"It isn't war—it's a massacre!" Ned sighed.
The man of prayer leaped on the ditch bank suddenly and shook his fist defiantly.
"Come back here, you damned cowards!" he yelled. "Come back and we'll whip hell out o' you!"
Slowly the shattered regiment fell back down the bloody slope, stumbling over their dead and wounded. The dim smoke-bound valley was a slaughter pen. Where magnificent lines of blue had marched with flashing bayonets and streaming banners at eight o'clock, the dead lay in mangled heaps, and the wounded huddled among them slowly freezing to death.
John saw a magnificent gun a heap of junk with four dead horses and every cannoneer on the ground dead or freezing where they fell. A single shell had done the work. Riderless horses galloped wildly over the field, shying at the grim piles of dark blue bodies, sniffing the blood and neighing pitifully.
Twelve hundred men in his regiment had charged up that hill. But two hundred and fifty came down.
From the steeple of the Court House in Fredericksburg General Couch, in command of the Second Corps, stood with his glasses on this frightful scene. He whispered to Howard by his side:
"The whole plain is covered with our men fallen and falling—I've never seen anything like it!"
He paused, his lips quivering as he gasped:
"O my God! see them falling—poor fellows, falling—falling!"