The like of this is, however, what soldiers must expect, and if victory had come at the end we could have borne far worse hardship cheerfully. But the climax was the slaughter at Fredericksburg. The sting of that defeat was felt not as a dishonour, but as undeserved disaster. We knew that courage and devotion such as any people might be proud of had been uselessly sacrificed. Yet the gloom of those winter days after the battle was not that of despair; it was the bitter prospect of indefinitely prolonged struggle, an outlook dark indeed to men who were soldiers not for glory but only for home and country. The depression of that time was doubtless responsible for at least as large a loss of life as the battle beside the river. Hardship and exposure had bred sickness, and the mood of the hour offered feeble resistance to death. For months the little funeral processions were mournfully frequent; from our own brigade alone there were often two or three in a day. There are no funerals on the march; there are none after battle. On the march, if a man falls out of the ranks stricken with mortal sickness or exhaustion he is left to be picked up by the ambulance, perhaps to die alone by the way. The column cannot halt. After battle, there are but ghoulish burials. But in settled camp the decencies of death are rudely observed. The first funeral in our company was that of one of our serjeants, a young man whom we all loved. He died shortly after Christmas-time. A box of good things from home had lately arrived; out of the boards of that box we managed to make a coffin for our dear comrade and the whole company marched to his grave. But the most of our dead were buried without coffin and funerals became too common for any but scantiest ceremony. A drum and fife playing the Dead March, a firing squad of three to give a parting volley over the grave, then the chaplain, then the body of the dead soldier wrapped in his blanket and carried on a stretcher by two men followed perhaps by half-a-dozen intimate friends, and that was all. In the brigade graveyard at the top of the hill which grew so dismally in population during the winter, there were no headstones--only little pine boards torn from empty cracker-boxes, with the name of the departed written thereon in lead pencil or cut in with a jack-knife. I remember several headboards hewn from cedar, the most lasting of woods, made with great care and pains, with deep-cut inscriptions. These, you may be sure were stronger proof of true affection than many of the costly monuments which challenge the beholder's eye in our great cemeteries.