Burnside at Fredericksburg, and we’re not there to see!... Oh, it ain’t your fault! You can’t help being Mississippi and Louisiana and bringing us down to help! You are all right and you fight like hell, and you’ve got your own quality, and we like you first-rate! If we weren’t Army of Northern Virginia, we surely would choose to be Army of Tennessee and the Southwest—so there’s no need for you to get wrathy!... Only we would be obliged to you if you’d change the name of that horse!” The clouds broke in a bitter downpour. “Ooooh-h! Country’s turned over and river’s on top! _Get up, Patsy! Get up, Pansy! Get up_—This ain’t a mud-hole, it’s a bayou! God knows, if I lived in this country I’d tear all that long, waving, black moss out of the trees! It gives me the horrors.”—“_Get on, men! get on!_”—“Captain, we can’t!” Pioneers came back. “It’s a bayou—but there’s a corduroy bridge, not more than a foot under water.” Infantry crossed, the two guns crossed. Beyond the arm of the bayou the earth was mere quaking morass. The men cut canes, armfuls and armfuls of canes, threw the bundles down, and made some sort of roadbed. Over it came those patient, famished, piteous soldiers, the horses, and behind them, heavily, heavily through the thickened mire, guns and caissons. Gun and wheel and caisson were all plastered with mud, not an inch of bright metal showing. The horses, too, were all masked and splashed. The men were in no better case, wet through, covered from head to foot with mud and mire, the worn, worn uniforms worsened yet by thorn and briar from the tangled forest. The water dripped from the rifles, stock and barrel, the water dripped from the furled and covered colours. The men’s shoes were very bad; only a few had overcoats. The clouds were leaden, the rain streamed, the comfortless day was drawing down. The detachment came into a narrow, somewhat firmer road set on either hand with tall cypresses and water oaks, from every limb of which hung the grey moss, long, crêpe-like, swaying in the chill and fretting wind. “For the Lord’s sake,” said Virginia in Louisiana, “sing something!” A man in the colour guard started “Roll, Jordan, roll”— “I want to get to Heaven when I die,— To hear Jordan roll!” The line protested. “Don’t sing about a _river!_ There’s river enough in ours now!—That darkey, back there, said the levees were breaking.” “Moses went up to de mountain top— _Land of Canaan, Canaan Land_, Moses went up to de mountain top—” “Don’t sing that either! We’re nine hundred miles from the Blue Ridge and Canaan Land.... Sech a fool to sing about mountains and home!” “Well,” said Colour Guard, “that was what I was thinking about. If anybody knows a cheerful hymn, I’ll be glad if he’ll line it out—”