f the leaders
swore and fumed in his saddle, and furiously jerked at the bridle. An
officer screamed out an order so violently that his voice broke and
ended the sentence in a falsetto shriek.

The leading company of the infantry regiment was somewhat exposed, and
the colonel ordered it moved more fully under the shelter of the hill.
There was the clank of steel against steel.

A lieutenant of the battery rode down and passed them, holding his right
arm carefully in his left hand. And it was as if this arm was not at all
a part of him, but belonged to another man. His sober and reflective
charger went slowly. The officer's face was grimy and perspiring, and
his uniform was tousled as if he had been in direct grapple with an
enemy. He smiled grimly when the men stared at him. He turned his horse
toward the meadow.

Collins, of A Company, said: "I wisht I had a drink. I bet there's water
in that there ol' well yonder!"

"Yes; but how you goin' to git it?"

For the little meadow which intervened was now suffering a terrible
onslaught of shells. Its green and beautiful calm had vanished utterly.
Brown earth was being flung in monstrous handfuls. And there was a
massacre of the young blades of grass. They were being torn, burned,
obliterated. Some curious fortune of the battle had made this gentle
little meadow the object of the red hate of the shells, and each one as
it exploded seemed like an imprecation in the face of a maiden.

The wounded officer who was riding across this expanse said to himself,
"Why, they couldn't shoot any harder if the whole army was massed here!"

A shell struck the gray ruins of the house, and as, after the roar, the
shattered wall fell in fragments, there was a noise which resembled the
flapping of shutters during a wild gale of winter. Indeed, the infantry
paused in the shelter of the bank appeared as men standing upon a shore
contemplating a madness of the sea. The angel of calamity had under its
glance the battery upon the hill. Fewer white-legged men laboured about
the guns. A shell had smitten one of the pieces, and after the flare,
the smoke, the dust, the wrath of this blow were gone, it was possible
to see white legs stretched horizontally upon the ground. And at that
interval to the rear, where it is the business of battery horses to
stand with their noses to the fight awaiting the command to drag their
guns out of the destruction or into it or wheresoever these
incomprehensible