Even from old Confederate soldiers I heard no expressions of violent feeling.  They spoke gently, handsomely and often humorously of the war, but never harshly.  Real hate, I think, remains chiefly in one quarter:  in the hearts of some old ladies, the wives and widows of Confederate soldiers—­for there are but few mothers of the soldiers left.  The wonder is that more of the old ladies of the South have not held to their resentment, for, as I have heard many a soldier say, women are the greatest sufferers from war.  One veteran said to me:  “My arm was shattered and had to be amputated at the shoulder.  There was no anesthetic.  Of course I suffered, but I never suffered as my mother did when she learned what I had endured.”

Be they haters of the North or not, the old ladies of the South are among its chief glories, and it should be added that another of those glories is the appreciation that the South has for the white-haired heroines who are its mothers, grandmothers, and great grandmothers, and the unfailing natural homage that it pays them.  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.  If it is indeed true that such things did not occur in the Civil War—­and I believe confidently that it is true—­then we have occasion, in the light of the European War, to revise the popular belief that of all wars civil war is the most horrible.