ched into
the depths of man's emotion.

The lieutenant, still holding his arm as if it were of glass, stood
watching this battery until all detail of it was lost, save the figures
of the riders, which rose and fell and waved lashes over the black mass.

Later, he turned his eyes toward the battle where the shooting sometimes
crackled like bush-fires, sometimes sputtered with exasperating
irregularity, and sometimes reverberated like the thunder. He saw the
smoke rolling upward and saw crowds of men who ran and cheered, or stood
and blazed away at the inscrutable distance.

He came upon some stragglers, and they told him how to find the field
hospital. They described its exact location. In fact, these men, no
longer having part in the battle, knew more of it than others. They told
the performance of every corps, every division, the opinion of every
general. The lieutenant, carrying his wounded arm rearward, looked upon
them with wonder.

At the roadside a brigade was making coffee and buzzing with talk like a
girls' boarding-school. Several officers came out to him and inquired
concerning things of which he knew nothing. One, seeing his arm, began
to scold. "Why, man, that's no way to do. You want to fix that thing."
He appropriated the lieutenant and the lieutenant's wound. He cut the
sleeve and laid bare the arm, every nerve of which softly fluttered
under his touch. He bound his handkerchief over the wound, scolding away
in the meantime. His tone allowed one to think that he was in the habit
of being wounded every day. The lieutenant hung his head, feeling, in
this presence, that he did not know how to be correctly wounded.

The low white tents of the hospital were grouped around an old
school-house. There was here a singular commotion. In the foreground two
ambulances interlocked wheels in the deep mud. The drivers were tossing
the blame of it back and forth, gesticulating and berating, while from
the ambulances, both crammed with wounded, there came an occasional
groan. An interminable crowd of bandaged men were coming and going.
Great numbers sat under the trees nursing heads or arms or legs. There
was a dispute of some kind raging on the steps of the school-house.
Sitting with his back against a tree a man with a face as grey as a new
army blanket was serenely smoking a corn-cob pipe. The lieutenant wished
to rush forward and inform him that he was dying.

A busy surgeon was passing near the lieutenant. "Goo