ion
of the fiery disk, which seemed to him to have ceased to move, hanging
there in the heavens over the woods of the left bank. And this was
not owing to any lack of courage on his part; it was simply the
overmastering, ever increasing desire, amounting to an imperious
necessity, to be relieved from the screaming and whistling of those
projectiles, to run away somewhere and find a hole where he might hide
his head and lose himself in oblivion. Were it not for the feeling of
shame that is implanted in men's breasts and keeps them from showing the
white feather before their comrades, every one of them would lose his
head and run, in spite of himself, like the veriest poltroon.

Maurice and Jean, meanwhile, were becoming somewhat more accustomed to
their surroundings, and even when their terror was at its highest there
came to them a sort of exalted self-unconsciousness that had in it
something of bravery. They finally reached a point when they did not
even hasten their steps as they made their way through the accursed
wood. The horror of the bombardment was even greater than it had been
previously among that race of sylvan denizens, killed at their post,
struck down on every hand, like gigantic, faithful sentries. In the
delicious twilight that reigned, golden-green, beneath their umbrageous
branches, among the mysterious recesses of romantic, moss-carpeted
retreats, Death showed his ill-favored, grinning face. The solitary
fountains were contaminated; men fell dead in distant nooks whose depths
had hitherto been trod by none save wandering lovers. A bullet pierced a
man's chest; he had time to utter the one word: "hit!" and fell forward
on his face, stone dead. Upon the lips of another, who had both legs
broken by a shell, the gay laugh remained; unconscious of his hurt, he
supposed he had tripped over a root. Others, injured mortally, would run
on for some yards, jesting and conversing, until suddenly they went down
like a log in the supreme convulsion. The severest wounds were hardly
felt at the moment they were received; it was only at a later period
that the terrible suffering commenced, venting itself in shrieks and hot
tears.

Ah, that accursed wood, that wood of slaughter and despair, where, amid
the sobbing of the expiring trees, arose by degrees and swelled the
agonized clamor of wounded men. Maurice and Jean saw a zouave, nearly
disemboweled, propped against the trunk of an oak, who kept up a most
terrific h