tual battle line, curiously curving for the shelter of walls,
fences, and breastworks, and here the dead lay, even as when they
lay and fired, their faces prone in the grass but their muskets still
resting across the breastworks. Exposed to grape and canister from the
battery on the ridge, death had come to them mercifully also--through
the head and throat. And now the whole field lay bare in the
sunlight, broken with grotesque shadows cast from sitting, crouching,
half-recumbent but always rigid figures, which might have been effigies
on their own monuments. One half-kneeling soldier, with head bowed
between his stiffened hands, might have stood for a carven figure of
Grief at the feet of his dead comrade. A captain, shot through the brain
in the act of mounting a wall, lay sideways half across it, his lips
parted with a word of command; his sword still pointing over the barrier
the way that they should go.

But it was not until the sun had mounted higher that it struck the
central horror of the field and seemed to linger there in dazzling
persistence, now and then returning to it in startling flashes that it
might be seen of men and those who brought succor. A tiny brook had run
obliquely near the battle line. It was here that, the night before
the battle, friend and foe had filled their canteens side by side with
soldierly recklessness--or perhaps a higher instinct--purposely ignoring
each other's presence; it was here that the wounded had afterwards
crept, crawled, and dragged themselves, here they had pushed, wrangled,
striven, and fought for a draught of that precious fluid which assuaged
the thirst of their wounds--or happily put them out of their misery
forever; here overborne, crushed, suffocated by numbers, pouring their
own blood into the flood, and tumbling after it with their helpless
bodies, they dammed the stream, until recoiling, red and angry, it had
burst its banks and overflowed the cotton-field in a broad pool that now
sparkled in the sunlight. But below this human dam--a mile away--where
the brook still crept sluggishly, the ambulance horses sniffed and
started from it.

The detail moved on slowly, doing their work expeditiously, and
apparently callously, but really only with that mechanical movement
that saves emotion. Only once they were moved to an outbreak of
indignation,--the discovery of the body of an officer whose pockets
were turned inside out, but whose hand was still tightly grasped on h