When the world ended

Emma was seventeen years of age when these passionate pages were written, and the war had brought her, she said, "little of the exuberant joy that people talk about as the natural heritage of youth." Four years of bitter blood-letting she reduced to a single stark sentence: "No pleasure, no enjoyment -- nothing but rigid economy and hard work -- nothing but the stern realities of life." With a power of expression far beyond the normal youth, she caught the agonizing immediacy of those months -- the fear, the courage, the sense of betrayal, the nothingness of a world torn asunder. Sherman marching into South Carolina -- with those five cruel words began the realization that the cause was lost, the dream ending, a way of life dying. - Introduction.