But with the first beams of the morning sun—­and the slowly moving “relief detail” from the camp—­came a weird half-resurrection of that ghastly field.  Then it was that the long rays of sunlight, streaming away a mile beyond the battle line, pointed out the first harvest of the dead where the reserves had been posted.  There they lay in heaps and piles, killed by solid shot or bursting shells that had leaped the battle line to plunge into the waiting ranks beyond.  As the sun lifted higher its beams fell within the range of musketry fire, where the dead lay thicker,—­even as they had fallen when killed outright,—­with arms extended and feet at all angles to the field.  As it touched these dead upturned faces, strangely enough it brought out no expression of pain or anguish—­but rather as if death had arrested them only in surprise and awe.  It revealed on the lips of those who had been mortally wounded and had turned upon their side the relief which death had brought their suffering, sometimes shown in a faint smile.  Mounting higher, it glanced upon the actual battle line, curiously curving for the shelter of walls, fences, and breastworks, and here the dead lay, even as when they lay and fired, their faces prone in the grass but their muskets still resting across the breastworks.  Exposed to grape and canister from the battery on the ridge, death had come to them mercifully also—­through the head and throat.  And now the whole field lay bare in the sunlight, broken with grotesque shadows cast from sitting, crouching, half-recumbent but always rigid figures, which might have been effigies on their own monuments.  One half-kneeling soldier, with head bowed between his stiffened hands, might have stood for a carven figure of Grief at the feet of his dead comrade.  A captain, shot through the brain in the act of mounting a wall, lay sideways half across it, his lips parted with a word of command; his sword still pointing over the barrier the way that they should go.

But it was not until the sun had mounted higher that it struck the central horror of the field and seemed to linger there in dazzling persistence, now and then returning to it in startling flashes that it might be seen of men and those who brought succor.  A tiny brook had run obliquely near the battle line.  It was here that, the night before the battle, friend and foe had filled their canteens side by side with soldierly recklessness—­or perhaps a higher instinct—­purposely ignoring each other’s presence; it was here that the wounded had afterwards crept, crawled, and dragged themselves, here they had pushed, wrangled, striven, and fought for a draught of that precious fluid which assuaged the thirst of their wounds—­or happily put them out of their misery forever; here overborne, crushed, suffocated by numbers, pouring their own blood into the flood, and tumbling after it with their helpless bodies, they dammed the stream, until recoiling, red and angry, it had burst its banks and overflowed the cotton-field in a broad pool that now sparkled in the sunlight.  But below this human dam—­a mile away—­where the brook still crept sluggishly, the ambulance horses sniffed and started from it.