On the rooftop in Charleston, the women stood wild-eyed as the shells burst over the water. It was half past four in the morning, and Mary Chesnut had sprung out of bed at the first heavy booming of a cannon. She had not pretended to go to sleep that night—how could she? Her husband, James Chesnut, Jr.

, had gone to demand the surrender of Fort Sumter, and from the housetop she watched the volleys arc through the dark sky, unable to tell what each one accomplished of death and destruction. The war had come at last, and for Mary Chesnut, the waiting was over. She had kept a journal only fitfully, and she would always regret that she had not recorded the last two delightful and eventful years—the delights having exhausted themselves in the latter part of 1860, when the events crowded in so fast they took away one’s breath to think about them. But now it was all one nightmare, from the time she heard that Lincoln was elected and their fate sealed.

She stood on the balcony to see their flag go up. They were separated, North from South—divorced, she wrote, because they had hated each other so. She did not allow herself vain regrets or sad foreboding. The Southern Confederacy must be supported now by calm determination and cool brains.

They had risked all, and they must play their best, for the stake was life or death. Yet she felt a nervous dread and horror of this break with so great a power as the United States. She was ready and willing. She wanted them to fight and stop talking.

The night before the bombardment, in Mrs. Davis’s drawing room, the President himself—Jefferson Davis—had taken a seat beside her and talked for nearly an hour. Every Southerner, they told each other, was equal to three Yankees at least. They would have to be equivalent to a dozen now.

Davis believed they would do all that could be done by pluck and muscle, endurance, and dogged courage. And yet there was a sad refrain running through it all. He thought it would be a long war. That floored her.

Then he said that before the end came, they would have many a bitter experience. Only fools, he told her, doubted the courage of the Yankees, or their willingness to fight when they saw fit. Now that they had stung their pride, they had roused them till they would fight like devils. She would remember those words in the years that followed, as the war ground on through its long, bitter seasons.

By the summer of 1862, the fighting had reached a scale that stunned even those who lived through it. In a letter dated June 29, 1862, James Chesnut wrote to his wife of the most stirring events of modern times. Three days earlier—on Friday—there had been the largest and fiercest fight of the whole war. Some sixty or seventy thousand men were engaged.

Their line was three times repulsed, and then General Lee, assembling all his generals to the front, told them that if night came without victory, all was lost, and the work must be done by the bayonet. The men then made a rapid and irresistible charge and carried everything. James Chesnut thought the end must now be decisive in their favor. But they had lost many men and many officers.

He heard that Alex Haskell and young McMahon were among them, as well as a son of Dr. Trezevant. Very sad, indeed. In Columbia, South Carolina, the talk around the table turned to the meaning of the war itself.

This war was undertaken by them, they said, to shake off the yoke of foreign invaders, and so they considered their cause righteous. The Yankees, since the war had begun, had discovered that it was to free the slaves that they were fighting. So their cause was also noble. The Yankees also expected to make the war pay—Yankees did not undertake anything that did not pay.

They thought the South belonged to them. The South had been a good milk cow, milked by the tariff or skimmed. The South bore the ban of slavery; the Yankees got the money. Cotton paid everybody who handled it, sold it, manufactured it—but rarely paid the man who grew it.

Secondhand, the Yankees received the wages of slavery. They grew rich. The South grew poor. The summer of 1862 brought news of triumph that seemed to confirm their hopes.

Stonewall Jackson had defeated Frémont and taken all his cannon and plenty of prisoners. Plenty, no doubt—enough and to spare. But even in victory, the cost pressed in. They could not feed their own soldiers, and how were they to feed prisoners?

Oranges were five dollars apiece. In the street, a barrel of flour sold for one hundred and fifteen dollars. They spent seventy-five dollars that day for a little tea and sugar, and had five hundred left. The Confederacy was winning battles and starving by inches.

By the spring of 1863, the war had come to the very churches of Richmond. During Stoneman’s raid, on a Sunday, Mary Chesnut sat in Mrs. Randolph’s pew while the Battle of Chancellorsville raged nearby. The rattling of the ammunition wagons, the tramp of soldiers, the everlasting slamming of those iron gates of the Capitol Square just opposite the church—it was hard to attend to the service.

Oh, such a day. Afterward, she went with Mrs. Randolph to all the hospitals. She could never again shut out of view the sights she saw there of human misery.

Long rows of dead and dying; awful sights. She did not remember any more, for she fainted. After that, she deemed it wise to do her hospital work from the outside. She felt humiliated at having to make this confession of weakness.

The war reached even the places they thought safe. On the journey to their plantation, they did not see one living thing—no man, woman, or animal. The blooming of the gardens had a funereal effect. Mrs.

Bartow drove with her to their house. On one side, every window had been broken, every piece of furniture destroyed, every door smashed in. Their books, their letters, their papers were strewed along the Charleston road. Sherman only took their horses.

Potter’s raid ruined them finally, burning their mills and gins and a hundred bales of cotton. Indeed, nothing was left now but the bare land, and the debts contracted for the support of hundreds of Negroes during the war. The cause that had been staked on a single throw was lost. In May 1865, Mary Chesnut watched the Negroes flock to the Yankee squad that had recently come.

The colored women carried bouquets to the Yankees, making the day a jubilee. By June, she heard that in New York people had been simply intoxicated with the fumes of their own glory. Military prowess was a new wrinkle of delight to them. They were mad with pride that, ten to one, they could, after five years’ hard fighting, prevail over the South.

By late July, she did not write often now—not for want of something to say, but from a loathing of all she saw and heard. Why dwell upon these things? On August 2, 1865, she put down the words that closed the account: “I am old, old, old. The weight of the years that hangs upon my eyelids is of lead.

”

But even then, she added, there is youth in even our world still. After four years of fire and ruin, after the flag that went up on the balcony had come down for good, after the dead lay in long rows and the plantations were stripped to bare land, Mary Chesnut still found that small measure of something beyond the wreckage. The war was over. The South was lost.

But the world, even hers, still had youth in it somewhere.