ern men who were in
the field, as they were much happier than those who stayed at home, if I
may judge by my own experience, were often merry enough by the camp
fire, and exchanged rough jests with the enemy's pickets. But the
invaded people were very much in earnest, however lightly some of their
adversaries treated the matter, and as the pressure of the war grew
tighter the more sombre did life become. A friend of mine, describing
the crowd that besieged the Gare de Lyon in Paris, when the circle of
fire was drawing round the city, and foreigners were hastening to
escape, told me that the press was so great that he could touch in every
direction those who had been crushed to death as they stood, and had not
had room to fall. Not wholly unlike this was the pressure brought to
bear on the Confederacy. It was only necessary to put out your hand and
you touched a corpse; and that not an alien corpse, but the corpse of a
brother or a friend. Every Southern man becomes grave when he thinks of
that terrible stretch of time, partly, it is true, because life was
nobler, but chiefly because of the memories of sorrow and suffering. A
professional Southern humorist once undertook to write in dialect a
Comic History of the War, but his heart failed him, as his public would
have failed him, and the serial lived only for a number or two.

[Note: Those who suffered in Sherman's March to the Sea--I was riveted
to my bed at the time--were not, are not so philosophic. See the
narrative in BRADLEY JOHNSON'S Life of Joseph E. Johnston. Nor was I so
philosophical when I followed the raiders of 1863, nor when I saw the
fires that lighted up the Valley of Virginia in 1864, and that was
before the systematic devastation recorded by MERRITT, who carried it
out. "When our army," says MERRITT (Battles and Leaders, 4, 512),
"commenced its return march, the cavalry was deployed across the Valley,
burning, destroying or taking nearly everything of value, or likely to
be of value to the enemy. It was a severe measure, and appears severer
now in the lapse of time, but it was necessary as a measure of war." The
plea of 1864 was the same as the plea of 1914. In a vivid sketch of
Sherman's March, Prof. HENRY E. SHEPHERD, whose North Carolina home,
Fayetteville, lay in the track of the invaders (Battles and Leaders, 4,
678) winds up by saying that the portrayal of it "baffles all the
resources of literary art and the affluence even of our English speech,"