Page:Southern Life in Southern Literature.djvu/400

382 of my Princeton College roommates; on the twenty-first, the day of the great battle, the other fell—both bearers of historic names, both upholding the cause of their state with as unclouded a conscience as any saint in the martyrology ever wore; and from that day to the end, great battle and outpost skirmish brought me, week by week, a personal loss in men of the same type.… The war began, the war went on. Passion was roused to fever heat. Both sides "saw red," that physiological condition which to a Frenchman excuses everything. The proverbial good humor of the American people did not, it is true, desert the country, and the Southern 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 somber 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.