Concerning "The Faded Coat of Blue."

No one seems to have mentioned that the Civil War song is unquestionably about the death of a POW in a Southern prison camp like Andersonville.

That explains the phrase "among the famished brave" as well as the requests for "a little water and just a little crumb" as well as the "nameless grave" and the complete absence of any reference to fighting.

Other Civil War prisons, North and South, were almost equally atrocious, but Andersonville, set up in 1864, became the most notorious.