Cindy declared she was in the same fix, and couldn’t finish her new homespun dress for that reason.
The soldier just then had an idea. He retired to a little distance, pulled out his case, sticking two needles on the front of his jacket, then went back and offered one of them, with his best bow, to the girl on the horse. Right away the lady of the house offered to trade for the one remaining. The result was a plentiful dinner for himself; and in consideration of a thread or two of silk, a full haversack and canteen. After this our mess was well supplied, and our forager began to look sleek and fat. The secret of his success did not leak out till long afterward, when he astonished the boys by declaring he “had been ‘living like a fighting-cock’ on a paper of needles and two skeins of silk.”
“And,” added father, “if he had paid for all the meals he got in Confederate money, the amount would have been far more than ten dollars.”
I know other boys and girls will think this a queer story, but I hope they will like it as well as mother and Loo and I did.
DESPAIR AT HOME—HEROISM AT THE FRONT
[Major Robert Stiles, in Four Years Under Marse Robert, pages 349-350.]
There is one feature of our Confederate struggle, to which I have already made two or three indirect allusions, as to which there has been such a strange popular misapprehension that I feel as if there rested upon the men who thoroughly understand the situation a solemn obligation to bring out strongly and clearly the sound and true view of the matter. I refer to an impression, quite common, that the desertions from the Confederate armies, especially in the latter part of the war, indicated a general lack of devotion to the cause on the part of the men in the ranks.
On the contrary, it is my deliberate conviction that Southern soldiers who remained faithful under the unspeakable pressure of letters and messages revealing suffering, starvation, and despair at home displayed more than human heroism. The men who felt this strain most were the husbands of young wives and fathers of young children, whom they had supported by their labor, manual or mental. As the lines of communication in the Confederacy were more and more broken and destroyed, and the ability, both of county and public authorities and of neighbors, to aid them became less and less, the situation of such families became more and more desperate, and their appeals more and more piteous to their only earthly helpers who were far away, filling their places in “the thin gray line.” Meanwhile the enemy sent into our camps, often by our own pickets, circulars offering our men indefinite parole, with free transportation to their homes.
I am not condemning the Federal Government or military authorities for making these offers or putting out these circulars; but if there was ever such a thing as a conflict of duties, that conflict was presented to the private soldiers of the Confederate army who belonged to the class just mentioned, and who received, perhaps simultaneously, one of these home letters and one of these Federal circulars; and if ever the strain of such a conflict 152 was great enough to unsettle a man’s reason and to break a man’s heart strings these men were subjected to that strain.