The men dropped in their tracks to snatch a few hours' sleep.
The low ominous sounds that drifted from the darkness could not be heeded till to-morrow. Here and there a lantern flickered as they picked up a wounded man and carried him to the rear. Only the desperately wounded could be helped. The dead must sleep beneath the stars. The low, pitiful cries for water guided the ambulance corps as they stumbled over the heaps of those past help.
The clouds drew a veil over the stars at midnight and it began to pour down rain before day. The sleeping, worn men woke with muttered oaths and stood against the trees or squatted against their trunks seeking shelter from the flood. As the mists lifted, they looked with grim foreboding but still desperate courage to the heights. Every rampart was deserted. Not one of those three hundred and forty guns remained. McClellan had withdrawn his army under the cover of the night to Harrison's Landing.
It would be difficult to tell whose men were better satisfied.
"Thank God, he's gone from there anyhow!" the men in grey cried with fervor.
Now they could get something to eat, bury their dead and care for all the wounded. McClellan's Peninsula Campaign had ended. His Grand Army had melted from a hundred and ten thousand fighting men in line to eighty-six thousand. The South had lost almost as many.
From the wildest panic into which the advance of his army had thrown Richmond, the Confederate Capital now swung to the opposite extreme of rejoicing for the deliverance, mingled with criticism of their leaders for allowing the Federal army to escape at all.
The gloom in Washington was profound.
An excited General rushed to the White House at two o'clock in the morning, roused the President from his bed and pleaded for the immediate dispatch of a fleet of transports to Harrison's Landing as the only possible way to save the army from annihilation.
The President soothed his fears and sent him home. He was not the man to be thrown into a panic. Yet the incredible thing had happened. His army of more than two hundred thousand men, under able generals, had been hurled back from the gates of Richmond in hopeless, bewildering defeat, and he must begin all over again.