Burial at sea

He attended many of their burials at sea. As a chaplain intoned the Lord's Prayer, two men would lift the cot with crisp ceremony. The hiss of the shroud sliding over canvas was "a sound that I felt go through my bones," Joe Custer wrote. "This was a memory, I knew then, that I would never forget: the sound of bodies sliding on canvas. . . . The battle itself didn't convey the despair, the hopelessness of this sound, for in the turmoil and the thunder of that battle night there were sounds of life all about, of men's voices, of leather pounding steel decks: There was Life - and here was Death."

(from Neptune's Inferno, by James D. Hornfischer)