ely to do it."--"Look
at them--look at them! pale red, and dancing! I've heard them called
'the merry dancers.' There's a shooting star! They say that every time a
star shoots some one dies."--"That's not so. If it were, the whole sky
would be full of falling stars to-night. Look at that red ray going up
to the zenith. O God, make the plain stop groaning!"

The display in the heavens continued, luminous rays, faintly
rose-coloured, shifting from east to west, streaming upward until they
were lost in the starry vault. Elsewhere the sky was dark, intensely
clear, the winter stars like diamonds. There was no wind. The wide,
unsheltered plain across which had stormed, across which had receded,
the Federal charges, was sown thick with soldiers who had dropped from
the ranks. Many and many lay still, dead and cold, their marchings and
their tentings and their battles over. They had fought well; they had
died; they lay here now stark and pale, but in the vast, pictured web of
the whole their threads are strong and their colour holds. But on the
plain of Fredericksburg many and many and many were not dead and
resting. Hundreds and hundreds they lay, and could not rest for mortal
anguish. They writhed and tossed, they dragged themselves a little way
and fell again, they idly waved a hat or sword or empty hand for help,
they cried for aid, they cried for water. Those who could not lift their
voices moaned, moaned. Some had grown delirious, and upon that plain
there was even laughter. All the various notes taken together blended
into one long, dreary, weird, dull, and awful sound, steady as a wind in
miles of frozen reeds. They were all blue soldiers, and they lay where
they fell.

There was a long fringe of them near the stone wall and near the railway
embankment behind which now rested the Light Division and Taliaferro and
Early. The wind here was loud, rattling a thicker growth of reeds.
Above, the long, silent, flickering lights mocked with their rosy hue,
and the glittering stars mocked, and the empty concave of the night
mocked, and the sound of the Rappahannock mocked. A river moving by like
the River of Death, and they could not even get to the river to drink,
drink, drink....

A figure kneeling by a wounded man, spoke in a guarded voice to an
upright, approaching form. "This man could be saved. I have given him
water. I went myself to the general, and he said that if we could get
any into the hospital behind the hill w