amed back
disordered, out of the shadowy wood into the open, where in the gold
sedge lay many a dead man and many a wounded. Allan saw the crimson flag
with the blue cross shaken, held on high, heard the officers crying,
"Back, men, back! Virginians, do your duty!" The wave formed again. He
tried to rise so that he might go with it, but could not. It returned
into the wood. Before him, racing toward the gully, came another
wave--Branch's brigade, yelling as it charged. He saw it a moment like a
grey wall, with the colours tossing, then it poured down into the gully
and up and past him. He put up his arms to shield his face, but the men
swerved a little and did not trample him. The worn shoes, digging into
the loose earth covered him with dust. The moving grey cloth, the smell
of sweat-drenched bodies, of powder, of leather, of hot metal, the
panting breath, the creak and swing, the sudden darkening, heat and
pressure--the passage of that wave took his own breath from him, left
him white and sick. Branch went on. He looked across the gully and saw
another wave coming--Pender, this time. Pender came without yelling,
grim and grey and close-mouthed. Pender had suffered before Beaver Dam
Creek; to-day there was not much more than half a brigade. It, too,
passed, a determined wave. Allan saw Field in the distance coming up. He
was tormented with thirst. Three yards from the gully lay stretched the
trunk of a man, the legs blown away. He was almost sure he caught the
glint of a canteen. He lay flat in the sedge and dragged himself to the
corpse. There was the canteen, indeed; marked with a great U. S., spoil
taken perhaps at Williamsburg or at Seven Pines. It was empty, drained
dry as a bone. There was another man near. Allan dragged himself on. He
thought this one dead, too, but when he reached him he opened large blue
eyes and breathed, "Water!" Allan sorrowfully shook his head. The blue
eyes did not wink nor close, they glazed and stayed open. The scout
dropped beside the body, exhausted. Field's charge passed over him. When
he opened his eyes, this portion of the plain was like a sea between
cross winds. All the broken waves were wildly tossing. Here they
recoiled, fled, even across the gully; here they seethed, inchoate;
there, regathering form and might, they readvanced to the echoing hill,
with its three breastworks and its eighty cannon. Death gorged himself
in the tangled slashing, on the treacherous banks of the slow-