"Father! come home!" moaned
the children, with gaunt faces, crying for bread. "Husband, come home!"
murmured the pale wife, with her half-dead infant in her arms. And the
mothers--the mothers--ah! the mothers! They did not say, "Come home!"
to their brave boys in the army; they were too proud for that--too
faithful to the end. They did not summon them to come home; they only
knelt down and prayed: "God, end this cruel war! Only give me back my
boy! Do not bereave me of my child! The cause is lost--his blood not
needed! God, pity me and give me back my boy!"
So that strange autumn of that strange year, 1864, wore on. The country
was oppressed as by some hideous nightmare; and Government was silent.
The army alone, kept heart of hope--Lee's old soldiers defied the enemy
to the last.
III.
LEE'S MISERABLES.
They called themselves "Lee's Miserables."
That was a grim piece of humor, was it not, reader? And the name had
had a somewhat curious origin. Victor Hugo's work, _Les Miserables_,
had been translated and published by a house in Richmond; the soldiers,
in the great dearth of reading matter, had seized upon it; and thus, by
a strange chance the tragic story of the great French writer, had
become known to the soldiers in the trenches. Everywhere, you might see
the gaunt figures in their tattered jackets bending over the dingy
pamphlets--"Fantine," "Cosette," or "Marius," or "St.
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