A dying man in blue was pitifully calling for water somewhere, in the darkness in front of Ned Vaughan's ditch. He took his canteen, got a lantern and went to find him. It might be John. If not, no matter, he was some other fellow's brother. As the light fell on his drawn face Ned murmured: "Thank God!" He pressed the canteen to his lips and held his head in his lap. It was only too plain from the steel look out of the eyes that his minutes were numbered. He moved and turned his dying face up to Ned: "Why is it you always whip us, Johnny?" He paused for breath: "I wonder--every battle I've been in we've been defeated--why--why--why, O God, why----" His head drooped and he was still. Ned wondered if some waiting loved one on the shores of eternity had given him the answer. He wrapped him tenderly in his blanket and left him at rest at last. As he turned toward his lines the unmistakable wail of a baby came faintly through the darkness--a wee voice, the half smothered cry sounding as if it were nestling in a mother's arms. He followed the sound until his lantern flashed in the wild eyes of a young woman who had fled from her home in terror during the battle and was hugging her baby frantically in her arms. Ned led her gently to an officer's quarters and made her comfortable. The glory of war was fast fading from his imagination. A grim spectre was slowly taking its place. John's shattered regiment lay down on the field with the rear guard at four o'clock to snatch an hour's sleep, their heads pillowed on the bodies of the dead. The cold moderated and a light mantle of snow fell softly just before day and covered the field, the living and the dead. When the reveille sounded at dawn, the bugler looked with awe at the thousands of white shrouded figures and wondered which would stir at his note. The living slowly rose as from the dead and shook their white shrouds. Thousands lay still, cold and immovable to await the archangel's mightier call at the last. Beyond the river, through the long night, Burnside, wild with anguish, had paced the floor of his tent. Again and again he threw his arms in a gesture of despair toward the freezing blood-stained field: "Oh, those men--those men over there! I'm thinking of them all the time----" As the rear guard turned from the field at sunrise, John Vaughan looked back across the valley of Death and saw the ragged brown and grey figures shivering in the cold, as they swarmed down from the hills and began to shake the frost from the new, warm clothes they were stripping from the dead. CHAPTER XXVI THE REST HOUR For two terrible days and nights Betty Winter saw the endless line of ambulances creep from the field of Fredericksburg. Some of these men lay on the frozen ground for forty-eight hours before relief came. Many of the wounded might have lived but for the frightful exposure to cold which followed the battle. They died in hundreds.