An awful anxiety clutched officers and men.

Few slept; the ceaseless and agonised shrieking from an emergency hospital somewhere near them in the darkness almost unnerved them.
At dawn shells began to plunge downward among the Dragoons.
McDunn's battery roused itself to reply, but muddy staff-officers arrived at full speed with orders for Claymore to make haste; and the starving command staggered off stiffly through the mud, their ears sickened by the piteous appeals of the wounded begging not to be abandoned.
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.