ith 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, everyone 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 artillery men 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
gray 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 gray sea, was outlined, crossed, and
re-crossed by sheets of flame. The howl of the battle arose to the noise
of innumerable wind demons.

The line, gall