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.
But it was not until the sun had mounted higher that it struck the central horror of the field and seemed to linger there in dazzling persistence, now and then returning to it in startling flashes that it might be seen of men and those who brought succor.

A tiny brook had run obliquely near the battle line.

It was here that, the night before the battle, friend and foe had filled their canteens side by side with soldierly recklessness--or perhaps a higher instinct--purposely ignoring each other's presence; it was here that the wounded had afterwards crept, crawled, and dragged themselves, here they had pushed, wrangled, striven, and fought for a draught of that precious fluid which assuaged the thirst of their wounds--or happily put them out of their misery forever; here overborne, crushed, suffocated by numbers, pouring their own blood into the flood, and tumbling after it with their helpless bodies, they dammed the stream, until recoiling, red and angry, it had burst its banks and overflowed the cotton-field in a broad pool that now sparkled in the sunlight.

But below this human dam--a mile away--where the brook still crept sluggishly, the ambulance horses sniffed and started from it.
The detail moved on slowly, doing their work expeditiously, and apparently callously, but really only with that mechanical movement that saves emotion.

Only once they were moved to an outbreak of indignation,--the discovery of the body of an officer whose pockets were turned inside out, but whose hand was still tightly grasped on his buttoned waistcoat, as if resisting the outrage that had been done while still in life.