Forbidding enough it was in every way.  The fire had swept every superficial foot of it, and at every step I sank into ashes to the ankle.  It had contained a thick undergrowth of young saplings, every one of which had been severed by a bullet, the foliage of the prostrate tops being afterward burnt and the stumps charred.  Death had put his sickle into this thicket and fire had gleaned the field.  Along a line which was not that of extreme depression, but was at every point significantly equidistant from the heights on either hand, lay the bodies, half buried in ashes; some in the unlovely looseness of attitude denoting sudden death by the bullet, but by far the greater number in postures of agony that told of the tormenting flame.  Their clothing was half burnt away—­their hair and beard entirely; the rain had come too late to save their nails.  Some were swollen to double girth; others shriveled to manikins.  According to degree of exposure, their faces were bloated and black or yellow and shrunken.  The contraction of muscles which had given them claws for hands had cursed each countenance with a hideous grin.  Faugh!  I cannot catalogue the charms of these gallant gentlemen who had got what they enlisted for.

XI

It was now three o’clock in the afternoon, and raining.  For fifteen hours we had been wet to the skin.  Chilled, sleepy, hungry and disappointed—­profoundly disgusted with the inglorious part to which they had been condemned—­the men of my regiment did everything doggedly.  The spirit had gone quite out of them.  Blue sheets of powder smoke, drifting amongst the trees, settling against the hillsides and beaten into nothingness by the falling rain, filled the air with their peculiar pungent odor, but it no longer stimulated.  For miles on either hand could be heard the hoarse murmur of the battle, breaking out near by with frightful distinctness, or sinking to a murmur in the distance; and the one sound aroused no more attention than the other.

We had been placed again in rear of those guns, but even they and their iron antagonists seemed to have tired of their feud, pounding away at one another with amiable infrequency.  The right of the regiment extended a little beyond the field.  On the prolongation of the line in that direction were some regiments of another division, with one in reserve.  A third of a mile back lay the remnant of somebody’s brigade looking to its wounds.  The line of forest bounding this end of the field stretched as straight as a wall from the right of my regiment to Heaven knows what regiment of the enemy.  There suddenly appeared, marching down along this wall, not more than two hundred yards in our front, a dozen files of gray-clad men with rifles on the right shoulder.  At an interval of fifty yards they were followed by perhaps half as many more; and in fair supporting distance of these stalked with confident mien a single man!