He should come home on a prancing horse, dressed in fine clothes and shining boots, a plume in his hat.

Let other soldiers limp by in rags with their feet tied up in sacks and strips of carpet, but not Ashley.

Then at the thought of Ashley barefooted, Scarlett could have cried.

It's a long walk and maybe��maybe he hasn't got any boots.

But don't cry, Melly! Ashley'll come home.

I never saw a nice Yankee, male or female.

She asked me how many bloodhounds we kept to chase our darkies with! I agree with Melly.

Nice, my foot! replied Scarlert.

Oh, yes, there are! God couldn't make a whole nation without having some nice women in it! Scarlett, you remember we did meet a nice Yankee woman at Saratoga that time��Scarlett, ...

Melly, there ARE some nice Yankee women.

Now, Melanie, some Yankee woman would have surely written us about it!.

But suppose��suppose he had died on the way home.

Why hadn't he written? Well, darling, you know what the mails are now��so uncertain and slipshod even where mail routes are re-established.

Why, goodness, it took days riding on a train to make the trip and if Ashley was walking, like these men.

Of course, he was coming home but his prison was so far away.

Some Yankee chaplain would have written if this were true.

Of course, Ashley hadn't died in prison.

The family tried to bolster Melanie's courage after each of these disappointments.

It was enough that they themselves were alive, and they did not care to think of the thousands in unmarked graves who would never come home.

Suellen, bridling, always asked news of Mr. But none of the soldiers had ever heard of them nor were they inclined to talk about the missing.

Of each soldier, they asked eagerly of Ashley.

And, in the months after the surrender, the deep soft nap began to show signs of wear and finally the heavy warp and woof showed through in spots where heels had worn it and spurs ...

They had to sleep somewhere.

Mammy cried out equally loudly at the sacrilege of soldiers being permitted to sleep on Miss Ellen's rug but Scarlett was firm.

Rather than argue the matter, Scarlett turned the parlor with its deep velvet rug into a dormitory.

Always she feared lest some louse had escaped her.

When the soldiers began arriving almost daily, Mammy protested against their being allowed to use the bedrooms.

Mammy replied that the girls would be a sight more humiliated if they found lice upon themselves.

It was useless for the girls to argue hotly that such conduct humiliated the soldiers.

She marched them behind a clump of thick bushes, relieved them of their uniforms, gave them a basin of water and strong lye soap to wash with and provided them with quilts and blan ...

No lice- ridden soldier should come into Tara.

One and all, Mammy dosed them, never waiting to ask foolish questions about the state of their organs and, one and all, they drank her doses meekly and with wry faces, remembering, ...

Four years of half-starvation, four years of rations which were coarse or green or half-putrefied, had done its work with them and every soldier who stopped at Tara was either just ...

As for dysentery��the bloody flux as the ladies delicately called it��it seemed to have spared no one from private to general.

The Confederate soldier was so accustomed to his verminous state he did not give it a thought and scratched unconcernedly even in the presence of ladies.

Old and young, talkative and taciturn, rich planter and sallow Cracker, they all had two things in common, lice and dysentery.

Later it would be different.

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, they would refight battles and tell children and grandchildren of pranks and forays and charges, of hunger, forced marches and wounds, but not now.

Going home! Going home! They could talk of nothing else, neither battles nor wounds, nor imprisonment nor the future.

They had fought a good fight, had been licked and were willing to settle down peaceably to plowing beneath the flag they had fought.

They left bitterness to their women and their old people.

Few of them were bitter.

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.

Going home! Going home! That was the only thought in the soldiers' minds.

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 co ...

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 mi ...

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.

They were Confederate soldiers walking home.

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 foo ...