Their feelings were perhaps the same.

To youth a year is a long time, and two years are almost a life time.

Three years and more of it had made war to them a normal state.

They had not thought much before of an end to the great struggle between North and South, and of what was to come after.

Now they realized that peace, not war, was normal, and that it must return.
The moonlight faded and then the stars were dimmed, as the darkness that precedes the dawn came.