IV

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 grey 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.

V

When the next morning calmly displayed another fog, the men of the

regiment exchanged eloquent comments; but they did not abuse it at

length, because the streets of the town now contained enough galloping

aides to make three troops of cavalry, and they knew that they had come

to the verge of the great fight.

Dan conversed with the man who had once possessed a horse-hair trunk;

but they did not mention the line of hills which had furnished them in

more careless moments with an agreeable topic. They avoided it now as

condemned men do the subject of death, and yet the thought of it stayed

in their eyes as they looked at each other and talked gravely of other

things.

The expectant regiment heaved a long sigh of relief when the sharp

call: "Fall in," repeated indefinitely, arose in the streets. It was

inevitable that a bloody battle was to be fought, and they wanted to

get it off their minds. They were, however, doomed again to spend a

long period planted firmly in the mud. They craned their necks, and

wondered where some of the other regiments were going.

At last the mists rolled carelessly away. Nature made at this time all

provisions to enable foes to see each other, and immediately the roar

of guns resounded from every hill. The endless cracking of the

skirmishers swelled to rolling crashes of musketry. Shells screamed

with panther-like noises at the houses. Dan looked at the man of the

horse-hair trunk, and the man said: "Well, here she comes!"

The tenor voices of younger officers and the deep and hoarse voices of

the older ones rang in the streets. These cries pricked like spurs. The

masses of men vibrated from the suddenness with which they were plunged

into the situation of troops about to fight. That the orders were

long-expected did not concern the emotion.

Simultaneous movement was imparted to all these thick bodies of men and

horses that lay in the town. Regiment after regiment swung rapidly into

the streets that faced the sinister ridge.

This exodus was theatrical. The little sober-hued village had been like

the cloak which disguises the king of drama. It was now put aside, and

an army, splendid thing of steel and blue, stood forth in the sunlight.

Even the soldiers in the heavy columns drew deep breaths at the sight,

more majestic than they had dreamed. The heights of the enemy's

position were crowded with men who resembled people come to witness

some mighty pageant. But as the column moved steadily to their

positions, the guns, matter-of-fact warriors, doubled their number, and

shells burst with red thrilling tumult on the crowded plain. One came

into the ranks of the regiment, and after the smoke and the wrath of it

had faded, leaving motionless figures, every one stormed according to

the limits of his vocabulary, for veterans detest being killed when

they are not busy.

The regiment sometimes looked sideways at its brigade companions

composed of men who had never been in battle; but no frozen blood could

withstand the heat of the splendour of this army before the eyes on the

plain, these lines so long that the flanks were little streaks, this

mass of men of one intention. The recruits carried themselves

heedlessly. At the rear was an idle battery, and three artillerymen in

a foolish row on a caisson nudged each other and grinned at the

recruits. "You'll catch it pretty soon," they called out. They were

impersonally gleeful, as if they themselves were not also likely to

catch it pretty soon. But with this picture of an army in their hearts,

the new men perhaps felt the devotion which the drops may feel for the

wave; they were of its power and glory; they smiled jauntily at the

foolish row of gunners, and told them to go to blazes.

The column trotted across some little bridges, and spread quickly into

lines of battle. Before them was a bit of plain, and back of the plain

was the ridge. There was no time left for considerations. The men were

staring at the plain, mightily wondering how it would feel to be out

there, when a brigade in advance yelled and charged. The hill was all

grey smoke and fire-points.

That fierce elation in the terrors of war, catching a man's heart and

making it burn with such ardour that he becomes capable of dying,

flashed in the faces of the men like coloured lights, and made them

resemble leashed animals, eager, ferocious, daunting at nothing. The

line was really in its first leap before the wild, hoarse crying of the

orders.

The greed for close quarters, which is the emotion of a bayonet charge,

came then into the minds of the men and developed until it was a

madness. The field, with its faded grass of a Southern winter, seemed

to this fury miles in width.

High, slow-moving masses of smoke, with an odour of burning cotton,

engulfed the line until the men might have been swimmers. Before them

the ridge, the shore of this grey sea, was outlined, crossed, and

recrossed by sheets of flame. The howl of the battle arose to the noise

of innumerable wind demons.

The line, galloping, scrambling, plunging like a herd of wounded

horses, went over a field that was sown with corpses, the records of

other charges.

Directly in front of the black-faced, whooping Dan, carousing in this

onward sweep like a new kind of fiend, a wounded man appeared, raising

his shattered body, and staring at this rush of men down upon him. It

seemed to occur to him that he was to be trampled; he made a desperate,

piteous effort to escape; then finally huddled in a waiting heap. Dan

and the soldier near him widened the interval between them without

looking down, without appearing to heed the wounded man. This little

clump of blue seemed to reel past them as boulders reel past a train.

Bursting through a smoke-wave, the scampering, unformed bunches came

upon the wreck of the brigade that had preceded them, a floundering

mass stopped afar from the hill by the swirling volleys.

It was as if a necromancer had suddenly shown them a picture of the

fate which awaited them; but the line with muscular spasm hurled itself

over this wreckage and onward, until men were stumbling amid the relics

of other assaults, the point where the fire from the ridge consumed.

The men, panting, perspiring, with crazed faces, tried to push against

it; but it was as if they had come to a wall. The wave halted,

shuddered in an agony from the quick struggle of its two desires, then

toppled, and broke into a fragmentary thing which has no name.

Veterans could now at last be distinguished from recruits. The new

regiments were instantly gone, lost, scattered, as if they never had

been. But the sweeping failure of the charge, the battle, could not

make the veterans forget their business. With a last throe, the band of

maniacs drew itself up and blazed a volley at the hill, insignificant

to those iron entrenchments, but nevertheless expressing that singular

final despair which enables men coolly to defy the walls of a city of

death.

After this episode the men renamed their command. They called it the

Little Regiment.