How it fitted in, now, with the other fact my host had let drop--the fact that Delane had fought all through the civil war! It seemed incredible that it should have come to me as a surprise; that I should have forgotten, or perhaps never even known, this phase of his history. Yet in young men like myself, just out of college in the ’nineties, such ignorance was more excusable than now seems possible.
That was the dark time of our national indifference, before the country’s awakening; no doubt the war seemed much farther from us, much less a part of us, than it does to the young men of today. Such was the case, at any rate, in old New York, and more particularly, perhaps, in the little clan of well-to-do and indolent old New Yorkers among whom I had grown up. Some of these, indeed, had fought bravely through the four years: New York had borne her part, a memorable part, in the long struggle. But I remember with what perplexity I first wakened to the fact--it was in my school-days--that if certain of my father’s kinsmen and contemporaries had been in the war, others--how many!--had stood aside. I recall especially the shock with which, at school, I had heard a boy explain his father’s lameness: “He’s never got over that shot in the leg he got at Chancellorsville.”
I stared; for my friend’s father was just my own father’s age. At the moment (it was at a school foot-ball match) the two men were standing side by side, in full sight of us--_his_ father stooping, halt and old, mine, even to filial eyes, straight and youthful. Only an hour before I had been bragging to my friend about the wonderful shot my father was (he had taken me down to his North Carolina shooting at Christmas); but now I stood abashed.
The next time I went home for the holidays I said to my mother, one day when we were alone: “Mother, why didn’t father fight in the war?” My heart was beating so hard that I thought she must have seen my excitement and been shocked. But she raised an untroubled face from her embroidery.
“Your father, dear? Why, because he was a married man.” She had a reminiscent smile. “Molly was born already--she was six months old when Fort Sumter fell. I remember I was nursing her when Papa came in with the news. We couldn’t believe it.” She paused to match a silk placidly. “Married men weren’t called upon to fight,” she explained.