lutched officers and men. Few
slept; the ceaseless and agonised shrieking from an emergency
hospital somewhere near them in the darkness almost unnerved them.

At dawn shells began to plunge downward among the Dragoons.
McDunn's battery roused itself to reply, but muddy staff-officers
arrived at full speed with orders for Claymore to make haste; and
the starving command staggered off stiffly through the mud, their
ears sickened by the piteous appeals of the wounded begging not to
be abandoned.

Berkley, his face a mass of bloody rags, gazed from his wet saddle
with feverish eyes at the brave contract surgeons standing silent
amid their wounded under the cedar trees.

Cripples hobbled along the lines, beseeching, imploring, catching
at stirrups, plucking feebly, blindly at the horses' manes for
support.

"Oh, my God!" sobbed a wounded artilleryman, lifting himself from
the blood-stained grass, "is this what I enlisted for? Are you
boys going to leave us behind to rot in rebel prisons?"

"Damn you!" shrieked another, "you ain't licked! What'n hell are
you runnin' away for? Gimme a gun an' a hoss an' I'll go back with
you to the river!"

And another pointed a mangled and shaking hand at the passing
horsemen.

"Oh, hell!" he sneered, "we don't expect anything of the cavalry,
but why are them Zouaves skedaddlin'? They fit like wild cats at
the river. Halt! you red-legged devils. You're goin' the wrong
way!"

A Sister of Charity, her snowy, wide-winged headdress limp in the
rain, came out of a shed and stood at the roadside, slender hands
joined imploringly.

"You mustn't leave your own wounded," she kept repeating. "You
wouldn't do that, gentlemen, would you? They've behaved so well;
they've done all that they could. Won't somebody tell General
McClellan how brave they were? If he knew, he would never leave
them here."

The Lancers looked down at her miserably as they rode; Colonel
Arran passed her, saluting, but with heavy, flushed face averted;
Berkley, burning with fever, leaned from his saddle, cap in hand.

"We can't help it, Sister. The same thing may happen to us in an
hour. But we'll surely come back; you never must doubt that!"

Farther on they came on a broken-down ambulance, the mules gone,
several dead men half buried in the wet straw, and two Sisters of
Charity standing near by in pallid despair.

Colonel Arran offered them lead-horses, but they were timid and
frightened; and Bur