tretch out my hand, and it's
ashes. My arms are empty. My heart is broken. Life isn't worth the
living."

Her voice drifted into a dreamy silence as the tears streamed down her
cheeks. She stood for half an hour staring through blurred eyes at the
cold clay.

She turned at last and seized her sister's hands both in hers, and gazed
with a strange, set look that saw something beyond time and the things
of sense.

"My dear sister, God will yet give to the mothers of men the power to
stop this murder. There's a better way. There's a better way,"

CHAPTER XLIV

While Sheridan rode against Richmond, Lee and Grant were struggling in
a pool of red at the "Bloody Angle" of Spottsylvania. The musketry fire
against the trees came in a low undertone, like the rattle of a hail
storm on the roofs of houses.

A company of blue soldiers were cut off by a wave of charging gray. The
men were trying to surrender. Their officers drew their revolvers and
ordered them to break through. A sullen private shouted:

"Shoot your officers!"

Every commander dropped in his tracks. And the men were marched to the
rear. Hour after hour the flames of hell swirled in endless waves about
this angle of the Southern trenches. Line after line of blue broke
against it and eddied down its sides in slimy pools.

Color bearers waved their flags in each other's faces, clinched and
fought, hand to hand, like devils. Two soldiers on top of the trench,
their ammunition spent, choked each other to death and rolled down the
embankment among the mangled bodies that filled the ditch.

In this mass of struggling maniacs men were fighting with guns, swords,
handspikes, clubbed muskets, stones and fists. Night brought no pause to
save the wounded or bury the dead.

For five days Grant circled his blue hosts in a whirlpool of death
trying in vain to break Lee's trenches. He gave it up. The stolid,
silent man of iron nerves watched the stream of wagons bearing the
wounded, groaning and shrieking, from the field. Lee's forces had been
handled with such skill the impact of numbers had made but little
impression.

Thirty thousand dead and mangled lay on the field.

The stark fighter of the West was facing a new problem. The devotion of
Lee's men was a mania. He was unconquerable in a square hand-to-hand
fight in the woods.

A truce to bury the dead followed. They found them piled six layers deep
in the trenches, blue and gray locked in the last embrac