Berkley, his face a mass of bloody rags, gazed from his wet saddle with feverish eyes at the brave contract surgeons standing silent amid their wounded under the cedar trees.

Cripples hobbled along the lines, beseeching, imploring, catching at stirrups, plucking feebly, blindly at the horses’ manes for support.

“Oh, my God!” sobbed a wounded artilleryman, lifting himself from the blood-stained grass, “is this what I enlisted for?  Are you boys going to leave us behind to rot in rebel prisons?”

“Damn you!” shrieked another, “you ain’t licked!  What’n hell are you runnin’ away for?  Gimme a gun an’ a hoss an’ I’ll go back with you to the river!”

And another pointed a mangled and shaking hand at the passing horsemen.

“Oh, hell!” he sneered, “we don’t expect anything of the cavalry, but why are them Zouaves skedaddlin’?  They fit like wild cats at the river.  Halt! you red-legged devils.  You’re goin’ the wrong way!”

A Sister of Charity, her snowy, wide-winged headdress limp in the rain, came out of a shed and stood at the roadside, slender hands joined imploringly.

“You mustn’t leave your own wounded,” she kept repeating.  “You wouldn’t do that, gentlemen, would you?  They’ve behaved so well; they’ve done all that they could.  Won’t somebody tell General McClellan how brave they were?  If he knew, he would never leave them here.”

The Lancers looked down at her miserably as they rode; Colonel Arran passed her, saluting, but with heavy, flushed face averted; Berkley, burning with fever, leaned from his saddle, cap in hand.

“We can’t help it, Sister.  The same thing may happen to us in an hour.  But we’ll surely come back; you never must doubt that!”

Farther on they came on a broken-down ambulance, the mules gone, several dead men half buried in the wet straw, and two Sisters of Charity standing near by in pallid despair.

Colonel Arran offered them lead-horses, but they were timid and frightened; and Burgess gave his horse to the older one, and Berkley took the other up behind him, where she sat sideways clutching his belt, white coiffe aflutter, feet dangling.

At noon the regiment halted for forage and rations procured from a waggon train which had attempted to cross their line of march.  The rain ceased:  a hot sun set their drenched clothing and their horses’ flanks steaming.  At two o’clock they resumed their route; the ragged, rain-blackened pennons on the lance heads dried out scarlet; a hot breeze set in, carrying with it the distant noise of battle.

All that afternoon the heavy sound of the cannonade jarred their ears.  And at sunset it had not ceased.

Berkley’s Sister of Charity clung to his belt in silence for a while.  After a mile or two she began to free her mind in regard to the distressing situation of her companion and herself.  She informed Berkley that the negro drivers had become frightened and had cut the traces and galloped off; that she and the other Sister were on their way to the new base at Azalea Court House, where thousands of badly wounded were being gathered from the battles of the last week, and where conditions were said to be deplorable, although the hospital boats had been taking the sick to Alexandria as fast as they could be loaded.