The soldiers will always crowd around the ones who get such letters, make remarks and ludicrous suggestions which cause bursts of hearty laughter and strains of highest merriment, thus passing the tedious hours of camp life in a light and merry way.
No one cares for a letter which is wholly devoted to the praise and admiration of one's patriotism and to the sacredness of the Union cause.
Such letters bore to the very quick. It seems to them that the writer is taking that opportunity to speak a word of eulogy for himself. As for the true soldier, he never asks for words of flattery; he is not to be gulled with bland words and braggadocio. The letter for the soldier is the long, pithy one, full of little things, even down to gossip. Gossip is better than eulogy, especially when used in an egotistical manner.
BATTLE.
Much has been said and written about battle, the greater portion of which is an exaggeration of facts. Fireside writers and reporters have composed long manuscripts, beginning and ending in frantic agonies and seas of blood, exhausting the vocabulary of pathetic epithets. That battle is dreadful cannot be denied, but those who have passed through the fiery ordeal do not experience half the convulsions and agony of soul that is written. If a comrade falls, the column still moves on. No one, by the late rules of war, dare stop to bear off the wounded or sympathize with those in the throes of death. There are men detailed for that purpose, who follow up in the rear and give those in need due attention.
A soldier in a pitched battle does not pretend to know who is hurt until the battle is ended; he must needs push ahead and do his part until he is no longer able. Many of your comrades fall around you; they show unmistakable symptoms of severe wounds, but your attention is too much engrossed to ever think to inquire the nature of their wounds. You are hardly conscious of any suffering around you. Excitement has borne you off so that you never think to look and see who is on your right or left, or whose spirit is winging its flight from the body over which you are walking. The soldier does not seem to feel pangs of sorrow when arms clash the loudest; he does not see danger and suffering and ghastly sights until all is over and quiet restored. Those who are unacquainted with the mental condition of the soldier in time of battle, wonder and ask why it is that those whom he knows so intimately are wounded and many times killed by his side without knowing the nature of their wounds or the circumstances of their death. The reason for this is manifest from what has already been said.
There is oftentimes more horror in the idea and dread of battle than in the thing itself. The soldier becomes so accustomed to human butchery that it loses many, very many, of its horrors.
After battle, when the clash of arms has ceased, is when the soldier's sympathy is tried. The solicitations of the maimed and dying raise a feeling of commiseration in the most obdurate heart; and still this feeling is of but short duration and of a mild character.
FARMING IN THE SOUTH.
Farming in the Southern States is carried on in a very simple and seeming ignorant style. One could not refrain from laughing at their oddity in agricultural pursuits. They are a great many years behind the North in this respect, as well as in many others.