en, we will not cross the
Potomac to-night. You will go to your respective commands, strengthen
your lines; send two officers from each brigade towards the ford to
collect your stragglers and get them up. Many have come in. I have
had the proper steps taken to collect all the men who are in the
rear. If McClellan wants to fight in the morning, I will give him
battle again. Go!" Without a word of remonstrance the group broke up,
leaving their great commander alone with his responsibility, and,
says an eyewitness, "if I read their faces aright, there was not one
but considered that General Lee was taking a fearful risk."* (*
Communicated by General Stephen P. Lee, who was present at the
conference.) So the soldiers' sleep was undisturbed. Through the
September night they lay beside their arms, and from the dark spaces
beyond came the groans of the wounded and the nameless odours of the
battle-field. Not often has the night looked down upon a scene more
terrible. The moon, rising above the mountains, revealed the long
lines of men and guns, stretching far across hill and valley, waiting
for the dawn to shoot each other down, and between the armies their
dead lay in such numbers as civilised war has seldom seen. So fearful
had been the carnage, and comprised within such narrow limits, that a
Federal patrol, it is related, passing into the corn-field, where the
fighting had been fiercest, believed that they had surprised a whole
Confederate brigade. There, in the shadow of the woods, lay the
skirmishers, their muskets beside them, and there, in regular ranks,
lay the line of battle, sleeping, as it seemed, the profound sleep of
utter exhaustion. But the first man that was touched was cold and
lifeless, and the next, and the next; it was the bivouac of the dead.

September 18.

When the day dawned the Confederate divisions, reinforced by some
5000 or 6000 stragglers, held the same position as the previous
evening, and over against them, seen dimly through the mist, lay the
Federal lines. The skirmishers, crouching behind the shattered
fences, confronted each other at short range; the guns of both armies
were unlimbered, and the masses of infantry, further to the rear, lay
ready for instant conflict. But not a shot was fired. The sun rose
higher in the heavens; the warm breath of the autumn morning rustled
in the woods, but still the same strange silence prevailed. The men
spoke in undertones, watching intently the movements