seem to
have been devised to increase the death-rate.

This young officer is in full uniform, as if on parade. He is all agleam
with bullion--a blue-and-gold edition of the Poetry of War. A wave of
derisive laughter runs abreast of him all along the line. But how
handsome he is!--with what careless grace he sits his horse!

He reins up within a respectful distance of the corps commander and
salutes. The old soldier nods familiarly; he evidently knows him. A
brief colloquy between them is going on; the young man seems to be
preferring some request which the elder one is indisposed to grant. Let
us ride a little nearer. Ah! too late--it is ended. The young officer
salutes again, wheels his horse, and rides straight toward the crest of
the hill!

A thin line of skirmishers, the men deployed at six paces or so apart,
now pushes from the wood into the open. The commander speaks to his
bugler, who claps his instrument to his lips. _Tra-la-la! Tra-la-la!_
The skirmishers halt in their tracks.

Meantime the young horseman has advanced a hundred yards. He is riding
at a walk, straight up the long slope, with never a turn of the head.
How glorious! Gods! what would we not give to be in his place--with his
soul! He does not draw his sabre; his right hand hangs easily at his
side. The breeze catches the plume in his hat and flutters it smartly.
The sunshine rests upon his shoulder-straps, lovingly, like a visible
benediction. Straight on he rides. Ten thousand pairs of eyes are fixed
upon him with an intensity that he can hardly fail to feel; ten thousand
hearts keep quick time to the inaudible hoof-beats of his snowy steed.
He is not alone--he draws all souls after him. But we remember that we
laughed! On and on, straight for the hedge-lined wall, he rides. Not a
look backward. O, if he would but turn--if he could but see the love,
the adoration, the atonement!

Not a word is spoken; the populous depths of the forest still murmur
with their unseen and unseeing swarm, but all along the fringe is
silence. The burly commander is an equestrian statue of himself. The
mounted staff officers, their field glasses up, are motionless all. The
line of battle in the edge of the wood stands at a new kind of
"attention," each man in the attitude in which he was caught by the
consciousness of what is going on. All these hardened and impenitent
man-killers, to whom death in its awfulest forms is a fact familiar to
their every-day observatio