your canteen?—mine isn’t any nearer than a spring a mile away. I’ll take it to him—know what thirst means—been thirsty myself and it means Hell!“—“Well, it was a fine mine, if it did go a bit wrong, and you deserve a lot of credit—though I don’t think some of your generals do!“—“Yes, that’s so! People stay what they always were, even through war. Lee stays Lee and Grant stays Grant, and Meade stays Meade, and A.P. Hill stays A.P. Hill. And some others stay what they always were, too,—more’s the pity!”—“Here, we’ll help cover this row.”—“Did you see little Billy Mahone charging? Pretty fine, wasn’t it?”—“Saw your Colonel Marshall and General Bartlett when they were taken prisoner. They seemed fine men. Yes, that’s so! We ain’t got a monopoly, and you ain’t got a monopoly.” The truce would last until full dark. Now, as the sun went down in a copper sky, most of the work was done. In great numbers the wounded had been lifted from the floor and sides of the crater; in great numbers the dead had been lowered into trenches, shallow trenches, the earth just covering the escaped from life. There were yet blue working-parties, a faint movement of blue and grey watchers, but the crater was lonely to what it had been. Only the wild débris remained, and the mounds beneath which life had gone out and been buried. There seemed a silence, too, heavy with the approaching night. A grey pioneer detail that had been engaged in repairing a work that flanked the vast excavation rested on spade and pick and gazed into the place. An infantry company of A.P. Hill’s, marching to some assigned post, was halted for five minutes and allowed to break ranks. Officers and men desired to look at the big hole in the ground. In groups or singly they peered over the edge or scrambled halfway down the loose earth of the sides. The sun’s rim had dipped; the west showed a forbidding hue, great level washes of a cold and sickly colour. Steadily this slope of the great earth wheeled under, leaving the quenchless hearth of the sun, facing the night without the house of light. It was all but dusk. One of the soldiers of this company was Maury Stafford. He stood alone, his back to a great projecting piece of timber and looked into the pit and across to the copper west. “Barring prison,” he thought, “for simple horror I have never seen a worse place than this.” CHAPTER XXXVI THE VALLEY