Mais c'est la guerre. War is a most uneconomical, foolish, poor arrangement, a bloody enrichment of that soil which bears the sweet flower of peace, and we saw the worst of it in many ways.
We went on, feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the soldier, binding up his wounds, harboring the stranger, visiting the sick, ministering to the prisoner, and burying the dead, until that blessed day at Appomattox Court House relieved the strain. I went to Washington in 1862-3, when it was a camp. Probably no capital in a state of siege was ever more gay and amusing. Foreigners, princes, and potentates, names of a thousand years and names of yesterday, were all jumbled in a state of frenzy and confusion. And the mud! Oh, the mud! I saw General McClellan with his two young aides, the French princes. Count de Paris and Duc de Chartres, ride into Washington so encrusted with mud that they looked like fossil monsters.
All about the city for thirty miles spread the tents, the camp-fires, the stockades of a citizen soldiery, apprentices to the great art of war. Every new condition of human life, every possible embarrassment of climate, food, and shelter, came to try men's souls. Suffering of the keenest dwelt in those tents, besides joviality and excitement; for the light, easily amused American temperament found much to like and to laugh at even in the surroundings of cold and mud, poor food, and ineradicable dirt, not to speak of the sober realities of the measles and scarlet-fever and smallpox and typhoid fever, all of which paid our army a visit from time to time.
I went to the great ball at the White House given by Mr. Lincoln to General McClellan. There were five thousand people at this ball, and ten thousand outside disap-
