but now lying between two mighty armies, directly within their line of
fire, and abandoned for a time by its people, all save a hardy few.

The effect upon him was startling. He rode along the deserted streets
and looked at the closed windows, like the eyeless sockets of a blind
man. In the streets mud and slush and snow had gathered, with no
attempt of man to clean them away, but the wheels of the cannon had cut
ruts in them a foot deep. The great white colonial houses, with their
green shutters fastened tightly, stood lone and desolate amid their
deserted lawns. No smoke rose from the chimneys. The shops were
closed. There was no sound of a child's voice in the whole town.
It was the first time that Harry had ever ridden through a deserted city,
and it was truly a city of the dead to him.

"It's almost as bad as a battlefield after the battle is over," he said
to Dalton, who was with him.

"It gives you a haunted, weird feeling," said Dalton, looking at the
closed windows and smokeless chimneys.

But the people of Fredericksburg had good cause to go. Two hundred
thousand men, hardened now to war, faced one another across the two
hundred yards of the Rappahannock. Four hundred Union cannon on the
other side of the river could easily smash their little city to pieces.
The people were scattered among their relatives in the farmhouses and
villages about Fredericksburg, eagerly awaiting the news that the
invincible Lee and Jackson had beaten back the hated invader.

But the Southern army, save for a small force, did not occupy
Fredericksburg itself.