e wished to rush forward and strangle with his fingers. He
craved a power that would enable him to make a world-sweeping gesture
and brush all back. His impotency appeared to him, and made his rage
into that of a driven beast.

Buried in the smoke of many rifles his anger was directed not so much
against the men whom he knew were rushing toward him as against the
swirling battle phantoms which were choking him, stuffing their smoke
robes down his parched throat. He fought frantically for respite for
his senses, for air, as a babe being smothered attacks the deadly
blankets.

There was a blare of heated rage mingled with a certain expression of
intentness on all faces. Many of the men were making low-toned noises
with their mouths, and these subdued cheers, snarls, imprecations,
prayers, made a wild, barbaric song that went as an undercurrent of
sound, strange and chantlike with the resounding chords of the war
march. The man at the youth's elbow was babbling. In it there was
something soft and tender like the monologue of a babe. The tall
soldier was swearing in a loud voice. From his lips came a black
procession of curious oaths. Of a sudden another broke out in a
querulous way like a man who has mislaid his hat. "Well, why don't
they support us? Why don't they send supports? Do they think--"

The youth in his battle sleep heard this as one who dozes hears.

There was a singular absence of heroic poses. The men bending and
surging in their haste and rage were in every impossible attitude. The
steel ramrods clanked and clanged with incessant din as the men pounded
them furiously into the hot rifle barrels. The flaps of the cartridge
boxes were all unfastened, and bobbed idiotically with each movement.
The rifles, once loaded, were jerked to the shoulder and fired without
apparent aim into the smoke or at one of the blurred and shifting forms
which upon the field before the regiment had been growing larger and
larger like puppets under a magician's hand.

The officers, at their intervals, rearward, neglected to stand in
picturesque attitudes. They were bobbing to and fro roaring directions
and encouragements. The dimensions of their howls were extraordinary.
They expended their lungs with prodigal wills. And often they nearly
stood upon their heads in their anxiety to observe the enemy on the
other side of the tumbling smoke.

The lieutenant of the youth's company had encountered a soldier who had