CAMDEN, S. C. — Home again at Mulberry, the fever in full
possession of me. My sister, Kate, is my ideal woman, the most agreeable person
I know in the world, with her soft, low, and sweet voice, her graceful,
gracious ways, and her glorious gray eyes, that I looked into so often as we
confided our very souls to each other.
God bless old Betsey's yellow face! She is a nurse in a
thousand, and would do anything for “Mars Jeems' wife.” My small ailments in
all this comfort set me mourning over the dead and dying soldiers I saw in
Virginia. How feeble my compassion proves, after all.
I handed the old Colonel a letter from his son in the army.
He said, as he folded up the missive from the seat of war, “With this war we
may die out. Your husband is the last — of my family.” He means that my husband
is his only living son; his grandsons are in the army, and they, too, may be
killed — even Johnny, the gallant and gay, may not be bullet-proof. No child
have I.
Now this old man of ninety years was born when it was not
the fashion for a gentleman to be a saint, and being lord of all he surveyed
for so many years, irresponsible, in the center of his huge domain, it is
wonderful he was not a greater tyrant — the softening influence of that angel
wife, no doubt. Saint or sinner, he understands the world about him — au
fond.
Have had a violent attack of something wrong about my heart.
It stopped beating, then it took to trembling, creaking and thumping like a
Mississippi high-pressure steamboat, and the noise in my ears was more like an
ammunition wagon rattling over the stones in Richmond. That was yesterday, and
yet I am alive. That kind of thing makes one feel very mortal.
Russell writes how disappointed Prince Jerome Napoleon was
with the appearance of our troops, and “he did not like Beauregard at all.”
Well! I give Bogar up to him. But how a man can find fault with our soldiers,
as I have seen them individually and collectively in Charleston, Richmond, and
everywhere — that beats me.
The British are the most conceited nation in the world, the
most self-sufficient, self-satisfied, and arrogant. But each individual man
does not blow his own penny whistle: they brag wholesale. Wellington — he
certainly left it for others to sound his praises — though Mr. Binney thought
the statue of Napoleon at the entrance of Apsley House was a little like “‘Who
killed Cock Robin?’ ‘I, said the sparrow, with my bow and arrow.’” But then it
is so pleasant to hear them when it is a lump sum of praise, with no private
crowing — praise of Trafalgar, Waterloo, the Scots Greys.
Fighting this and fighting that, with their crack corps
stirs the blood and every heart responds — three times three! Hurrah!
But our people feel that they must send forth their own
reported prowess: with an, “I did this and I did that.” I know they did it; but
I hang my head.
In those Tarleton Memoirs, in Lee's Memoirs, in Moultrie's,
and in Lord Rawdon's letters, self is never brought to the front. I have been
reading them over and admire their modesty and good taste as much as their
courage and cleverness. That kind of British eloquence takes me. It is not, “Soldats!
marchons, gloire!” Not a bit of it; but, “Now, my lads, stand firm!” and, “Now
up, and let them have it!”
Our name has not gone out of print. To-day, the Examiner, as
usual, pitches into the President. It thinks Toombs, Cobb, Slidell, Lamar, or
Chesnut would have been far better in the office. There is considerable choice
in that lot. Five men more utterly dissimilar were never named in the same
paragraph.
SOURCE: Mary Boykin Chesnut, Edited by Isabella D. Martin
and Myrta Lockett Avary, A Diary From Dixie, p. 127-9
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