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.
