In a moment thousands of others were to be seen, silently telling us “Good-bye and God bless you.” In a few moments we could see excitement in every face, and presently a little tender woman’s voice screamed out “Hurrah! hurrah!” and then a thousand sweet throats took up the shout. That “Hurrah” from Southern women and those handkerchiefs waved under the point of hostile bayonets told with pathos of a world of patriotism in the breasts of those noble women. We old Confederates were overcome. One grim old North Carolinian, standing by my side, with Federal guards all around us, and the tears streaming down his sun-hardened cheeks, cried out at the top of his voice: “Men, they may kill me, but I tell you I am willing to die a hundred times for such women as them.” We all felt so, and the living veterans feel that way yet.
“IT DON’T TROUBLE ME”
[Phoebe Y. Pember.]
There was but little sensibility exhibited by soldiers for the fate of their comrades in field or hospital. The results of war are here to-day and gone to-morrow. I stood still, spell-bound by that youthful death-bed, when my painful revery was broken upon by a drawling voice from a neighboring bed, which had been calling me such peculiar names and titles that I had been oblivious to whom they were addressed.
“Look here. I say, Aunty!—Mammy!—You!” Then in despair, “Missus Mauma! Kin you gim me sich a thing as a b’iled sweet pur-r-rta-a-a-tu-ur? I b’long to the Twenty-secun’ Nor’ Ka-a-a-li-i-na Regiment.” I told the nurse to remove his bed from proximity to his dead neighbor, that in the low state of his health from fever the sight might affect his nerves, but he treated the suggestion with contempt.
“Don’t make no sort of difference to me; they dies all around me in the field and it don’t trouble me.”
SAVAGE WAR IN THE VALLEY
[In the Rise and Fall of Confederate Government, Volume 2, pages 700-709.]