gly complete healing.

Following, leading, resting sometimes perforce, amid gun-shots,
putrefying wounds, green corpses, they never lacked good spirits, any
more than the birds warbling perennially afresh, as they will, over
such gangrened places, or the grass which so soon covers them. And at
length fortune, their misfortune, perversely determined that heroism
should take the form of patience under the walls of an unimportant
frontier town, with old Vauban fortifications seemingly made only for
appearance' sake, like the work in the trenches--gardener's work! round
about the walls they are called upon to superintend day after day. It
was like a calm at sea, delaying one's passage, one's purpose in being
on board at all, a dead calm, yet with an awful feeling of tension,
intolerable at last for those who were still all athirst for action.
How dumb and [233] stupid the place seemed, in its useless defiance of
conquerors, anxious, for reasons not indeed apparent, but which they
were undoubtedly within their rights in holding to, not to blow it at
once into the air--the steeple, the perky weathercock--to James Stokes
in particular, always eloquent in action, longing for heroic effort,
and ready to pay its price, maddened now by the palpable imposture in
front of him morning after morning, as he demonstrates conclusively to
Uthwart, seduced at last from the clearer sense of duty and discipline,
not by the demonstrated ease, but rather by the apparent difficulty of
what Stokes proposes to do. They might have been deterred by recent
example. Colonel --, who, as every one knew, had actually gained a
victory by disobeying orders, had not been suffered to remain in the
army of which he was an ornament. It was easy in fact for both, though
it seemed the heroic thing, to dash through the calm with delightful
sense of active powers renewed; to pass into the beleaguered town with
a handful of men, and no loss, after a manner the feasibility of which
Stokes had explained acutely but in vain at headquarters. He proved it
to Uthwart at all events, and a few others. Delightful heroism!
delightful self-indulgence! It was delayed for a moment by orders to
move forward at last, with hopes checked almost immediately after by a
countermand, bringing them right round their [234] stupid dumb enemy to
the same wearisome position once again, to the trenches and the rest,
but with their thirst for action only stimulated the more. How grea