hills, bleak and
desolate with fir woods?--hares and snow birds are all the life over
there! General Lee and Stonewall Jackson? Down the Rappahannock below
Moss Neck. At least, undoubtedly, Stonewall Jackson's down there. The
balloon people say so. General Lee's got an idea that Port Royal's our
point of attack. The mass of his army's there. The gunboat people say
so. Longstreet may be behind those hills. Well, we'll crush Longstreet!
We'll build our bridges under cover of this fortunate fog, and go over
and defeat Longstreet and be far down the road to Richmond before a man
can say Jack Robinson!"

"Jack Robinson!" said the brigade from McLaws's division--Barksdale's
Mississippians--drawn up on the water edge of Fredericksburg. They were
tall men--Barksdale's Mississippians--playful bear-hunters from the cane
brakes, young and powerfully made, and deadly shots. "Old Barksdale"
knew how to handle them, and together they were a handful for any enemy
whatsoever. Sixteen hundred born hunters and fighters, they opened fire
on the bridge-builders, trying to build four bridges, three above, one
below the town. Barksdale's men were somewhat sheltered by the houses on
the river brink; the blue had the favourable fog with which to cover
operations. It did not wholly help; the Mississippians had keen eyes;
the rifles blazed, blazed, blazed! Burnside's bridge-builders were
gallant men; beaten back from the river they came again and again, but
again and again the eyes of the swamp hunters ran along the gleaming
barrels and a thousand bronzed fingers pulled a thousand triggers. Past
the middle of the day the fog lifted. The town lay defined and helpless
beneath a pallid sky.

The artillery of the Army of the Potomac opened upon it. One hundred and
forty heavy guns, set in tiers upon the heights to the north, fired each
into Fredericksburg fifty rounds. Under that terrible cover the blue
began to cross on pontoons.

A number of the women and children had been sent from the town during
the preceding days. Not all, however, were gone. Many had no place to go
to; some were ill and some were nursing the ill; many had husbands,
sons, brothers, there at hand in the Army of Northern Virginia and would
not go. Now with the beginning of the bombardment they must go. There
were grey, imperative orders. "At once! at once! Go _where_? God knows!
but go."

They went, almost all, in the snow, beneath the pallid sky, with the
shells shrieking