The regiment trotted in double time along the street, and the colonel
seemed to quarrel over the right of way with many artillery officers.
Batteries were waiting in the mud, and the men of them, exasperated by
the bustle of this ambitious infantry, shook their fists from saddle and
caisson, exchanging all manner of taunts and jests. The slanted guns
continued to look reflectively at the ground.
On the outskirts of the crumbled town a fringe of blue figures were
firing into the fog. The regiment swung out into skirmish lines, and the
fringe of blue figures departed, turning their backs and going joyfully
around the flank.
The bullets began a low moan off toward a ridge which loomed faintly in
the heavy mist. When the swift crescendo had reached its climax, the
missiles zipped just overhead, as if piercing an invisible curtain. A
battery on the hill was crashing with such tumult that it was as if the
guns had quarrelled and had fallen pell-mell and snarling upon each
other. The shells howled on their journey toward the town. From short
range distance there came a spatter of musketry, sweeping along an
invisible line and making faint sheets of orange light.
Some in the new skirmish lines were beginning to fire at various shadows
discerned in the vapour, forms of men suddenly revealed by some humour
of the laggard masses of clouds. The crackle of musketry began to
dominate the purring of the hostile bullets. Dan, in the front rank,
held his rifle poised, and looked into the fog keenly, coldly, with the
air of a sportsman. His nerves were so steady that it was as if they had
been drawn from his body, leaving him merely a muscular machine; but his
numb heart was somehow beating to the pealing march of the fight.
The waving skirmish line went backward and forward, ran this way and
that way. Men got lost in the fog, and men were found again. Once they
got too close to the formidable ridge, and the thing burst out as if
repulsing a general attack. Once another blue regiment was apprehended
on the very edge of firing into them. Once a friendly battery began an
elaborate and scientific process of extermination. Always as busy as
brokers, the men slid here and there over the plain, fighting their
foes, escaping from their friends, leaving a history of many movements
in the wet yellow turf, cursing the atmosphere, blazing away every time
they could identify the enemy.
In one mystic changing of the fog, as if the fingers of spirits were
drawing aside these draperies, a small group of the gray skirmishers,
silent, statuesque, were suddenly disclosed to Dan and those about him.
So vivid and near were they that there was something uncanny in the
revelation.
There might have been a second of mutual staring. Then each rifle in
each group was at the shoulder. As Dan's glance flashed along the barrel
of his weapon, the figure of a man suddenly loomed as if the musket had
been a telescope. The short black beard, the slouch hat, the pose of the
man as he sighted to shoot, made a quick picture in Dan's mind. The same
moment, it would seem, he pulled his own trigger, and the man, smitten,
lurched forward, while his exploding rifle made a slanting crimson
streak in the air, and the slouch hat fell before the body. The billows
of the fog, governed by singular impulses, rolled between.
"You got that feller sure enough," said a comrade to Dan. Dan looked at
him absent-mindedly.