for happy, painless war.  One rested upon his side, his arm beneath his head as though he slept.  Another sat against a tree, his head fallen slightly forward, his lax arms allowing his hands to droop plaintively, palms upward and half spread, as though he sat in utter weariness.  Some lay upon their backs where they had turned, thrusting up a knee in the last struggle.  Some lay face downward as the slaughtered fall.  Many had died with hands open, suddenly.  Others sat huddled, the closed hand with its thumb turned under and covered by the fingers, betokening a gradual passing of the vital spark, and a slow submission to the conqueror.  It was all a hideous and cruel dream.  Surely it could be nothing more.  It could not be reality.  The birds gurgled and twittered.  The squirrels barked and played.  The sky was innocent.  It must be a dream.

In this part of the wood the dead were mingled from both sides of the contest, the faded blue and the faded gray sometimes scarce distinguishable.  Then there came a thickening of the gray, and in turn, as the traveller advanced toward the fences and abattis, the Northern dead predominated, though still there were many faces yellow-pale, dark-framed.  At the abattis the dead lay in a horrid commingling mass, some hanging forward half through the entanglement, some still in the attitude of effort, still tearing at the spiked boughs, some standing upright as though to signal the advance.  The long row of dead lay here as where the prairie wind drives rolling weeds, heaping them up against some fence that holds them back from farther travel.

Franklin passed over the abattis, over the remaining fences, and into the intrenchments where the final stand had been.  The dead lay thick, among them many who were young.  Out across the broken and trodden fields there lay some scattered, sodden lumps upon the ground.  Franklin stood looking out over the fields, in the direction of the town.  And there he saw a sight fitly to be called the ultimate horror of all these things horrible that he had seen.

Over the fields of Louisburg there came a fearful sound, growing, rising, falling, stopping the singing and the twitter of the birds.  Across the land there came a horrible procession, advancing with short, uncertain, broken pauses—­a procession which advanced, paused, halted, broke into groups; advanced, paused, stopped, and stooped; a procession which came with wailings and bitter cries, with wringing of hands, with heads now and then laid upon the shoulders of others for support; a procession which stooped uncertainly, horribly.  It was the women of Louisburg coming to seek their slain—­a sight most monstrous, most terrible, unknown upon any field of civilized war, and unfit to be tolerated even in the thought!  It is for men, who sow the fields of battle, to attend also to the reaping.