Excerpt from Iconoclastic Memories of the Civil War: Bits of AutobiographyWe were regarded by the others with profound respect as old soldiers. (our ages, if equal ized, would, I fancy, have given about twenty years to each man.) We gave ourselves. This aristocracy of service, no end of military airs; some of us even going-to the extreme of keeping our jackets buttoned and our hair combed. We had been in action, too; had shot off a Confederate leg at Philippi, the first battle of the war, and had lost as many as a dozen men at Laurel Hill and Carrick's Ford, whither the enemy had fled in trying, Heaven knows why, to get away from us. We now brought to the task of subduing the Rebellion a patriotism Which never for a moment doubted that a rebel was a fiend accursed of God and the angels one for whose extirpation by force and arms each youth of us considered himself specially raised up.It was a strange country. Nine in ten of us had never seen a mountain, nor a hill as high as a church spire, until we had crossed the Ohio River. In power upon the emotions nothing, I think, is comparable to a first sight of mountains. To a member of a plains-tribe, born and reared on the flats of Ohio or Indiana, a mountain region' was a perpetual miracle. Space seemed to have taken on a new dimension; areas to have not only length and breadth, but thickness.