North America-2 [78]
could there exist encouragement for farm-work of any kind. Fences had been taken down and burned; the ground had been overrun in every direction. The stock had of course disappeared; it had not been stolen, but had been sold in a hurry for what under such circumstances it might fetch. What farmer could work or have any hope for his land in the middle of such a crowd of soldiers? But yet there were the families. The women were in their houses, and the children playing at their doors; and the men, with whom I sometimes spoke, would stand around with their hands in their pockets. They knew that they were ruined; they expected no redress. In nine cases out of ten they were inimical in spirit to the soldiers around them. And yet it seemed that their equanimity was never disturbed. In a former chapter I have spoken of a certain general--not a fighting general of the army, but a local farming general--who spoke loudly, and with many curses, of the injury inflicted on him by the secessionists. With that exception I heard no loud complaint of personal suffering. These Virginian farmers must have been deprived of everything--of the very means of earning bread. They still hold by their houses, though they were in the very thick of the war, because there they had shelter for their families, and elsewhere they might seek it in vain. A man cannot move his wife and children if he have no place to which to move them, even though his house be in the midst of disease, of pestilence, or of battle. So it was with them then, but it seemed as though they were already used to it. But there was a class of inhabitants in that same country to whom fate had been even more unkind than to those whom I saw. The lines of the Northern army extended perhaps seven or eight miles from the Potomac; and the lines of the Confederate army were distant some four miles from those of their enemies. There was, therefore, an intervening space or strip of ground, about four miles broad, which might be said to be no man's land. It was no man's land as to military possession, but it was still occupied by many of its old inhabitants. These people were not allowed to pass the lines either of one army or of the other; or if they did so pass, they were not allowed to return to their homes. To these homes they were forced to cling, and there they remained. They had no market; no shops at which to make purchases, even if they had money to buy; no customers with whom to deal, even if they had produce to sell. They had their cows, if they could keep them from the Confederate soldiers, their pigs and their poultry; and on them they were living--a most forlorn life. Any advance made by either party must be over their homesteads. In the event of battle, they would be in the midst of it; and in the mean time they could see no one, hear of nothing, go nowhither beyond the limits of that miserable strip of ground! The earth was hard with frost when I paid my visit to the camp, and the general appearance of things around my friend's quarters was on that account cheerful enough. It was the mud which made things sad and wretched. When the frost came it seemed as though the army had overcome one of its worst enemies. Unfortunately cold weather did not last long. I have been told in Washington that they rarely have had so open a season. Soon after my departure that terrible enemy the mud came back upon them; but during my stay the ground was hard and the weather very sharp. I slept in a tent, and managed to keep my body warm by an enormous overstructure of blankets and coats; but I could not keep my head warm. Throughout the night I had to go down like a fish beneath the water for protection, and come up for air at intervals, half smothered. I had a stove in my tent; but the heat of that, when lighted, was more terrible than the severity of the frost. The tents of the brigade with which I was staying had been pitched not without an eye to appearances. They were placed in streets as it were, each street having its name, and between them screens had been erected