oping, scrambling, plunging like a herd of wounded horses,
went over a field that was sown with corpses, the records of other
charges.

Directly in front of the black-faced, whooping Dan, carousing in this
onward sweep like a new kind of fiend, a wounded man appeared, raising
his shattered body, and staring at this rush of men down upon him. It
seemed 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. Dan
and the soldier near him widened the interval between them without
looking down, without appearing to heed the wounded man. This little
clump of blue seemed to reel past them as boulders reel past a train.

Bursting through a smoke-wave, the scampering, unformed bunches came
upon the wreck of the brigade that had preceded them, a floundering mass
stopped afar from the hill by the swirling volleys.

It was as if a necromancer had suddenly shown them a picture of the fate
which awaited them; but the line with muscular spasm hurled itself over
this wreckage and onward, until men were stumbling amid the relics of
other assaults, the point where the fire from the ridge consumed.

The men, panting, perspiring, with crazed faces, tried to push against
it; but it was as if they had come to a wall. The wave halted, shuddered
in 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 new
regiments were instantly gone, lost, scattered, as if they never had
been. But the sweeping failure of the charge, the battle, could not make
the veterans forget their business. With a last throe, the band of
maniacs drew itself up and blazed a volley at the hill, insignificant to
those iron intrenchments, but nevertheless expressing that singular
final despair which enables men coolly to defy the walls of a city of
death.

After this episode the men renamed their command. They called it the
Little Regiment.

VI.

"I seen Dan shoot a feller yesterday. Yes sir. I'm sure it was him that
done it. And maybe he thinks about that feller now, and wonders if _he_
tumbled down just about the same way. Them things come up in a man's
mind."

Bivouac fires upon the sidewalks, in the streets, in the yards, threw
high their wavering reflections, which examined, like slim, red fingers,
the dingy, scarred walls and the piles of tumbled b