Olympia eagerly assented—­anything was preferable to this mute misery of her mother and Merry’s sepulchral struggles to be conversational and tearless.  They drove through bewildering numbers of tents, most of them, Olympia’s sharp eyes noted, marked “U.S.A.,” and she reflected, almost angrily, that the chief part of war, after all, was pillage.  The men looked shabby, and the uniforms were as varied as a carnival, though by no means so gay.  Whenever they crossed a stream, which was not seldom, groups of men were standing in the water to their middle, washing their clothing, very much as Olympia had seen the washer-women on the Continent, in Europe.  They were very merry, even boisterous in this unaccustomed work, responding to rough jests by resounding slashes of the tightly wrung garments upon the heads or backs of the unwary wags.

“Why, there must be a million men here,” Merry cried, as the tents stretched for miles, as far as she could see.

“No; not quite a million, I reckon,” the orderly said, proudly; “but we shall have a million when we march on Washington.”

“March on Washington!” Merry gasped, as though it was an official order she had just heard promulgated.  “But—­but we aren’t ready yet.  We—­” Then she halted in dismay.  Was she giving information to the enemy?  Would they instantly make use of it?  Ah! she must, at any cost, undo this fatal treason, big with disaster to the republic.  “I mean we are not ready yet to put our many million men on the march.”

The orderly laughed.  “I reckon your many million will be ready as soon as our one million.  You know we have a big country to cover with them.  You folks have only Washington to guard and Richmond to take.  We have the Mississippi and fifteen hundred miles of coast to guard.  Now, this corner is Newmarket, where Johnston waited for his troops on Sunday and led them right along the road we are on—­to the pine wood yonder—­just north of us.  We won’t go through there, because we ain’t making a flank movement,” and he laughed pleasantly.  They drove on at a rapid rate as they came upon the southern shelf of the Manassas plateau.

“This,” the orderly said, pointing to a small stone building in a bare and ragged waste of trees, shrubs, and ruined implements of war, “is the Henry House—­what is left of it—­the key of our position when Jackson formed his stone wall facing toward the northwest, over there where your folks very cleverly flanked us and waited an hour or two, Heaven only knows what for, unless it was to give us time to bring up our re-enforcements.  Your officers lay the blame on Burnside and Hunter, who, they declare, just sat still half the day, while Sherman got in behind us and would have captured every man Jack of our fellows, if Johnston hadn’t come up, where I showed you, in the very nick of time.”

The women were looking eagerly at the field of death.  It was still as on the day of the battle, save that instead of the thousands of beating hearts, the flaunting flags, and roaring guns, there were countless ridges torn in the sod, as if a plow had run through at random, limbs and trees torn down and whirled across each other, broken wheels, musket stocks and barrels, twisted and sticking, gaunt and eloquent, in the tough, grassy fiber of the earth.