Several months after this I saw Captain Jeter’s widow. She was surrounded by his little children—none of them old enough to realize their loss.
“Nell,” she said, “you remember the day in Petersburg when we stood together and watched the troops start off for Norfolk—and everybody was cheering?”
“Yes.”
“Well, war does not look to me now as it did then. God grant it may spare your husband to you, Nell!”
I shivered.
I called on another widowed friend. Her husband—a captain, too—had been sent home, his face mutilated past recognition by the shell that killed him. Her little ones were around her, and the captain’s sword was hanging on the wall. When I spoke to her of it as a proud possession, her eyes filled. His little boy said with flashing eyes:
“It’s my papa’s s’ode. I wants to be a man. An’ I’ll take it down and kill all the Yankees!”
“H-sh!” his mother put her hand over his mouth. “God grant there may be no war when you are a man!” she said fervently.
“Amen!” I responded.
“Oh, Nell,” she said, “when it’s all over, what good will it do? It will just show that one side could fight better than the other, or had more money and men than the other. It won’t show that anybody’s right. You can’t know how it is until it hits you, Nell. I’m proud of him, and proud of his sword; I wouldn’t have had him out of it all. I wouldn’t have had him a coward. But oh, Nell, I feel that war is wrong! I’m sorry for every Northern woman who has a circle like this around her, and a sword like that hanging on her wall.”