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. There would be more work in the hospitals there than in Burnside's camp. It would be many a day before his shattered army could be ready again to give battle.
The worst trouble with it was not the bleeding gap torn through its ranks by Lee's shot and shell. Not only was its body wounded, its soul was crushed. Its commanding generals were divided into warring factions, the rank and file of its stern fighting men discouraged.
Again an epidemic of desertions broke out and ten thousand men were lost in a single month.
Burnside assumed the full responsibility for the disaster and asked to be relieved of his command. The third Union General had gone down before Lee—McClellan, Pope and Burnside.
The President, heartsick but undismayed, called to the head of the army the most promising general in sight, Joseph Hooker, popularly known as "Fighting Joe Hooker." There was inspiration to the thoughtless in the name, yet the Chief had misgivings.