I sicken of the dreadful scene,—can endure it no longer,—and beg Andy to "Come away! Come away! It's too awful to look at any more!"
And so we get back to our place in the breastworks with sad, heavy hearts, and wonder how we ever could have imagined war so grand and gallant a thing when, after all, it is so horribly wicked and cruel. We lie down—the thirteen of us that are left in the company—on a big flat rock, sleeping without shelter, and shielding our faces from the drizzling rain with our caps as best we may, thinking of the dreadful scene in front there, and of the sad, heavy hearts there will be all over the land for weary years, till kindly sleep comes to us, with sweet forgetfulness of all.
Our clothes were damp with the heavy mists and drizzling rain when we awoke next morning, and hastily prepared for the march off the field and the long pursuit of the foe through the waving grain-fields of Maryland. Having cooked our coffee in our blackened tin cups, and roasted our slices of fresh beef, stuck on the end of a ramrod and thrust into the crackling fires, we were ready in a moment for the march, for we had but little to pack up.
Straight over the field we go, through that valley of death where the heavy charging had been done, and thousands of men had been swept away, line after line, in the mad and furious tempest of the battle. Heavy mists still overhang the field, even dumb Nature seeming to be in sympathy with the scene, while all around us, as we march along, are sights at which the most callous turn faint. Interesting enough we find the evidences of conflict, save only where human life is concerned.
On the March to and from Gettysburg.
We stop to wonder at the immense furrow yonder which some shell has ploughed up in the ground; we call one another's attention to a caisson shivered to atoms by an explosion, or to a tree cut clean off by a solid shot, or bored through and through by a shell. With pity we contemplate the poor artillery-horses hobbling, wounded and mangled, about the field, and we think it a mercy to shoot them as we pass. But the dead men! Hundreds of torn and distorted bodies yet on the field, although thousands already lie buried in the trenches. Even the roughest and rudest among us marches awed and silent, as he is forced to think of the terrible suffering endured in this place, and of the sorrow and tears there will be among the mountains of the North and the rice-fields of the far-off South.
We were quiet, I remember, very quiet, as we marched off that great field; and not only then, but for days afterwards, as we tramped through the pleasant fields of Maryland. We had little to say, and we all were pretty busily thinking. Where were the boys who, but a week before, had marched with us through those same fragrant fields, blithe as a sunshiny morn in May? And so, as I have told you, when those young ladies and gentlemen came out to the end of that Maryland village to meet and cheer us after the battle, as they had met and cheered us before it, we did not know how heavy-hearted we were until, in response to their song of "Rally round the Flag, Boys!" some one proposed three cheers for them. But the cheers would not come. Somehow, after the first hurrah, the other two stuck in our throats or died away soundless on the air. And so we only said: "God bless you, young friends; but we can't cheer to-day, you see!"