going home! going home!

[excerpts, Gone With The Wind] -----------------


CHAPTER 29

The following April General Johnston, who had been given back the shattered remnants of his old command, surrendered them in North Carolina and the war was over.  But not until two weeks later did the news reach Tara.  There was too much to do at Tara for anyone to waste time traveling abroad and hearing gossip and, as the neighbors were just as busy as they, there was little visiting and news spread slowly....


CHAPTER 30

In that warm summer after peace came, Tara suddenly lost its isolation.  And for months thereafter a stream of scarecrows, bearded, ragged, footsore and always hungry, toiled up the red hill to Tara and came to rest on the shady front steps, wanting food and a night's lodging.  They were Confederate soldiers walking home.  


The railroad had carried the remains of Johnston's army from North Carolina to Atlanta and dumped them there, and from Atlanta they began their pilgrimages afoot.  

When the wave of Johnston's men had passed, the weary veterans from the Army of Virginia arrived and then men from the Western troops, beating their way south toward homes which might not exist and families which might be scattered or dead.  

Most of them were walking, a few fortunate ones rode bony horses and mules which the terms of the surrender had permitted them to keep, gaunt animals which even an untrained eye could tell would never reach far-away Florida and south Georgia.

     Going home!  Going home!  That was the only thought in the soldiers' minds.  Some were sad and silent, others gay and contemptuous of hardships, but the thought that it was all over and they were going home was the one thing that sustained them.  Few of them were bitter.  They left bitterness to their women and their old people.  They had fought a good fight, had been licked and were willing to settle down peaceably to plowing beneath the flag they had fought.


     Going home!  Going home!  They could talk of nothing else, neither battles nor wounds, nor imprisonment nor the future.  Later, they would refight battles and tell children and grandchildren of pranks and forays and charges, of hunger, forced marches and wounds, but not now.  

Some of them lacked an arm or a leg or an eye, many had scars which would ache in rainy weather if they lived for seventy years but these seemed small matters now.  Later it would be different....

     ...When the soldiers were too ill to go on, and there were many such, Scarlett put them to bed with none too good grace.  

Each sick man meant another mouth to feed.  

Someone had to nurse him and that meant one less worker at the business of fence building, hoeing, weeding and plowing.  


One boy, on whose face a blond fuzz had just begun to sprout, was dumped on the front porch by a mounted soldier bound for Fayetteville.  He had found him unconscious by the roadside and had brought him, across his saddle, to Tara, the nearest house.  
        The girls though he must be one of the little cadets who had been called out of military school when Sherman approached Milledgeville but they never knew, for he died without regaining consciousness and a search of his pockets yielded no information.

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