Show I NEW GRAVES CAT C-AT ARLINGTON By EDWARD MARSHALL Ugly in the bare red of its monotony of newly turned clay the new graves of the soldiers dead in the Spanish American war will pitifully bear their flowers this Memorial day I was Sunday afternoon when I drove out to Arlington Holidaymak ers swarmed into the great National graveyard a if It were a picnic ground The spreading trees and rich turf of the old cemetery were green and peaceful Where lay the dead heroes of our civil war was sclemnltv but no sadness The scars of that great conflict had been obliterated bv tIme But where the new graves are is this great red lota tremendous wound In the sward t tell a story awesome and asvfull of heartache a HIs H-Is of dory Almost precisely a year before I had traveled about from camp to camp and come to know OU soldiers I had messed and camped with the gallant Ninth cavalry I ha gone to Cuba with the surgeons and the hospital corps I ha gone into battle with the rough riders and fought with them and bled with them Among the brave black troopers of the Ninth I numbered scores of friends Among the roughriders rough-riders there was scarcely a man whom I did not personally know Day after day since the time when battle and disease began among these my friends I had watched the records and I knew who were dead I wanted earnestly to find their graves But on the long rows fnd thcr gve of tiny tombstones there were no names Each ha its Inexpressive unromantic un-romantic number On one or two some romantc reverent one had scratched a name In lead pencil but they were all strange names to me A pleasant man came from the office of the cemetery with at first some merriment He showed me the map of the graves I looked at it with eager interest I looked away a quickly when I saw the long rows marked unknown It seems to mea I me-a pity that our government does not make some plan by which the identity of the men who go out to fight for i shall be certainly preserved One Little Decorator Then I drove back to the graves They were not wreathed with flowers a one would have expected them to be just after they had been made but from each one floated a little flag They were pitiful little flags those bits of color on our soldiers new graves They were made of the cheapest cloth and the red and the bluein them was stenciled sten-ciled on with cheap paint which will run down and spoil the white stripes when the first rain comes On one or two of all the thousand graves were tiny nosegays I fancy that they had been put there by a little girl that morning I saw her going about weeping weep-ing with some other bunches of flowers In her hands She told me that no one she knew had been buried there but that her big brother had been killed in the Philippines The graves were dug by contract doubtless and are arranged in rows so regularly that they make straight lines no matter in what position you stand as you view them They were dug by I contract and there were not enough dead soldiers to fill all of them for there are many blank spaces where one may walk if he is not on crutches as I was I he Is the soft earth which has been loosely thrown Into the useless use-less holes will sink beneath his crutches and he will founder as if in quicksand I tried to walk about among the graves but the government of the United States had too little land to spare to make the paths wide enough for a lame mans progress Leaves Mark Caprons Grave I saw Captain Capron a moment or two after he had been hit at Las Guas imas I saw his grave at Arlington At Guaslmas he so covered himself with glory that he made the brave men In that brave regiment of rough riders look at him in amazement and more than one of them there in the excitement excite-ment of the first battle took time enough as he passed him to pause and bare his head At Arlington a grateful country has not taken time to pause long enough in its monotonous workaday worka-day hours to put flowers on his grave Two faded palm leaves were laid upon it That was all Near his grave is that of another soldier whom I knew well Captain William ONeill the famous Buckey He rests under a handsome granite stone and some one had smothered the sodden mound with flowers the day I saw it I was he who made 3 famous remark Some one had said that our landing in Cuba would be a gamble Who wouldnt gamble for a new star in the flag Buckey quietly remarked re-marked and went on chewing his tobacco to-bacco To one who had seen the men who are now lying at Arlington in camp and on the battlefield it was tremendously tremen-dously impressive to gaze at their last resting places I raised my eyes and across a beautiful ravine the silvery sheen of the Potomac greeted them Beyond that lies Washington magic city in which the country for which they fought and died has its governmental center The great white dome of the capitol changed slowly to a red dome as the suns setting colored everything The tall shaft of the I Washington monument pierced a tinted sky skyFrom From Fort Meyer came the long quivering I quiv-ering pathetic bugle notes of taps |