WAR AND DISCOURAGEMENT 109 
white lace waist, and a blue ribbon only in my hair.” They 
drove to the ball in an ambulance; the ball-room was dec- 
orated with ragged flags full of bullet holes. General Meade 
condescended to speak to her twice and next day invited her 
party to dinner. At the military review, the realistic cavalry 
charge by yelling soldiers frightened the ladies. ‘They were 
touched by the appearance of veteran regiments that had but 
two or three hundred men left. ““They march so firmly,” she 
wrote, “carrying their torn banners, with the names of the 
battles in which they have fought written upon them.” Such 
a letter, as Gladstone noted, brings clearly to the reader some- 
thing of the pathos of the war. Alice was the only one of 
Field’s four daughters who did not marry; unfortunately she 
became an invalid in later life and eventually suffered from 
hallucinations. The full letter follows: 
Washington, D. C., February 25, 1864. 
My dear Mother,—Since I last wrote I have been to the army 
front, passing on the way many of the battle-fields whose names 
bring up sad memories, and finally living for two nights and much 
of three days within view of the enemy’s signals, and in the midst 
of our own encampments. . . . Early on Monday morning we 
found ourselves in the government train on the way to Brandeth 
Station. This is a five hours’ journey from Washington, but the 
time could not have dragged with any one interested in the his- 
tory of our country. We saw the battle-ground of Manassas; we 
crossed the Bull Run stream and the fields made memorable by 
Pope’s disastrous campaign. Indeed, along the long line of the 
railway runs a battle-field—the ‘“‘race-course,” as an officer told 
me it was called, so often have our troops and the enemy’s pur- 
sued each other there. Everywhere one sees the evidences of war; 
the whole country is desolated, and the earth ploughed by the 
tread of armies; broken earthworks border the brows of the hills, 
and wherever a camp is seen around it is a stockade or abatis to 
protect it from Mosby’s guerillas, who infest this region. 
As we were whirled past these scenes, I listened to the talk of 
the officers about me, and expressions such as these made the 
story doubly real: “It was there the cavalry was attacked”; “The 
