…You were carrying a sand pail filled with wild roses, all plucked, thorns included, from the mountain side. I wept then, wept to think it could have been for myself that you carried those sweet flowers if you did not already loved another. Do not deny me the justice of knowing for I knew it then as surely as I do now that you grieved for forty days and forty nights, your tears ceaseless in their flowing. I sometimes dare to imagine, in the darkest moments, that had it been I who swept clean off this land you might be moved to mourn in similar manner.
War does awful things to good people and good people do awful things in war. I have learned this in the most difficult manner imaginable and constantly berate myself for not having the wisdom to realize this sooner. Even the lines have faded in this war, the black and white of it has gone and now, in its place, we are forced to see the shocking truth of it all. I see that I will never return to you wholly and completely, if at all. I see that you will never truly want or come to love me as I do you. You may cry now over this for I will always, in the strangest parts of me, long to return to this muddied wasteland and my fallen comrades. I feel no remorse for the plainness and simplicity of that fact.
I ask only but thing of you. I ask that you think of me tenderly as you do your fallen boy and my progress into desertion and certain death will be greatly eased. I will remember you completely and always as the wondrous creature I saw that day upon yonder hill, roses in your sand pail as you bit down on the silence in your mouth.
Your Confederate Soldier.