[Illustration: Burial at Arlington of 426 American soldiers who fell in Cuba.]
The year after the Cuban campaign I attended the burial of four hundred and twenty-six officers and men at Arlington, the great national cemetery on the beautiful, sloping banks of the Potomac River, opposite Washington. The President, the members of the cabinet, the commanding general of the army, and other high officials of state were there to pay their respect to the noble dead as they were laid to rest in the company of the thousands of others who gave their lives for their country in the Civil War. The long lines of coffins, each one draped with a flag, resting beside the open graves, ready to be lowered, told a heavy story of the breakage of war. Two chaplains, one Protestant and the other Roman Catholic, read the service for the burial of the dead, while a soldier stood at each grave and sprinkled the symbolic handful of earth upon the coffin. At the end of the ceremony the artillery boomed the last salute, and the trumpeters sounded the slow, mournful notes of “taps.” The imposing funeral cost the government a great amount of money. But each year the soldier dead are gathered home; the dead of every war our country has waged have been brought together, a silent army of heroic men. These graves will be cared for and the names will be preserved so long as the nation lasts.
In South Africa the English forces buried their dead with the honors of war whenever it was possible, but not with the intention of taking the bodies home at any future date; and in hundreds of cases the graves were not even marked. There was not that deserved attention paid to the dead which seemed often feasible, and which in some cases I felt that Americans would have made feasible. In one instance in Natal a Boer general sent a flag of truce to the British general, whose forces had just met with a severe defeat, and told him that a truce would be allowed in which to bury the dead, and that if the British general would send out a burial party it would be given safe conduct and every assistance in the work. The answer went back to the Boer commander, “Bury them yourself and send us the bill.” The Boers did bury them, and read a Christian service over them, but they did not send in a bill.