Sergeant Johnny Clem (later Lt.); Was Sgt at age 13 (image from 1870's) w-Bro.
“… We who fought to kill each other were really never enemies. It was a war of cannon against fortress, of rifle against trench, but never of man against his brother man!” - Col Johnny Clem aka "The Drummer boy of Chickamauga"
In honor of Memorial Day, here is an excerpt from an interview Col John Clem gave a Washington D.C. newspaper reporter in 1914.
Clem had been famous since he was 12 years old as "The Drummer boy of Chickamauga". Clem was asked, on the occasion of Memorial Day, what memory was uppermost in his mind that day. Clem gently responded:
“My memory pictures today what my kid eyes saw fifty-one years ago today, a soldier in blue an a soldier in gray, shaking hands like two loving comrades between the trenches, swapping tobacco and coffee. In the morning they were to stab each other brutally with bayonets in a fierce hand-to-hand fight for those very trenches."
.... “Yet what I like to think of first on Memorial Day is not the bloody fight, but that tender scene preceding it, which showed me that after all, man to man, we soldiers of the north and of the south were friends and brothers always. We of the north hated that which they fought for, but we did not hate them personally, nor they us.
It is the great tragedy of those bloody deaths we brought each other, but not because of hatred for each other, but for the sake of a principle, that we must think of on this sacred Memorial Day.”
