As it touched these dead
upturned faces, strangely enough it brought out no expression of pain or
anguish--but rather as if death had arrested them only in surprise and
awe. It revealed on the lips of those who had been mortally wounded
and had turned upon their side the relief which death had brought their
suffering, sometimes shown in a faint smile. Mounting higher, it glanced
upon the actual battle line, curiously curving for the shelter of walls,
fences, and breastworks, and here the dead lay, even as when they
lay and fired, their faces prone in the grass but their muskets still
resting across the breastworks. Exposed to grape and canister from the
battery on the ridge, death had come to them mercifully also--through
the head and throat. And now the whole field lay bare in the
sunlight, broken with grotesque shadows cast from sitting, crouching,
half-recumbent but always rigid figures, which might have been effigies
on their own monuments. One half-kneeling soldier, with head bowed
between his stiffened hands, might have stood for a carven figure of
Grief at the feet of his dead comrade. A captain, shot through the brain
in the act of mounting a wall, lay sideways half across it, his lips
parted with a word of command; his sword still pointing over the barrier
the way that they should go.
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