aps, weapons, bits of gear, all marked and
emphasized with many, many shapeless, ghastly things. Here they lay,
these integers of the line, huddled, jumbled. They had all the
contortions, all the frozen ultimate agonies left for survivors to see
and remember, so that they should no more go to war. Again, they lay
so peacefully calm that all the lesson was acclaim for happy, painless
war. One rested upon his side, his arm beneath his head as though he
slept. Another sat against a tree, his head fallen slightly forward,
his lax arms allowing his hands to droop plaintively, palms upward and
half spread, as though he sat in utter weariness. Some lay upon their
backs where they had turned, thrusting up a knee in the last struggle.
Some lay face downward as the slaughtered fall. Many had died with
hands open, suddenly. Others sat huddled, the closed hand with its
thumb turned under and covered by the fingers, betokening a gradual
passing of the vital spark, and a slow submission to the conqueror. It
was all a hideous and cruel dream. Surely it could be nothing more.
It could not be reality. The birds gurgled and twittered. The
squirrels barked and played. The sky was innocent. It must be a dream.

In this part of the wood the dead were mingled from both sides of the
contest, the faded blue and the faded gray sometimes scarce
distinguishable. Then there came a thickening of the gray, and in
turn, as the traveller advanced toward the fences and abattis, the
Northern dead predominated, though still there were many faces
yellow-pale, dark-framed. At the abattis the dead lay in a horrid
commingling mass, some hanging forward half through the entanglement,
some still in the attitude of effort, still tearing at the spiked
boughs, some standing upright as though to signal the advance. The
long row of dead lay here as where the prairie wind drives rolling
weeds, heaping them up against some fence that holds them back from
farther travel.

Franklin passed over the abattis, over the remaining fences, and into
the intrenchments where the final stand had been. The dead lay thick,
among them many who were young. Out across the broken and trodden
fields there lay some scattered, sodden lumps upon the ground.
Franklin stood looking out over the fields, in the direction of the
town. And there he saw a sight fitly to be called the ultimate horror
of all these things horrible that he had seen.

Over the fields of Louisbur