V.
When the next morning calmly displayed another fog, the men of theregiment exchanged eloquent comments; but they did not abuse it atlength, because the streets of the town now contained enough gallopingaides to make three troops of cavalry, and they knew that they had cometo the verge of the great fight.
Dan conversed with the man who had once possessed a horse-hair trunk;but they did not mention the line of hills which had furnished them inmore careless moments with an agreeable topic. They avoided it now ascondemned men do the subject of death, and yet the thought of it stayedin their eyes as they looked at each other and talked gravely of otherthings.
The expectant regiment heaved a long sigh of relief when the sharp call:"Fall in," repeated indefinitely, arose in the streets. It wasinevitable that a bloody battle was to be fought, and they wanted to getit off their minds. They were, however, doomed again to spend a longperiod planted firmly in the mud. They craned their necks, and wonderedwhere some of the other regiments were going.
At last the mists rolled carelessly away. Nature made at this time allprovisions to enable foes to see each other, and immediately the roar ofguns resounded from every hill. The endless cracking of the skirmishersswelled to rolling crashes of musketry. Shells screamed withpanther-like noises at the houses. Dan looked at the man of thehorse-hair trunk, and the man said: "Well, here she comes!"
The tenor voices of younger officers and the deep and hoarse voices ofthe older ones rang in the streets. These cries pricked like spurs. Themasses of men vibrated from the suddenness with which they were plungedinto the situation of troops about to fight. That the orders werelong-expected did not concern the emotion.
Simultaneous movement was imparted to all these thick bodies of men andhorses that lay in the town. Regiment after regiment swung rapidly intothe streets that faced the sinister ridge.
This exodus was theatrical. The little sober-hued village had been likethe cloak which disguises the king of drama. It was now put aside, andan army, splendid thing of steel and blue, stood forth in the sunlight.
Even the soldiers in the heavy columns drew deep breaths at the sight,more majestic than they had dreamed. The heights of the enemy's positionwere crowded with men who resembled people come to witness some mightypageant. But as the column moved steadily to their positions, the guns,matter-of-fact warriors, doubled their number, and shells burst with redthrilling tumult on the crowded plain. One came into the ranks of theregiment, and after the smoke and the wrath of it had faded, leavingmotionless figures, everyone stormed according to the limits of hisvocabulary, for veterans detest being killed when they are not busy.
The regiment sometimes looked sideways at its brigade companionscomposed of men who had never been in battle; but no frozen blood couldwithstand the heat of the splendour of this army before the eyes on theplain, these lines so long that the flanks were little streaks, thismass of men of one intention. The recruits carried themselvesheedlessly. At the rear was an idle battery, and three artillery men ina foolish row on a caisson nudged each other and grinned at therecruits. "You'll catch it pretty soon," they called out. They wereimpersonally gleeful, as if they themselves were not also likely tocatch it pretty soon. But with this picture of an army in their hearts,the new men perhaps felt the devotion which the drops may feel for thewave; they were of its power and glory; they smiled jauntily at thefoolish row of gunners, and told them to go to blazes.
The column trotted across some little bridges, and spread quickly intolines of battle. Before them was a bit of plain, and back of the plainwas the ridge. There was no time left for considerations. The men werestaring at the plain, mightily wondering how it would feel to be outthere, when a brigade in advance yelled and charged. The hill was allgray smoke and fire-points.
That fierce elation in the terrors of war, catching a man's heart andmaking it burn with such ardour that he becomes capable of dying,flashed in the faces of the men like coloured lights, and made themresemble leashed animals, eager, ferocious, daunting at nothing. Theline was really in its first leap before the wild, hoarse crying of theorders.
The greed for close quarters which is the emotion of a bayonet charge,came then into the minds of the men and developed until it was amadness. The field, with its faded grass of a Southern winter, seemed tothis fury miles in width.
High, slow-moving masses of smoke, with an odour of burning cotton,engulfed the line until the men might have been swimmers. Before themthe ridge, the shore of this gray sea, was outlined, crossed, andre-crossed by sheets of flame. The howl of the battle arose to the noiseof innumerable wind demons.
The line, galloping, scrambling, plunging like a herd of wounded horses,went over a field that was sown with corpses, the records of othercharges.
Directly in front of the black-faced, whooping Dan, carousing in thisonward sweep like a new kind of fiend, a wounded man appeared, raisinghis shattered body, and staring at this rush of men down upon him. Itseemed to occur to him that he was to be trampled; he made a desperate,piteous effort to escape; then finally huddled in a waiting heap. Danand the soldier near him widened the interval between them withoutlooking down, without appearing to heed the wounded man. This littleclump of blue seemed to reel past them as boulders reel past a train.
Bursting through a smoke-wave, the scampering, unformed bunches cameupon the wreck of the brigade that had preceded them, a floundering massstopped afar from the hill by the swirling volleys.
It was as if a necromancer had suddenly shown them a picture of the fatewhich awaited them; but the line with muscular spasm hurled itself overthis wreckage and onward, until men were stumbling amid the relics ofother assaults, the point where the fire from the ridge consumed.
The men, panting, perspiring, with crazed faces, tried to push againstit; but it was as if they had come to a wall. The wave halted, shudderedin an agony from the quick struggle of its two desires, then toppled,and broke into a fragmentary thing which has no name.
Veterans could now at last be distinguished from recruits. The newregiments were instantly gone, lost, scattered, as if they never hadbeen. But the sweeping failure of the charge, the battle, could not makethe veterans forget their business. With a last throe, the band ofmaniacs drew itself up and blazed a volley at the hill, insignificant tothose iron intrenchments, but nevertheless expressing that singularfinal despair which enables men coolly to defy the walls of a city ofdeath.
After this episode the men renamed their command. They called it theLittle Regiment.