Edward Peple (1869–1924)

Review from Amazon:
"It's about two sides of the Civil War, both doing their best to protect a little girl. The men both bond over being a father. They remain loyal to their duties and ideals, but they still work together for the greater good. It shows how you can be on opposite sides but still be friends."

From the Forward:

"The play, from which this book is written, was in no sense of the word intended as a war drama; for war is merely its background, and always in the center stands a lonely little child.
War is its theme but not its purpose. War breeds hatred, horror, pestilence and famine,
yet from its tears and ashes eventually must rise the clean white spirit of HUMANITY.

The enmity between North and South is dead; it sleeps with the fathers and the sons, the brothers and the lovers, who died in a cause which each believed was just.

Therefore this story deals, not with the right or wrong of a lost confederacy, but with the mercy and generosity, the chivalry and humanity which lived in the hearts of the Blue and Gray, a noble contrast to the grim brutality of war."… (more)

The existing history of Assyria's greatest ruler, Semiramis, is so confounded with the religions and superstitions of the ancients that little or no authentic fact may be gleaned therefrom. Again, these legends were handed down from father to son among the Syrians and imaginative Persians, till finally recorded by the more imaginative Greeks. These latter gentlemen seemed seldom to allow mere truth to stand as a stumbling block in their literary paths, but leaped it nimbly for the entertainment of an admiring world.
As for poets, they ever sing of Queen Semiramis at a period of her seasoned age and wickedness, though her "devilish beauty" continued to abide with her, being wielded as an evil scepter o'er the souls of men; yet much must be forgiven in a poet, because of that strange inaptitude of truth for a friendly relationship with meter and with rhyme.
In every human, however bad, there exists a trace of virtue, even as, on the other hand, no mortal yet has lived without some blemish of flesh or mind or heart; thus Nature balances her weird accounts, leaving the extremes of vice or purity to mythical ideals.… (more)