Deserters.
The character of a deserter from a volunteer army is the meanest of all characters. It implies not only treason, cowardice, but pretence and humbug, making the creature who commit it at once the most base and contemptible of mankind. In a volunteer army, every man, as the term indicates, enters it of his own free will. No man was obliged to enter that gallant host which is now contending to the death for the valor and independence of the Southern States. No one was compelled to put on the habiliments of a soldier, and to receive, in that guise, the admiration and gratitude of the country. The deserter from such an army is false to himself, as well as to his country, and an impostor as well as a traitor, who deserves an ignominious death, but is so contemptible that, at present prices, it would be a waste of powder and shot to shoot him.Deserters from a Southern army are altogether beneath the moral status of the same sort of recreants in the Yankee army. Many of the latter are mere mercenaries, most of them were forced into the service by their necessities, and all of them might desert in a body without injury to their homes, liberties, or any vital interests of society.--Not so deserters from the Southern flag. As the prompting of cowardice, or love of ease, they expose all that makes life valuable to destruction; country, firesides, family, property, and their noble comrades, who, faithful to their trusts, are fighting the battles of the recreant hounds, who have left them to struggle and perhaps to perish under the mighty odds thrown upon their diminished ranks.
As contemptible and traitorous as the deserters, the military loafers and humbugs who, on one pretence or another, are dangling about hotels, and showing off in public places, or dodging about in obscure retreats in the rural districts. The ladies might do some service to the State in banishing these holiday heroes with their fans, or giving them a leave of absence from their presence till they had fulfilled their duties to their country in their commands. If such an admonition should not prove efficient, the Provost Marshal should be authorized to swing each of them to the nearest lamp post or tree.
