When the reveille sounded at dawn, the bugler looked with awe at the
thousands of white shrouded figures and wondered which would stir at his
note. The living slowly rose as from the dead and shook their white
shrouds. Thousands lay still, cold and immovable to await the
archangel's mightier call at the last.
Beyond the river, through the long night, Burnside, wild with anguish,
had paced the floor of his tent. Again and again he threw his arms in a
gesture of despair toward the freezing blood-stained field:
"Oh, those men--those men over there! I'm thinking of them all the
time----"
As the rear guard turned from the field at sunrise, John Vaughan looked
back across the valley of Death and saw the ragged brown and grey
figures shivering in the cold, as they swarmed down from the hills and
began to shake the frost from the new, warm clothes they were stripping
from the dead.
CHAPTER XXVI
THE REST HOUR
For two terrible days and nights Betty Winter saw the endless line of
ambulances creep from the field of Fredericksburg. Some of these men lay
on the frozen ground for forty-eight hours before relief came. Many of
the wounded might have lived but for the frightful exposure to cold
which followed the battle. They died in hundreds.
Thousands were placed on the train for Washington and so great was the
pitiful suffering among them Betty left with the first load.
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