Are men wounded and broken by the thousands, do they lie in burning thirst, pleading for water, pleading for the bandaging of bleeding arteries, pleading for merciful death? The conquerors think of none of these things. Is night coming, are long marches coming? Still the conquerors shout like mad. Is war ended by this mammoth victory? For months and months it will drag on. Is this conquered foe a stranger, will he now withdraw to a distant country? He is our brother, his ills are ours, these wounds which we have given, we shall feel ourselves for fifty years. Is this brave young officer to enjoy the reward of his great courage, to live in fame, to be honored by his countrymen? At Cold Harbor he is to perish with a bullet in his forehead. Is not all this business of war mad?
It is a feeble, peace-loving, fireside-living generation which asks such questions as these.
Mercifully, Mary Bowman, a widow, whose husband had been missing since the battle of Gettysburg, had been warned, together with the other citizens of Gettysburg, that on Thursday the nineteenth of November, 1863, she would be awakened from sleep by a bugler's reveillé, and that during that great day she would hear again dread sound of cannon.
Nevertheless, hearing again the reveillé, she sat up in bed with a scream and put her hands over her ears. Then, gasping, groping about in her confusion and terror, she rose and began to dress. She put on a dress which had been once a bright plaid, but which now, having lost both its color and the stiff, out-standing quality of the skirts of '63, hung about her in straight and dingy folds. It was clean, but it had upon it certain ineradicable brown stains on which soap and water seemed to have had no effect. She was thin and pale, and her eyes had a set look, as though they saw other sights than those directly about her.
In the bed from which she had risen lay her little daughter; in a trundle-bed near by, her two sons, one about ten years old, the other about four. They slept heavily, lying deep in their beds, as though they would never move. Their mother looked at them with her strange, absent gaze; then she barred a little more closely the broken shutters, and went down the stairs. The shutters were broken in a curious fashion. Here and there they were pierced by round holes, and one hung from a single hinge. The window-frames were without glass, the floor was without carpet, the beds without pillows.