They piled them high, these uncoffined bodies of the brave, and hurried
them under the burning sun to the trenches outside the city. They piled
them in long heaps to await the slow work of the tired grave-diggers.
The frail board coffins in which they were placed at last would often
burst from the swelling corpse. The air was filled with poisonous odors.
The hospitals were jammed with swollen, disfigured bodies of the wounded
and the dying. Gangrene and erysipelas did their work each hour in the
weltering heat of mid-summer.
But the South received her dead and mangled boys with a majesty of grief
that gave no cry to the ear of the world. Mothers lifted their eyes from
the faces of their dead and firmly spoke the words of resignation:
"Thy will, O Lord, be done!"
Her houses were filled with the wounded, the dying and the dead, but
Richmond lifted up her head. The fields about her were covered with
imperishable glory.
The Confederacy had won immortality.
The women of the South resolved to wear no mourning for their dead.
Their boys had laid their lives a joyous offering on their country's
altar. They would make no cry.
Johnston had lost six thousand and eighty-four men, dead, wounded and
missing at Seven Pines, and Lee had lost seventeen thousand five hundred
and eighty-three in seven days of continuous battle.
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