rious and fought among
themselves like demons--blood drying in hideous networks and arabesques
upon the railing of the bridge--blood upon the fences, blood upon the
trembling leaves of the bushes by the wayside--blood everywhere! And
everywhere the upturned faces and torn bodies of men who had dared to do
their duty and to die: side by side the white, who led and the black who
followed--all set and motionless, but all wearing the same expression of
brave but hopeless determination. That was a brave charge at Balaklava,
but, trust me, there have been Balaklavas that are yet unsung.

So the expedition went back, and its brigades were redistributed to the
Sea Islands and to Florida; but why it was ever sent out, and why that
regiment was sent forward to take the battery without artillery and
without reinforcements, God, who knoweth all things, only knows. And God
alone knows why there must be wars and rumors of wars, and why men made
in his image must tear each other like maddened beasts.

In this battle, heavy as the losses were, the Confederates took but one
prisoner. At the third charge a tall, broad-shouldered captain, who
seemed, like another son of Thetis, almost invulnerable, darted
impetuously ahead of his men and reached the summit of the defence.
Useless bravery! In an instant a volley point blank swept away the
charging men behind him, and a gunner's sabrethrust bore him to the
ground within the works, where he lay stunned and bleeding beside the
gun he had striven so hard to take. The man who had captured him, wild
with excitement and maddened with the powder that blackened him and the
hot blood which jetted upon him, sprang down, spat upon him, spurned him
with his foot, and would have dashed out his brains with the heavy hilt
of his clubbed sword had not a strong hand grasped his uplifted wrist.

It was Fournier, who had watched the battle with an interest as intense
as that of the most ardent Southerner in the battery, though widely
different in character. His interest was that of the naturalist who
stands by eager and curious to see a rustic entrap some _rara avis_ that
he desires to study, to use for his experiment. Better for the bird: it
can suffer and die. Afterward what matter whether it stand neatly
stuffed and mounted, a voiceless worshiper, in some glass mausoleum, or
slowly moulder in a fence corner until its feathers are wafted far and
wide, and only a little tuft of greener grass remains to its