rown with sedge and sassafras, here and
there dwarf pines. Apparently the cannon had lost them; at any rate for
a time the firing ceased. The east was now pink, the air here very pure
and cool and still, each feather of broom sedge holding its row of
diamond dewdrops. The earth was much cut up. "Batteries been along
here," said the men. "Ours, too. Know the wheel marks. Hello! What you
got, Carter?"

"Somebody's dropped his photograph album."

The man in front and the man behind and the man on the other side all
looked. "One of those folding things! Pretty children! one, two, three,
four, and their mother.--Keep it for him, Henry. Think the Crenshaw
battery, or Braxton's, or the King William, or the Dixie was over this
way."

Beyond the poisoned field were more woods, dipping to one of the
innumerable sluggish creeks of the region. There was a bridge--weak and
shaken, but still a bridge. This crossed at last, the troops climbed a
slippery bank, beneath a wild tangle of shrub and vine, and came
suddenly into view of a line of breastworks, three hundred yards away.
There was a halt; skirmishers were thrown forward. These returned
without a trigger having been pulled. "Deserted, sir. They've fallen
back, guns and all. But there's a meadow between us and the earthworks,
sir, that--that--that--"

The column began to move across the meadow--not a wide meadow, a little
green, boggy place commanded by the breastworks. Apparently grey troops
had made a charge here, the evening before. The trees that fringed the
small, irregular oval, and the great birds that sat in the trees, and
the column whose coming had made the birds to rise, looked upon a meadow
set as thick with dead men as it should have been with daisies. They lay
thick, thick, two hundred and fifty of them, perhaps, heart pierced,
temple pierced by minie balls, or all the body shockingly torn by grape
and canister. The wounded had been taken away. Only the dead were here,
watched by the great birds, the treetops and the dawn. They lay
fantastically, some rounded into a ball, some spread eagle, some with
their arms over their eyes, some in the posture of easy sleep. At one
side was a swampy place, and on the edge of this a man, sunk to the
thigh, kept upright. The living men thought him living, too. More than
one started out of line toward him, but then they saw that half his head
was blown away.

They left the meadow and took a road that skirted another great pie