In the meantime we stood in ranks--numb, trembling, and heart-sick.

The guards around us crouched over fires, and shielded themselves as best they could with blankets and bits of tent cloth.
We had nothing to build fires with, and were not allowed to approach those of the guards.
Around us everywhere was the dull, cold, gray, hopeless desolation of the approach of minter.

The hard, wiry grass that thinly covered the once and sand, the occasional stunted weeds, and the sparse foliage of the gnarled and dwarfish undergrowth, all were parched brown and sere by the fiery heat of the long Summer, and now rattled drearily under the pitiless, cold rain, streaming from lowering clouds that seemed to have floated down to us from the cheerless summit of some great iceberg; the tall, naked pines moaned and shivered; dead, sapless leaves fell wearily to the sodden earth, like withered hopes drifting down to deepen some Slough of Despond.
Scores of our crowd found this the culmination of their misery.

They laid down upon the ground and yielded to death as s welcome relief, and we left them lying there unburied when we moved to the cars.
As we passed through the Rebel camp at dawn, on our way to the cars, Andrews and I noticed a nest of four large, bright, new tin pans--a rare thing in the Confederacy at that time.

We managed to snatch them without the guard's attention being attracted, and in an instant had them wrapped up in our blanket.