"They"re runnin" now?" the pious one asked.
"It isn"t war--it"s a ma.s.sacre!" Ned sighed.
The man of prayer leaped on the ditch bank suddenly and shook his fist defiantly.
"Come back here, you d.a.m.ned cowards!" he yelled. "Come back and we"ll whip h.e.l.l out o" you!"
Slowly the shattered regiment fell back down the b.l.o.o.d.y slope, stumbling over their dead and wounded. The dim smoke-bound valley was a slaughter pen. Where magnificent lines of blue had marched with flashing bayonets and streaming banners at eight o"clock, the dead lay in mangled heaps, and the wounded huddled among them slowly freezing to death.
John saw a magnificent gun a heap of junk with four dead horses and every cannoneer on the ground dead or freezing where they fell. A single sh.e.l.l had done the work. Riderless horses galloped wildly over the field, shying at the grim piles of dark blue bodies, sniffing the blood and neighing pitifully.
Twelve hundred men in his regiment had charged up that hill. But two hundred and fifty came down.
From the steeple of the Court House in Fredericksburg General Couch, in command of the Second Corps, stood with his gla.s.ses on this frightful scene. He whispered to Howard by his side:
"The whole plain is covered with our men fallen and falling--I"ve never seen anything like it!"
He paused, his lips quivering as he gasped:
"O my G.o.d! see them falling--poor fellows, falling--falling!"
He signalled Burnside for reinforcements.
General Sumner"s division on the Union right had charged into the deadliest trap of all.
Down the road toward the foot of Marye"s Heights his magnificent army swept at double quick. The Confederate batteries had been specially trained to rake this road from three directions, right, and left flank and centre.
Steadily, stoically the men in blue pressed into this narrow way in silence and met the flaming torrent from three directions. Rushing on over the bodies of their fallen comrades the thinning ranks reached the old stone wall at the foot of the hill. General Cobb lay concealed behind it with three thousand infantry. The low quick order ran along his line:
"Fire!"
Straight into the faces of the heroic Union soldiers flashed a level blinding flame from three thousand muskets, slaying, crushing, tearing to pieces the proud army of an hour ago. A thousand men in blue fell in five minutes. The ground was piled with their bodies until it was impossible to charge over them effectively.
For a moment a cloud of smoke pitifully drew a soft grey veil over the awful scene while the men who were left fell back in straggling broken groups.
Five times the Union hosts had charged those terrible brown hills and five times they had been rolled back in red waves of blood.
Late in the day a fierce bitter wind was blowing from the north. There was yet time to turn defeat into victory. The desperate Union Commander ordered the sixth charge.
The men in blue pulled their hats down low as if to shut out the pelting hail of lead and iron and without a murmur charged once more into the mouth of h.e.l.l. The winds had frozen stiff the bodies of their dead. The advancing blue lines s.n.a.t.c.hed these dead men from the ground, carried them in front, stacked them in long piles for bulwarks, and fought behind them with the desperation of madmen. There was no escape. The keen eyes of the Confederate Commanders had planted their right and left flanking lines to pour death into these ranks no matter how high their corpses were piled. The crescent hill blazed and roared with unceasing fury. Only the darkness was kind at last.
And then the men in blue planted the frozen bodies of their comrades along the outer battle line as dummy sentinels, and under cover of the night began to slip back through Fredericksburg and across the silver mirror of the Rappahannock to their old camp, shattered, broken, crushed.
It was four o"clock in the morning before John Vaughan"s regiment would give up the search for their desperately wounded. Only the strongest could endure that bitter cold. Through the long, desolate hours the pitiful cries of the wounded men rang through the black, freezing night, and few hands stirred to save them. A great army was fighting to save its flags and guns and reach the shelter beyond the river.
Amid the few flickering lanterns could be heard the greetings of friends in subdued tones as they clasped hands:
"Is that you, old boy?"
"G.o.d bless you--yes--I"m glad to see you!"
A dying man in blue was pitifully calling for water somewhere, in the darkness in front of Ned Vaughan"s ditch. He took his canteen, got a lantern and went to find him. It might be John. If not, no matter, he was some other fellow"s brother.
As the light fell on his drawn face Ned murmured:
"Thank G.o.d!"
He pressed the canteen to his lips and held his head in his lap. It was only too plain from the steel look out of the eyes that his minutes were numbered. He moved and turned his dying face up to Ned:
"Why is it you always whip us, Johnny?"
He paused for breath:
"I wonder--every battle I"ve been in we"ve been defeated--why--why--why, O G.o.d, why----"
His head drooped and he was still.
Ned wondered if some waiting loved one on the sh.o.r.es of eternity had given him the answer. He wrapped him tenderly in his blanket and left him at rest at last.
As he turned toward his lines the unmistakable wail of a baby came faintly through the darkness--a wee voice, the half smothered cry sounding as if it were nestling in a mother"s arms. He followed the sound until his lantern flashed in the wild eyes of a young woman who had fled from her home in terror during the battle and was hugging her baby frantically in her arms.
Ned led her gently to an officer"s quarters and made her comfortable.
The glory of war was fast fading from his imagination. A grim spectre was slowly taking its place.
John"s shattered regiment lay down on the field with the rear guard at four o"clock to s.n.a.t.c.h an hour"s sleep, their heads pillowed on the bodies of the dead. The cold moderated and a light mantle of snow fell softly just before day and covered the field, the living and the dead.
When the reveille sounded at dawn, the bugler looked with awe at the thousands of white shrouded figures and wondered which would stir at his note. The living slowly rose as from the dead and shook their white shrouds. Thousands lay still, cold and immovable to await the archangel"s mightier call at the last.
Beyond the river, through the long night, Burnside, wild with anguish, had paced the floor of his tent. Again and again he threw his arms in a gesture of despair toward the freezing blood-stained field:
"Oh, those men--those men over there! I"m thinking of them all the time----"
As the rear guard turned from the field at sunrise, John Vaughan looked back across the valley of Death and saw the ragged brown and grey figures shivering in the cold, as they swarmed down from the hills and began to shake the frost from the new, warm clothes they were stripping from the dead.
CHAPTER XXVI
THE REST HOUR
For two terrible days and nights Betty Winter saw the endless line of ambulances creep from the field of Fredericksburg. Some of these men lay on the frozen ground for forty-eight hours before relief came. Many of the wounded might have lived but for the frightful exposure to cold which followed the battle. They died in hundreds.
Thousands were placed on the train for Washington and so great was the pitiful suffering among them Betty left with the first load. There would be more work in the hospitals there than in Burnside"s camp. It would be many a day before his shattered army could be ready again to give battle.
The worst trouble with it was not the bleeding gap torn through its ranks by Lee"s shot and sh.e.l.l. Not only was its body wounded, its soul was crushed. Its commanding generals were divided into warring factions, the rank and file of its stern fighting men discouraged.
Again an epidemic of desertions broke out and ten thousand men were lost in a single month.