Before the fog had lifted, the skies had already filled with the agonised cries of the dying. Enough alive though, and moving, to give the misty field a singular crawling effect. As the mist rose further, Ellen wondered how they would cope? July had been a wicked month.
She started out, searching for those who had not yet gone beyond help. She tried to avoid stepping on the bodies, but it was impossible. You could walk on the dead in any direction a half-mile without a foot touching the ground. She stumbled, fell against a stiffening corpse, her face but inches removed from socketless eyes and a mouthless face. Once, a voice seemed to come from such a hideous wound that she stared stupidly at the mouth of the great gaping hole, only to realise the strangled sound came from beneath the lifeless body. Then would she struggle to separate the dead from the living. Many times she failed, the bodies so masticated together by cannon fire as to render separation fatal to the living portion. Here and there a peach tree rained down its soft pink petals, the flowers changing to blood-red where they fell on open wounds. Drawing new colour from ebbing life.
In vain she searched their faces – where faces remained. Praying she would not find Lavelle. Guilty, at the selfishness of her thought. A wagon came. She helped them heap it up, and watched as it cranked away through the mist – a cranking, creaking abattoir. One stiff arm, raised above the rest, swayed with the roll of the wagon. Involuntarily, she raised her hand to wave back, then closed her palm. She watched the wagon recede, the defiant arm still raised, its dead owner appealing to Heaven for vengeance.
She felt someone beside her. A Union soldier dragging a lifeless leg back towards his own side. ‘Victory has no charms, Sister … no charms!’ the anonymous soldier said. ‘But he who does not see the Hand of God in this is blind!’
Later that night as she knelt in prayer, Ellen wondered hard and long about the Hand of God.