The rest of the story.
John Clem had been with the 22nd Massachusetts Regiment for more than two years now.
He had faced every imaginable danger on the battlefields of the Civil War,
even had a load of army equipment blasted right out of his hands by a Confederate cannonball during the Battle of Shiloh.
But nothing, nothing had prepared him for the intimate horror of September 2018-63, the Battle of Chikamagwa.
The 22nd Massachusetts was catching hell, infantry was being captured on mass.
Amid the Cacophonist mayhem John Clem heard the voice of a Confederate officer booming surrender.
Without stopping to consider his options or his odds, John ran as fast as he could.
The officer was pursuing him on horseback and squeezed off a couple of shots and shouted again for the soldier to give himself up.
John halted and turned slowly as if reluctantly obeying the command and their eyes met.
And for a seeming eternity with artillery fire and bellows of anger and screams of the dying echoing all around them,
John Clem and the grey-coated officer gazed into each other's souls.
It was only for an instant really, but it would live forever in the battlefields of John's dreams,
because in the next instant John jerked his rifle to his shoulder and pulled the trigger in half of the revs head blew away.
John turned and ran again, even harder this time, until he spied a heap of contorted corpses.
There was only one way of escape he told himself, pretend to be shot and toppled onto the pile of bodies,
and then wait until nobody was looking and high-tailed it back behind the Union line.
And this John did.
For his valor, at the Battle of Chikamagua, John Clem was promoted to corporal and thereafter he would be captured once and wounded twice,
but even after the war was over, his life in the United States Army was only beginning.
John finally resigned a major general in 1916, and yet all through his many and various military experiences he would remain haunted.
A wake or a sleep he would remain haunted by a pair of Confederate eyes, a light and a live and quizzically expressed only a moment before John closed them forever.
You see, impressionable minds and tender hearts just naturally go together, and yet what such a mind readily absorbs such a heart cannot hope to explain.
In history texts, the American war between the states is often subtitled the Brothers War, and yet so young were so many of the soldiers who fought and died in the battles of blue and gray,
that they may also be said to comprise a children's crusade, or something more.
All of your life you've heard majestic issues applied to that otherwise unconscionable conflict, and yet looming overall was an almost palpable insanity.
Perhaps no better illustrated than by the attempted capture of John Glenn, whereupon the Confederate officer chasing him about to be killed by him, shouted surrender surrender you damned little Yankee.
Indeed, private John Clem, 60 pounds, 30 inches tall, age 12, now you know the rest of the story.