several of them. There they lie, in the largest, in an open space in
the woods, from 200 to 300 poor fellows--the groans and screams--the
odor of blood, mixed with the fresh scent of the night, the grass, the
trees--that slaughter-house! O well is it their mothers, their sisters
cannot see them--cannot conceive, and never conceiv'd, these things.
One man is shot by a shell, both in the arm and leg--both are
amputated--there lie the rejected members. Some have their legs blown
off--some bullets through the breast--some indescribably horrid wounds
in the face or head, all mutilated, sickening, torn, gouged out--some
in the abdomen--some mere boys--many rebels, badly hurt--they take
their regular turns with the rest, just the same as any--the surgeons
use them just the same. Such is the camp of the wounded--such a
fragment, a reflection afar off of the bloody scene--while all over
the clear, large moon comes out at times softly, quietly shining. Amid
the woods, that scene of flitting souls--amid the crack and crash
and yelling sounds--the impalpable perfume of the woods--and yet the
pungent, stifling smoke--the radiance of the moon, looking from heaven
at intervals so placid--the sky so heavenly the clear-obscure up
there, those buoyant upper oceans--a few large placid stars beyond,
coming silently and languidly out, and then disappearing--the
melancholy, draperied night above, around. And there, upon the roads,
the fields, and in those woods, that contest, never one more desperate
in any age or land--both parties now in force--masses--no fancy
battle, no semi-play, but fierce and savage demons fighting
there--courage and scorn of death the rule, exceptions almost none.

What history, I say, can ever give--for who can know--the mad,
determin'd tussle of the armies, in all their separate large and
little squads--as this--each steep'd from crown to toe in desperate,
mortal purports? Who know the conflict, hand-to-hand--the many