Chapter 35 - Page 2

but mottled with dim
figures of frantic women and children scurrying from home and bed
toward the cave dungeons--encouraged by the humorous grim soldiery,
who shout 'Rats, to your holes!' and laugh.

The cannon-thunder rages, shells scream and crash overhead, the iron
rain pours down, one hour, two hours, three, possibly six, then stops;
silence follows, but the streets are still empty; the silence continues;
by-and-bye a head projects from a cave here and there and yonder,
and reconnoitres, cautiously; the silence still continuing,
bodies follow heads, and jaded, half smothered creatures group
themselves about, stretch their cramped limbs, draw in deep draughts
of the grateful fresh air, gossip with the neighbors from the next cave;
maybe straggle off home presently, or take a lounge through the town,
if the stillness continues; and will scurry to the holes again,
by-and-bye, when the war-tempest breaks forth once more.

There being but three thousand of these cave-dwellers--
merely the population of a village--would they not come
to know each other, after a week or two, and familiarly;
insomuch that the fortunate or unfortunate experiences of one
would be of interest to all?

Those are the materials furnished by history. From them might not almost
anybody reproduce for himself the life of that time in Vicksburg?
Could you, who did not experience it, come nearer to reproducing it
to the imagination of another non-participant than could a Vicksburger
who did experience it? It seems impossible; and yet there are reasons
why it might not really be. When one makes his first voyage in a ship,
it is an experience which multitudinously bristles with striking novelties;
novelties which are in such sharp contrast with all this person's former
experiences that they take a seemingly deathless grip upon his imagination
and memory. By tongue or pen he can make a landsman live that strange
and stirring voyage over with him; make him see it all and feel it all.
But if he wait? If he make ten voyages in succession--what then?
Why, the thing has lost color, snap, surprise; and has become commonplace.
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