current
flowing on either side of him and his huddled escort, like tide waves
parted by a rock. Not a sign of feeling in his face; he is thinking.
Again he directs his eyes forward; they slowly traverse that malign and
awful crest. He addresses a calm word to his bugler. _Tra-la-la!
Tra-la-la!_ The injunction has an imperiousness which enforces it. It is
repeated by all the bugles of all the sub-ordinate commanders; the sharp
metallic notes assert themselves above the hum of the advance and
penetrate the sound of the cannon. To halt is to withdraw. The colors
move slowly back; the lines face about and sullenly follow, bearing
their wounded; the skirmishers return, gathering up the dead.

Ah, those many, many needless dead! That great soul whose beautiful body
is lying over yonder, so conspicuous against the sere hillside--could it
not have been spared the bitter consciousness of a vain devotion? Would
one exception have marred too much the pitiless perfection of the
divine, eternal plan?

ONE OF THE MISSING

Jerome Searing, a private soldier of General Sherman's army, then
confronting the enemy at and about Kennesaw Mountain, Georgia, turned
his back upon a small group of officers with whom he had been talking in
low tones, stepped across a light line of earthworks, and disappeared in
a forest. None of the men in line behind the works had said a word to
him, nor had he so much as nodded to them in passing, but all who saw
understood that this brave man had been intrusted with some perilous
duty. Jerome Searing, though a private, did not serve in the ranks; he
was detailed for service at division headquarters, being borne upon the
rolls as an orderly. "Orderly" is a word covering a multitude of duties.
An orderly may be a messenger, a clerk, an officer's servant--anything.
He may perform services for which no provision is made in orders and
army regulations. Their nature may depend upon his aptitude, upon favor,
upon accident. Private Searing, an incomparable marksman, young, hardy,
intelligent and insensible to fear, was a scout. The general commanding
his division was not content to obey orders blindly without knowing what
was in his front, even when his command was not on detached service, but
formed a fraction of the line of the army; nor was he satisfied to
receive his knowledge of his _vis-a-vis_ through the customary channels;
he wanted to know more than he was apprised of by the corps commander
and the