I do not mean by this
merely that children and grandchildren have been taught to treat their
elders with respect. I do not mean merely that they love them. The thing
of which I speak is beyond family feeling, beyond the respect of youth
for age. It is a strong, superb sentiment, something as great as it is
subtle, which floods the South, causing it to love and reverence its old
ladies collectively, and with a kind of national spirit, like the love
and reverence of a proud people for its flag.
Among young men, I met many who told me, with suitable pride, of the
parts played by their fathers and uncles in the war. Of these only one
spoke with heat. He was a Georgian, and when I mentioned to him that, in
all my inquiries, I had heard of no cases of atrocious attacks upon
women by soldiers--such attacks as we heard of at the time of the German
invasion of Belgium and France--he replied with a great show of feeling
that I had been misinformed, and that many women had been outraged by
northern soldiers in the course of Sherman's march to the sea. At this
my heart sank, for I had treasured the belief that, despite the
roughness of war, unprotected women had generally been safe from the
soldiers of North and South alike. What was my relief, then, on later
receiving from this same young man a letter in which he declared that he
had been mistaken, and that after many inquiries in Georgia he had been
unable to learn of a single case of such crime.
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