me with their arms off, some with their legs off,
dismembered, torn to pieces, they lay there single, in rows, and in piles.
I did not count them, but there must have been three hundred dead men in
the row behind which we concealed ourselves on the 15th, a part of which
we dragged together the night before. Just to the left of our regiment, at
the time of the fight there stood a brick house. From this house, inside
and just behind it, we carried more than forty dead men. I have no idea
how many men were lying behind the board fence, but there were certainly
one-quarter of a line of battle--one-half of a single line.

After the Johnnies had got us picks and shovels, we set to work to dig in
the frozen earth the trenches which were to contain the men and fragments
of men who had given up their lives on the plains in front of Mary's
Heights. We put them in rows, one beside the other, wrapped them up in
blankets or in whatever else we could get to put around them. There was
practically no means of identifying one out of a hundred of them. Thus
they lay in unknown graves.

Two long days we worked there tearing a trench in the frozen earth and
filling it with the bodies of frozen men, with nothing to eat but what the
guards could spare us from their scant rations. Our party buried nine
hundred and eighty-seven men.

About sundown, our work being finished, we went down to the river, crossed
over and returned to camp. Those days at Fredericksburg were among the
most disheartening and most dreadful I have every known. The assault on
Mary's Heights was so ill-advised; the day's picket duty on the field was
so nerve-racking; then the two days' work in a half-starved condition,
burying the dead, a work so heartrending at best, was enough to upset
one's mind if anything could upset it. I do not think there were any
desertions from our regiment during the next month or two, but there was a
great deal of desertion from the army, and it was not to be wondered at.
There was a general feeling of despondency pervading the Army of the
Potomac, the feeling was deep and wide spread. The conviction was general
that the men in the ranks were superior in intelligence to the southerners
and just as brave, that the army was better disciplined and much better
supplied, that what we lacked was leaders, the men were not tired of
fighting, but they were tired of being sent to the slaughter by
incompetent generals. From what I was able to observe whe