at least half a mile away across the valley. In a fraction of a minute he fired half a dozen bullets which tore up the ground all around that bush. Then the boys hung one of their brown uniforms on the fence across the pasture, and put Grandpa’s old blue coat beside it. You could hardly distinguish the brown coat against the background, while the blue coat stood out like a target. It was hard for the old man to realize that both he and his musket belonged to a vanished past. The boys looked at the gun and at Grandpa marching home—trying to throw his old shoulders back into military form—and smiled knowingly at each other as youth has ever done in the pride of its power. They could not see—who of us ever can see?—the spiritual forces of which walked beside the old man, waiting for the time to show their power.
The weeks went by, and day by day Grandpa read his paper with growing indignation. You remember how for months the army in France seemed to stand still before that great “Hindenburg line” which stretched out like an iron wall in front of Germany. It seemed to Uncle Isaac as if his boys and the rest of the army were cowards—afraid to march up to the line and fight. One day he threw down his paper and expressed himself , as only an old soldier can.
“I told you those boys never would fight. At the Battle of the Lee had a line of twice as strong as this Hindenburg ever had. Did General Grant sit still and wait for something to happen? Not much!
“‘Forward by the left flank!’
“That was the order, and we went forward. Don’t you know what he said at Fort Donelson? ‘I propose to move on your works at once.’ If General Grant was in France that’s what he’d say, and within an hour you’d see old Hindenburg coming out to surrender! My fought all day against a regiment from North Carolina. I’ll tell you what! Let me have my old regiment and that North Carolina regiment alongside and I’ll guarantee that we will break right through that Hindenburg line, march right across the Rhine, hog-tie the Kaiser and bring him back with us.”
“But, father,” said his daughter gently, “don’t you remember what writes? They don’t fight that way now. The must open a way first. Harry says they fire shells so large and powerful that when they strike the ground they make a hole so large you could put the barn into it. Suppose one of these big shells struck in the middle of your regiment?”
“I don’t care,” said Uncle Isaac. “We’d start, anyway! We’d move on those breastworks and take our chances!”
And mother wrote about it to her boys in the army over in France. The young fellows laughed at the thought of those old white-haired men, with their weapons, lined up before the death-dealing power of Germany. It seemed such a foolish thing to youth. The letter finally came to the grey-haired colonel of the regiment—an elderly man who had in some way held his army place in the ocean of youth which surrounded him. His eyes were moist as he read it, for he knew that if that group of wasted, white-haired men had lined up in front of the army they would not have been alone. Down the of history would have come a of old heroes—the spirit of the past would have stood with them. They would have stilled the laughter, and if these old veterans had started forward the whole great army would have thrown off restraint, broken orders and followed them through the &............