er this double stress, torn in advance of the actual undertaking by
primitive emotions pulling in opposite directions, men bear themselves
after curious but common fashions. To a psychologist twenty men chosen
at random from the members of the battalion, waiting there in the edge
of the birch thicket for their striking hour to come, would have offered
twenty contrasting subjects for study.

Here was a man all deathly white, who spoke never a word, but who
retched with sharp painful sounds and kept his free hand gripped into
his cramping belly. That dread of being hit in the bowels which so many
men have at moments like this was making him physically sick.

Here again was a man who made jokes about cold feet and yellow streaks
and the chances of death and the like and laughed at his own jokes. But
there was a quiver of barely checked hysteria in his laughing and his
eyes shone like the eyes of a man in a fever and the sweat kept popping
out in little beads on his face.

Here again was a man who swore constantly in a monotonous undertone.
Always I am reading where a man of my race under strain or provocation
coins new and apt and picturesque oaths; but myself, I have never seen
such a man. I should have seen him, too, if he really existed anywhere
except in books, seeing that as a boy I knew many steamboat mates on
Southern waters and afterward met socially many and divers mule drivers
and horse wranglers in the great West.

But it has been my observation that in the matter of oaths the
Anglo-Saxon tongue is strangely lacking in variety and spice. There are
a few stand-by oaths--three or four nouns, two or three adjectives, one
double-jointed adjective--and these invariably are employed over and
over again. The which was undeniably true in this particular instance.
This man who swore so steadily merely repeated, times without number and
presumably with reference to the Germans, the unprettiest and at the
same time the most familiar name of compounded opprobrium that our
deficient language yields.

For the fiftieth time in half as many minutes, a captain--his name was
Captain Griswold and he was the captain of B Company--consulted the
luminous face of his wrist watch where he stooped behind shelter. He
spoke then, and his voice was plainly to be heard under the whistle and
whoop of the shells passing over his head from the supporting batteries
behind with intent to fall in the supposed defences of the enemy in
front.