always full of battle,
kept the heart of New England patient and courageous.

McClellan had been removed, and Burnside, taking command, led his army
to the riverside before Fredericksburg. Carleton was witness of the
bombardment of the city by the Federal artillery. From his coign of
vantage at General Sumner's headquarters, on the piazza of an elegant
mansion, one hundred feet above the Rappahannock, and about
three-quarters of a mile from it, he could see, as though it were a
great cartoon and he a weaver of the Gobelins tapestry of history, the
awful pattern of war. Beyond the sixteen rifled Rodman guns of large
calibre and long range, mounted on the river bluff and thrust out
through sand-bags, behind the masses of infantry, the pontoon and
artillery trains, Carleton stood and saw the making of a bridge in
fifteen minutes, in the face of a terrific musketry fire from the
opposite shore. Then followed views of the street fight in the doomed
city, the shattered houses, the cloudless sky, the setting sun, the
gorgeous sunset dyes, the deepening shadows, the masses of men upon
the opposite hills, the screaming shells, the puffs of white smoke,
the bursting storms of iron, the blood-red flames illuminating the
ruin of dwellings, the battle smoke settling in the valley, so densely
as to obscure or hide the flashes. All this was before Carleton on
that afternoon and evening of that winter's day, December 11th. Then
he spread his blanket for a little sleep, expecting to awake to behold
one of the greatest battles of modern times; but the sun set without
the two great armies coming to close quarters.

The next day was a hard one, for Carleton was in the field until
night, now watching a bombardment, now a charge, and again a long and
stubborn, persistent musketry fire. The shells sang near him, and at
one time he was evidently the target for a whole Confederate battery;
for, within a few seconds, a round shot struck a few rods in front of
him, a second fell to the right, a third went over his head, a fourth
skimmed along the surface of the ground, just over the backs of a
regiment, lying flat on their faces. As he moved to the shelter of the
river bank, a shot dropped obligingly in the water before him. All day
long the lines of batteries on the hills smoked like Etna and
Vesuvius. Sometimes, between ordnance and musketry, there were twenty
thousand flashes a minute. Carleton thus far had seen no battles where
the fire equ