"The Last Cavalier"
When the Civil War began, there still existed a sense of romance about war and it's heroics. But this war was the first which was extensively recorded by the camera. When the real horrors of war were thus captured and then shown to the public, that romantic attitude quickly evaporated.
This snappy cavalier, dressed in his finest uniform and wearing his mustache and beard in a rakish fashion, would soon learn the all too real aspects of war; the romance would be buried alongside the thousands of dead soldiers from both sides. Sadly, many of these dramatic, often horrible, images had been captured on glass plates and, being as the subject matter was so brutal, they were left out in the sun, often being used as glass squares in green-houses, where the image slowly faded away until it was lost forever.
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