At dawn Lee still held the great V, save only the extreme point, the narrow Bloody Angle. This was covered and possessed by the blue, and at the dawn details came to gather the wounded and bury the dead. The dead lay thronged. The blue buried their own, and then they came and looked upon the trenches on the grey side of the breastworks, and the grey dead lay there so thick that it was ghastly. They lay in blood stiffened with earth, and their pale faces looked upwards, and their cold hands still clutched their muskets. A ray from the rising sun struck upon them. “With much labour,” says a Federal eye-witness, “a detail of Union soldiers buried these dead by simply turning the captured breastworks upon them.” Back somewhere near the river Po, in the width of the V, a mounted officer met a mounted comrade. The latter was shining wet, he and his horse, from a swollen ford. Each drew rein. “Have you anything to eat?” said the one from across the Po. “I am dizzy, I am so famished.” “I’ve got a little brown sugar. Here—” He poured it into the hollow of the other’s hand, who ate it eagerly. “Has anything,” asked the first, “been heard from Richmond way—from Stuart?” The other let fall his hand, sticky with the sugar. He looked at his fellow with sombre eyes. “Where have you been,” he said, “not to have heard?—Stuart is dead.” CHAPTER XXVII RICHMOND “From lightning and tempest; from plague, pestilence and famine; from battle and murder, and from sudden death, “_Good Lord, deliver us_.” By most the words were sobbed out. May the eighth, and the Wilderness vast in the minds of all, and fresh battle impending, now at Spottsylvania! It was a congregation of men and women, dusky in raiment, bereaved, torn by anxieties, sick with alternating hope and fear. Only on one’s bed at night, or here in church, could the overladen heart speak without shame or acknowledgment of weakness. Outside, one must be brave again. The overladen heart expressed itself not loudly but very truly. The kneeling women looked crushed and immobile in that position. Over them was flung a veil of black, and a hand, potent from the beginning of ages, seemed yet more heavily to press downward their bowed heads. The men knelt more stiffly, but they, too, rested their foreheads on their clasped hands, and the tears came from between their closed lids.