When he came out on the open ridge it looked as if all the universe had been swabbed with molasses, to catch flies … it had caught a million bugs. They lay in a sticky padding, steaming out into the yellow distance of the afternoon; the smell rode in a solid wave. The bugs were blue and black and gray and brown, so many shades of each color that they blended in a confused, dun crust laid on the green and gold of the fields. The bugs were horses and artillery caissons and mules, and people named … people named … think of it, said Finis Sketchley, a good ten thousand corpses. Little farms sat squat and horrid in this vast, decaying lake: Niedes’ house and barns, the Codori place … tiny, moving images walked here and there; soldiers and civilians who went searching, searching, holding cologne-soaked cloths over their noses.

The buggy wheel racked up over a log; at the peak of the rise, the log collapsed with a sound. Dan looked back. He thought he was going to fall out of the buggy; the spasm struck him suddenly; he reined in the mare, and she stood quivering all the time he was sick. As soon as his vision cleared he drove on. The horizon would incline, slowly, palpitating—the same jelly which the guns had made of it. There was a vile mist clinging in every hollow, despite the sun. He looked back at a shattered house—General Meade’s house, Duffey had called it. He began to count: one horse, two, three, four five six seven eight nine ten eleven … you complained about that one by your gate, he thought. Said that the town council would not allow it.

He headed the sorrel into the field on his right and went quartering along the west face of the ridge. Not all of the Nationals had followed after the retreating rebels; there were still living soldiers in this country. They hitched along in couples or in straggling files—far and wide amid the wilderness of swollen bugs—some of them had spades, some had stretchers, some still carried guns, they looked like French peasants. It was a picture; he had seen it; French or Irish or Dutch peasants cutting peat out of a sedgy moorland. They were stolid clods come to life, and moving slowly.