The tobacco-chewing, smiling, guffawing crowds of the street, and Peachtree Street jammed with people and cars! What a hubbub the four jammed-up processions of automobiles are making—like choruses of hoarse katydids crying only for repetition’s sake and the lust of noise! But there is more noise and more joy still a-coming! Skirling and shrieking, in strange contrast to the Negroes and to the clothed Whites and to the color of night itself, comes the parade of college youths all in their pajamas and nightshirts. Long queues of some hundreds of lads in white shouting at the top of their voices—they climb in and out of the electric cars, rush into shops and theatres in a wild game of “Follow my leader.” _Rah, rah, rah_, they cry, _rah, rah, rah_, and rush into hotels, circle the foyer, and plunge among the amazed diners in the dining rooms, thread their way around tables and up the hotel balustrade, invade bedrooms, go out at windows and down fire escapes, and then once more file along the packed streets amidst autos and cars, raving all the while with pleasure and excitement. It is good humor and boisterousness and the jollity of the Fair time. Up above all the flags and the bunting wave listlessly in the night air. It seems impossible but that the firing of Atlanta is forgotten, and the pitiful exodus of its humiliated people—forgotten also the exultancy of the soldiers of the North singing while the city burned. Sherman with 60,000 men and 2500 wagons but only 60 guns marched out, and none knew what his destination was. A retreat from Atlanta comparable only to Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow was about to commence. The hostile farming population of Georgia and the Carolinas should harass the Yankee army as the Russian peasants had done the French in 1812. That was the Southern belief and the substance of Southern propaganda at the time. Not so the Northern Army, which had the consciousness of victory and a radiant belief in its cause and in its general. “A feeling of exhilaration seemed to pervade all minds, a feeling of something to come, vague and undefined, still full of venture and intense interest. Even the common soldiers caught the inspiration, and many a group called out: ‘Uncle Billy, I guess Grant is waiting for us at Richmond.’ The general sentiment was that we were marching for Richmond and that there we should end the war, but how and when they seemed to care not, nor did they measure the distance, or count the cost in life, or bother their brains about the great rivers to be crossed and the food required for man and beast that had to be gathered by the way.”[3]