ts of
his advance came on, pressing in toward the last row of the board,
toward the line where lay the boys of Louisburg. Many a boy was pale
and sick that day, in spite of the encouraging calm or the biting jests
of the veterans. The strange sighings in the air became more numerous
and more urgent. Now and then bits of twigs and boughs and leaves came
sifting down, cut by invisible shears, and now and then a sapling
jarred with the thud of an unseen blow. The long line in the trenches
moved and twisted restlessly.

In front of the trenches were other regiments, out ahead in the woods,
unseen, somewhere toward that place whence came the steadiest jarring
of artillery and the loudest rattling of the lesser arms. It was very
hard to lie and listen, to imagine, to suspect, to dread. For hours
the game went on, the reserves at the trenches hearing now distinctly
and now faintly the tumult of the lines, now receding, now coming on.
But the volume of the tumult, and its separation into a thousand
distinct and terrifying sounds, became in the average ever an
increasing and not a lessening thing. The cracker-popping of the
musketry became less and less a thing of sport, of reminiscences. The
whinings that passed overhead bore more and more a personal message.
These young men, who but lately had said good-bye to the women of their
kin, began to learn what war might mean. It had been heretofore a
distant, unmeasured, undreaded thing, conquerable, not to be feared.
It seemed so sweet and fit to go forth, even though it had been hard to
say good-bye!

Now there began to appear in the woods before the trenches the figures
of men, at first scattered, then becoming steadily more numerous.
There came men bearing other men whose arms lopped loosely. Some men
walked with a hand gripped tightly to an arm; others hobbled painfully.
Two men sometimes supported a third, whose head, heavy and a-droop,
would now and then be kept erect with difficulty, the eyes staring with
a ghastly, sheepish gaze, the face set in a look of horrified surprise.
This awful rabble, the parings of the defeated line in front, dropped
back through the woods, dropped back upon the young reserves, who lay
there in the line. Some of them could go no farther, but fell there
and lay silent. Others passed back into the fields where droned the
protesting bees, or where here and there a wide tree offered shelter.
Suddenly all the summer air was filled with ang