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.
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