Captain Ransome walked up and down behind his guns, which were firing
rapidly but with steadiness. The gunners worked alertly, but without
haste or apparent excitement. There was really no reason for excitement;
it is not much to point a cannon into a fog and fire it. Anybody can do
as much as that.
The men smiled at their noisy work, performing it with a lessening
alacrity. They cast curious regards upon their captain, who had now
mounted the banquette of the fortification and was looking across the
parapet as if observing the effect of his fire. But the only visible
effect was the substitution of wide, low-lying sheets of smoke for their
bulk of fog. Suddenly out of the obscurity burst a great sound of
cheering, which filled the intervals between the reports of the guns
with startling distinctness! To the few with leisure and opportunity to
observe, the sound was inexpressibly strange--so loud, so near, so
menacing, yet nothing seen! The men who had smiled at their work smiled
no more, but performed it with a serious and feverish activity.
From his station at the parapet Captain Ransome now saw a great
multitude of dim gray figures taking shape in the mist below him and
swarming up the slope. But the work of the guns was now fast and
furious. They swept the populous declivity with gusts of grape and
canister, the whirring of which could be heard through the thunder of
the explosions. In this awful tempest of iron the assailants struggled
forward foot by foot across their dead, firing into the embrasures,
reloading, firing again, and at last falling in their turn, a little in
advance of those who had fallen before. Soon the smoke was dense enough
to cover all. It settled down upon the attack and, drifting back,
involved the defense. The gunners could hardly see to serve their
pieces, and when occasional figures of the enemy appeared upon the
parapet--having had the good luck to get near enough to it, between two
embrasures, to be protected from the guns--they looked so unsubstantial
that it seemed hardly worth while for the few infantrymen to go to work
upon them with the bayonet and tumble them back into the ditch.
As the commander of a battery in action can find something better to do
than cracking individual skulls, Captain Ransome had retired from the
parapet to his proper post in rear of his guns, where he stood with
folded arms, his bugler beside him. Here, during the hottest of the
fight, he was approached by Lieutenant Price, who had just sabred a
daring assailant inside the work. A spirited colloquy ensued between the
two officers--spirited, at least, on the part of the lieutenant, who
gesticulated with energy and shouted again and again into his
commander's ear in the attempt to make himself heard above the infernal
din of the guns. His gestures, if coolly noted by an actor, would have
been pronounced to be those of protestation: one would have said that he
was opposed to the proceedings. Did he wish to surrender?
Captain Ransome listened without a change of countenance or attitude,
and when the other man had finished his harangue, looked him coldly in
the eyes and during a seasonable abatement of the uproar said:
"Lieutenant Price, it is not permitted to you to know _anything_. It is
sufficient that you obey my orders."
The lieutenant went to his post, and the parapet being now apparently
clear Captain Ransome returned to it to have a look over. As he mounted
the banquette a man sprang upon the crest, waving a great brilliant
flag. The captain drew a pistol from his belt and shot him dead. The
body, pitching forward, hung over the inner edge of the embankment, the
arms straight downward, both hands still grasping the flag. The man's
few followers turned and fled down the slope. Looking over the parapet,
the captain saw no living thing. He observed also that no bullets were
coming into the work.
He made a sign to the bugler, who sounded the command to cease firing.
At all other points the action had already ended with a repulse of the
Confederate attack; with the cessation of this cannonade the silence was
absolute.