harged once more into the
jaws of death. The lines as they advanced snatched up the frozen bodies
of their comrades, carried them to the front, stacked the corpses into
long piles for bulwarks, dropped low and fought behind them. In vain.
The gray hills roared and blazed, roared and blazed with increasing
fury. Darkness came at last and drew a mantle of mercy over the scene.

The men in blue planted the frozen bodies of their dead along the outer
line as dummy sentinels and crept through the shadows across the river
shattered, broken, crushed. They left their wounded. Through the long
hours of the freezing night the pitiful cries came to the boys in gray
on the wings of the fierce North winds. They crawled out into the
darkness here and there and held a canteen to the lips of a dying foe.

At dawn they looked and saw the piles of the slain wrapped in white
shrouds of snow. The shivering, ragged, gray figures, thinly clad, swept
down the hill, stripped the dead and shook the frost from the warm
clothes.

Burnsides fell before the genius of Lee and Hooker was put in his place.

Fighting Joe Hooker they called him. At Chancellorsville a few months
later he led his reorganized army across the same river and threw it
on Lee with supreme confidence in the results. He led an army of one
hundred and thirty thousand men in seven grand divisions backed by four
hundred and forty-eight great guns.

Lee, still on the hills behind Fredericksburg, had sixty-two thousand
men and one hundred and seventy guns. He had sent Longstreet's corps
into Tennessee.

Hooker threw the flower of his army across the river seven miles above
Fredericksburg to flank Lee and strike him from the rear while the
remainder of his army crossed in front and between the two he would
crush the Confederate army as an eggshell.

But the unexpected happened. Lee was not only a stark fighter. He was a
supreme master of the art of war. He understood Hooker's move from the
moment it began. His gray army had already slipped out of his trenches
and were feeling their way through the tangled vines and underbrush with
sure, ominous tread. In this wilderness Hooker's four hundred guns would
be as useless as his own hundred and seventy. It would be a hand-to-hand
fight in the tangled brush. The gray veteran was a dead shot and he was
creeping through his own native woods. On this beautiful May morning,
Lee, Jackson, and Stuart met in conference before the battle open