the unlovely looseness of attitude denoting sudden death by the bullet,
but by far the greater number in postures of agony that told of the
tormenting flame. Their clothing was half burnt away--their hair and beard
entirely; the rain had come too late to save their nails. Some were
swollen to double girth; others shriveled to manikins. According to degree
of exposure, their faces were bloated and black or yellow and shrunken.
The contraction of muscles which had given them claws for hands had cursed
each countenance with a hideous grin. Faugh! I cannot catalogue the charms
of these gallant gentlemen who had got what they enlisted for.

XI

It was now three o'clock in the afternoon, and raining. For fifteen hours
we had been wet to the skin. Chilled, sleepy, hungry and
disappointed--profoundly disgusted with the inglorious part to which they
had been condemned--the men of my regiment did everything doggedly. The
spirit had gone quite out of them. Blue sheets of powder smoke, drifting
amongst the trees, settling against the hillsides and beaten into
nothingness by the falling rain, filled the air with their peculiar
pungent odor, but it no longer stimulated. For miles on either hand could
be heard the hoarse murmur of the battle, breaking out near by with
frightful distinctness, or sinking to a murmur in the distance; and the
one sound aroused no more attention than the other.

We had been placed again in rear of those guns, but even they and their
iron antagonists seemed to have tired of their feud, pounding away at one
another with amiable infrequency. The right of the regiment extended a
little beyond the field. On the prolongation of the line in that direction
were some regiments of another division, with one in reserve. A third of a
mile back lay the remnant of somebody's brigade looking to its wounds. The
line of forest bounding this end of the field stretched as straight as a
wall from the right of my regiment to Heaven knows what regiment of the
enemy. There suddenly appeared, marching down along this wall, not more
than two hundred yards in our front, a dozen files of gray-clad men with
rifles on the right shoulder. At an interval of fifty yards they were
followed by perhaps half as many more; and in fair supporting distance of
these stalked with confident mien a single man! There seemed to me
something indescribably ludicrous in the advance of this handful of men
upon an army, albeit with their left flank prote