wounded as favorable care as it is able to entend to its own. It exceeds at this moment in the possession of ambulance corps." Further on Dr. Bellows makes this significant observation:
"The war must have increased the respect felt by the North for the South, its miraculous resources, the bravery of its troops, their patience under hardship, and their unshrinking firmness in the desperate position they have assumed; the wonderful success with which they have extemporized manufactories and munitions of war, and kept themselves in relation with the world, in spite of our magnificent blockade. The elasticity with which they have risen from defeat and the courage they have shown in threatening again and again our capital, and soon our interior, cannot fail to stir an unwilling admiration and respect."
The home influences and academic training of the boys of the South, during these two wonderful decades of our history, 1840-1860, will furnish a key to the story of the Confederate soldier's wonderful achievements in war as well as his unexampled success when defeat challenged him to a greater degree of courage, patience and endurance.
To their everlasting honor stands the fact that in their march through the enemy's country they left behind them no ruined homes, no private houses burned, no families cruelly robbed. They were, with one solitary exception, and that perhaps a righteous reprisal, careful with fire, and they were never known to borrow jewels of gold and silver with no thought of returning the same. They divided their last morsel of food and the last drop of water with the hungry and thirsty prisoners that they captured by the thousand. With the rarest exception, they never cherished bitterness and ill feeling for the rank, and file of the men they met in deadly combat.
They were soldiers from necessity, not choice, and only fought, as their Revolutionary sires did, for home and liberty. They knew then, and know now, that they were absolutely right in their contentions. The last one will die with the proud satisfaction that impartial history will pronounce judgment in their favor, and rank them as the most heroic and least selfish of all
