For it was not the enemy, but the innocent earth we had mutilated, stamping an armed heel into its smiling and upturned face.

And what we had done sickened me.
Yet, this was scarcely the beginning of that terrible punishment which was to pass through the Long House in flame and smoke, from the Eastern Door to the Door of the West, scouring it fiercely from one end to the other, and leaving no living thing within--only a few dead men prone among its blood-soaked ashes.
*Etho ni-ya-wenonh! [*Thus it befell!] By six that evening the army was back in its camp at Tioga Point.

All the fever and excitement of the swift foray had passed, and the inevitable reaction had set in.

The men were haggard, weary, sombre, and harassed.

There was no elation after success either among officers or privates; only a sullen grimness, the sullenness of repletion after an orgy--the grimness of disgust for an unwelcome duty only yet begun.
Because this sturdy soldiery was largely composed of tillers of the soil, of pioneer farmers who understood good land, good husbandry, good crops, and the stern privations necessary to wrest a single rod of land from the iron jaws of the wilderness.
To stamp upon, burn, girdle, destroy, annihilate, give back to the forest what human courage and self-denial had wrested from it, was to them in their souls abhorrent.
Save for the excitement of the chase, the peril ever present, the certainty that failure meant death in its most dreadful forms, it might have been impossible for these men to destroy the fruits of the earth, even though produced by their mortal enemies, and designed, ultimately, to nourish them.
Even my Indians sat silent and morose, stretching, braiding, and hooping their Seneca scalps.