“Don’t you see? Before the fight there was just the field. Next it was covered all over with your fellows in blue clothes. Saturday night the blue clothes were stripped off, and only their white under-clothes left. Monday night these were stripped off, and Tuesday they lay all in their naked skins.”
“Who stripped the dead in that way?”
“It was mostly done by the North Carolinians. They are the triflin’est set of men!”
“What do you mean by triflin’est?”
“They ha’n’t got no sense. They’ll stoop to anything. They’re more like savages than civilized men. They say ‘we ’uns’ and ‘you ’uns,’ and all such outlandish phrases. They’ve got a great long tone to their voice, like something wild.”
“Were you in the battle?”
“Yes, I was in all of Saturday’s fight. My regiment was stationed on the hill down on the right there. We could see everything. Your men piled up their dead for breastworks. It was an awful sight when the shells struck them, and exploded! The air, for a minute, would be just full of legs and arms and pieces of trunks. Down by the road there we dug out a wagon-load of muskets. They had been piled up by your fellows, and dirt thrown over them, for a breastwork. But the worst sight I saw was three days afterwards. I didn’t mind the heaps of dead, nor nothing. But just a starving dog sitting by a corpse, which he wouldn’t let anybody come near, and which he never left night nor day;—by George, that just made me cry! We finally had to shoot the dog to get at the man to bury him.”
The young Rebel thought our army might have been easily destroyed after Saturday’s battle,—at least that portion of it which occupied Fredericksburg. “We had guns on that point that could have cut your pontoon bridge in two; and then our artillery could have blown Burnside all to pieces, or have compelled his surrender.”
“Why didn’t you do it?”
“Because General Lee was too humane. He didn’t want to kill so many men.”