Reminiscencies of a Confederate Soldier of Co. C, 2nd Va. Cavalry

Written nearly fifty years after the guns fell silent, this memoir is one old veteran's attempt to hold onto what mattered. Rufus H. Peck enlisted as a teenager in the Botetourt Dragoons, Company C of the 2nd Virginia Cavalry, and in 1913 he sat down to remember. What emerges is not military strategy or grand history, but the texture of a young boy's life during America's great rupture: the thunder of horses beneath him, the strange mixture of excitement and terror that accompanied every march toward confrontation, the friendships forged in circumstances no civilian could understand. Peck recalls the dramatic morning his company rode out from Fincastle, the humor that surfaced even in horror, the heartbreaking goodbyes to families who knew some of their boys would never return. His account carries the particular sadness of aged memory, the awareness that everyone he rode with is now gone and he himself is nearly there. This is history from the ground, told not by scholars but by a man who was there, who was young, who still remembers the faces. It captures what soldiers always capture: the unbearable humanity of war, and the impossible distance between the boys who enlisted and the men who survived.