The man would have nothing to tell that would quicken a landsman’s pulse.
Years ago, I talked with a couple of the Vicksburg non-combatants–
a man and his wife. Left to tell their story in their own way,
those people told it without fire, almost without interest.
A week of their wonderful life there would have made their tongues eloquent
for ever perhaps; but they had six weeks of it, and that wore the novelty
all out; they got used to being bomb-shelled out of home and into the ground;
the matter became commonplace. After that, the possibility of their
ever being startlingly interesting in their talks about it was gone.
What the man said was to this effect:–
‘It got to be Sunday all the time. Seven Sundays in the week–to us, anyway.
We hadn’t anything to do, and time hung heavy. Seven Sundays, and all
of them broken up at one time or another, in the day or in the night,
by a few hours of the awful storm of fire and thunder and iron. At first
we used to shin for the holes a good deal faster than we did afterwards.
The first time, I forgot the children, and Maria fetched them both along.
When she was all safe in the cave she fainted. Two or three weeks afterwards,
when she was running for the holes, one morning, through a shell-shower, a big
shell burst near her, and covered her all over with dirt, and a piece of
the iron carried away her game-bag of false hair from the back of her head.
Well, she stopped to get that game-bag before she shoved along again!
Was getting used to things already, you see. We all got so that we could
tell a good deal about shells; and after that we didn’t always go under
shelter if it was a light shower. Us men would loaf around and talk;
and a man would say, ‘There she goes!’ and name the kind of shell it was from
the sound of it, and go on talking–if there wasn’t any danger from it.
If a shell was bursting close over us, we stopped talking and stood still;–
uncomfortable, yes, but it wasn’t safe to move. When it let go, we went
on talking again, if nobody hurt–maybe saying, ‘That was a ripper!’
or some such commonplace comment before we resumed; or, maybe, we would
see a shell poising itself away high in the air overhead. In that case,
every fellow just whipped out a sudden, ‘See you again, gents!’ and shoved.
Often and often I saw gangs of ladies promenading the streets, looking as
cheerful as you please, and keeping an eye canted up watching the shells;
and I’ve seen them stop still when they were uncertain about what a
shell was going to do, and wait and make certain; and after that they
sa’ntered along again, or lit out for shelter, according to the verdict.
Streets in some towns have a litter of pieces of paper, and odds and ends
of one sort or another lying around. Ours hadn’t; they had IRON litter.
Sometimes a man would gather up all the iron fragments and unbursted
shells in his neighborhood, and pile them into a kind of monument
in his front yard–a ton of it, sometimes. No glass left;
glass couldn’t stand such a bombardment; it was all shivered out.
Windows of the houses vacant–looked like eye-holes in a skull.
WHOLE panes were as scarce as news.
‘We had church Sundays. Not many there, along at first; but by-and-bye
pretty good turnouts. I’ve seen service stop a minute, and everybody
sit quiet–no voice heard, pretty funeral-like then–and all the more
so on account of the awful boom and crash going on outside and overhead;
and pretty soon, when a body could be heard, service would go on again.
Organs and church-music mixed up with a bombardment is a powerful
queer combination–along at first. Coming out of church, one morning,
we had an accident–the only one that happened around me on a Sunday.
I was just having a hearty handshake with a friend I hadn’t seen for
a while, and saying, ‘Drop into our cave to-night, after bombardment;