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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Stephen Crane's "The Complete Short Stories of Stephen Crane" presents a rich tapestry of human experience through masterfully crafted narratives, characterized by his innovative use of realism and impressionism. Crane's stories often reflect the turbulent milieu of late 19th-century America, addressing themes of war, existentialism, and the struggle against nature. His prose is marked by vivid imagery and a keen psychological insight that immerses readers in the emotional landscapes of his characters, while his minimalist style enhances the powerful resonance of his stories, offering a haunting exploration of the human condition. Born in 1871, Crane was a pioneer of naturalism and an influential figure in American literature despite his brief life, passing away at just 28. His experiences as a war correspondent during the Spanish-American War and his fascination with urban life greatly informed his writing. His exposure to the hardship and suffering of the time imbued his works with a profound depth, allowing him to convey resilience amidst despair'—an aspect that resonates throughout this anthology. This collection is highly recommended for readers seeking a deep understanding of Crane's literary genius and his unparalleled contribution to American short fiction. The breadth of emotions and situations encapsulated within these stories not only entertains but also provokes thought regarding the universal struggles of humanity. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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The Complete Short Stories of Stephen Crane
Table of Contents
Introduction
This collection presents The Complete Short Stories of Stephen Crane, gathering the full range of his shorter fiction and short prose narratives into a single, coherent reading experience. Its purpose is to make accessible, in one place, the compact works through which Crane refined his art of compression, immediacy, and psychological insight. Arranged around the major books that first carried these tales into print, and supplemented by additional short pieces, the volume emphasizes how Crane repeatedly returned to crisis, chance, and character under pressure. Readers will encounter a writer who shaped modern narrative expectations through clarity of vision and disciplined, vividly economical prose.
The scope of the edition follows Crane’s own clustering of short work: The Little Regiment and Other Episodes from the American Civil War; The Open Boat and Other Stories; Blue Hotel & His New Mittens; Whilomville Stories; Wounds in the Rain: War Stories; Great Battles of the World; Last Words; and other short stories originally published in periodicals and later collections. Taken together, these books span material issued during Crane’s lifetime as well as posthumous volumes that preserved stories and sketches not previously gathered. The arrangement foregrounds both the breadth of his subjects and the consistency of his method across disparate settings.
The texts represented here include short stories, compact war narratives, sea tales, small‑town sketches, and historical battle pieces. Some are firmly fictional; others read as reportage refined into narrative form. The collection moves from domestic episodes to battlefield vignettes, from a boat tossed on coastal waters to tense moments in frontier towns, and to concise reconstructions of historical engagements. While the forms vary—story, sketch, and dramatized history—their length, concentration, and scene‑driven focus position them within Crane’s shorter prose practice. The result is a comprehensive view of his versatility within the short form, rather than a narrow sampling of a single type.
Crane’s war writings anchor the collection’s sense of ordeal and moral ambiguity. The Little Regiment offers compact Civil War episodes that stress confusion, fear, and sudden courage without romantic gloss. Wounds in the Rain turns to the Spanish‑American War, drawing on the author’s experience as a correspondent to shape narratives that blur observation and invention while remaining faithful to the feel of action. Across these works, Crane avoids grand summaries, favoring close attention to men in motion, shifting lines of sight, and the fragmented knowledge available in combat. The effect is a distinctly modern approach to battlefield storytelling in short compass.
Equally central are Crane’s sea and frontier narratives. The Open Boat follows a handful of shipwreck survivors adrift in a dinghy, its premise allowing Crane to explore comradeship, fatigue, and nature’s impersonal force through restrained, scene‑by‑scene progression. The Blue Hotel uses a Western lodging‑house as a pressure chamber for fear, misreading, and shifting responsibility, emphasizing how perception alters fate. His New Mittens, by contrast, turns to the small scale of a single child’s day, attentive to embarrassment, pride, and social codes. Each piece demonstrates how a tightly circumscribed situation can reveal layered dynamics without recourse to elaborate plotting.
Whilomville Stories brings Crane’s eye to a fictional small town, attentive to childhood rites, neighborly surveillance, and the quick turns from play to peril. Set pieces unfold with humor and clear‑sightedness, yet resist sentimentality. The town’s adults and children alike are portrayed with a mix of sympathy and sharpness, their gestures and speech catching the texture of everyday life. Crane’s method here echoes his war and sea tales: concentrate on a decisive moment, filter action through limited vantage points, and allow consequences to emerge cleanly. The result is a domestic counterpart to his tales of extremity, no less exacting in observation.
Wounds in the Rain deserves separate note for how it adapts the correspondent’s notebook to the short story’s demands. The pieces often compress multiple observations into a single arc, retain technical detail where necessary, and rely on dialogue and visual detail over authorial explanation. Crane remains attentive to fatigue, rumor, and the half‑knowledge that governs decisions in the field. The collection’s war tales thereby serve as a bridge between journalism and fiction, showing how factual scaffolding can support an imagined sequence without compromising plausibility. The compressed length intensifies the atmosphere of risk, miscommunication, and sudden shifts in fortune.
Great Battles of the World stands apart as historical narrative rather than short fiction, yet it belongs in a complete account of Crane’s shorter prose. These pieces dramatize well‑known engagements in compact, vivid form, translating large‑scale events into graspable scenes. Crane’s approach privileges momentum, clarity of movement, and the felt experience of participants while retaining the orientation needed for non‑specialist readers. In context, these battle narratives illuminate his broader method: he renders complex action legible through selected detail and rhythmic pacing. The volume complements his invented war tales by showing the same techniques applied to historical subjects.
Last Words and other posthumous pieces preserve stories and sketches that extend Crane’s range. The material is varied—adventure, satire, character studies—and reflects his late style’s sharpened economy and preference for implication over explanation. These texts also document the pathways by which his shorter works first reached readers, through magazines and newspapers as well as books. Brought together here, they allow readers to see continuities that serial publication sometimes obscured: recurrent preoccupations with fear, bravado, misunderstanding, and the small signals by which social life is negotiated. The posthumous context underscores how much of his short work merited preservation.
Across the collection, several unifying tendencies emerge. Crane prizes immediacy and cuts swiftly to consequential scenes. He favors limited points of view that reveal how knowledge is partial and motives are mixed. Irony operates quietly, often through juxtaposition rather than authorial commentary. His prose is compact, concrete, and rhythmic, relying on sensory detail to carry meaning. Themes recur: the indifference of larger forces, the fragility and necessity of solidarity, the pull of fear and pride, and the decisive part played by chance. Whether in battlefields, boardinghouses, boats, or backyards, he tests character by narrowing options and heightening stakes.
These works remain significant as a whole because they consolidate techniques that continue to shape short fiction: scene‑led plotting, close focalization, and suggestive understatement. Crane’s narratives are strikingly contemporary in their refusal of easy verdicts; they trust readers to infer. They are also durable teaching texts for how to compress action without losing depth. Read across the volumes, one sees not a specialist in a single mode, but a writer applying the same disciplined attention to war, sea, frontier, and town. The persistence of these stories in classrooms and anthologies attests to their clarity, force, and interpretive openness.
This edition invites readers to move through Crane’s shorter work by mood as much as by subject: from the exposed boat to the tense hotel parlor, from crowded streets to smoky hillsides, from historical reconstructions to domestic misadventures. The organization by original books preserves context while the collective frame highlights continuities of method and theme. Without prescribing an order, the collection encourages comparison—how a child’s mortification echoes a soldier’s dread, how rumor in town mirrors confusion in battle. Taken together, these pieces offer a complete portrait of Crane’s mastery of short prose and its enduring capacity to surprise and clarify.
Author Biography
Stephen Crane was an American novelist, short-story writer, poet, and journalist active in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Though his life was brief, he helped transform U.S. literature through spare, unsentimental prose and a psychologically acute approach to war, urban life, and moral conflict. His best-known novel, The Red Badge of Courage, became a touchstone for depictions of combat and fear. Earlier work such as Maggie: A Girl of the Streets probed the pressures of poverty. His short stories, including The Open Boat, The Blue Hotel, and The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky, and his two volumes of poetry further display his range.
Crane was born in Newark, New Jersey, in the early 1870s and grew up in a family steeped in Methodism and reform-minded culture. He was educated at preparatory and military schools and later attended college for brief periods before leaving to pursue reporting and fiction. Those years of intermittent study exposed him to classical curricula and to contemporary debates about realism then reshaping American letters. His early reading and the professional habits of the newsroom - shorthand observation, sharp dialogue, and a feel for headlines - would become hallmarks of his style, even as he gravitated toward the broader artistic movements of realism, naturalism, and impressionism.
As a young reporter in New York, Crane frequented neighborhoods on the Lower East Side and documented street life, lodging houses, and the rhythms of casual labor. Out of those observations came Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, a compact work of fiction first issued at his own expense in the early 1890s. The book's frank treatment of slum conditions, its refusal of melodramatic consolation, and its plainspoken dialogue marked a departure from prevailing tastes. Although it initially attracted limited attention and some controversy, the novella later found a wider readership and has since been recognized as a pioneering example of American literary naturalism.
His breakthrough arrived with The Red Badge of Courage, a Civil War novel notable for its interior focus on fear, shame, and courage under fire. Composed without the author having served as a soldier, the book drew on research, testimony, and imaginative reconstruction to convey battle as a storm of sensation rather than a pageant of heroics. Its impressionistic scenes and disciplined diction impressed reviewers in the United States and abroad, establishing Crane's reputation almost overnight. The novel also positioned him among writers who reoriented war literature away from romantic glory toward psychological scrutiny and moral ambiguity, a shift that would echo through subsequent generations.
Following that success, Crane broadened his pursuits as a correspondent and fiction writer. In the late 1890s he reported from abroad, covering conflicts such as the Greco-Turkish War and the Spanish-American War. A shipwreck during one assignment, in which he survived in a small boat before reaching shore, informed his celebrated story The Open Boat. He also wrote other enduring tales - The Blue Hotel and The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky - whose spare narration, irony, and sharply drawn voices made them staples of American short fiction. Alongside these he produced additional novels, including George's Mother and The Third Violet, that explored urban and artistic milieus.
Crane's poetry, collected in The Black Riders and Other Lines and War Is Kind, pursued a stark, epigrammatic mode - brief, often aphoristic pieces that stripped pieties to their cores. Many readers found the poems bracingly modern; others were puzzled by their austerity and fierce irony. In the late 1890s he lived for periods in England, where he entered a circle of prominent writers, among them Joseph Conrad, Henry James, and H. G. Wells. He continued to publish fiction, including Active Service, set against the background of contemporary war, and The Monster, which examined small-town fears and moral responsibility. Financial strain and illness increasingly shadowed his work.
In his final years Crane struggled with deteriorating health, and he died in Germany around the turn of the century, in his late twenties, from tuberculosis. Despite the brevity of his career, his influence has been substantial. The Red Badge of Courage remains a cornerstone of war literature and is frequently taught for its subtle analysis of courage and panic without resorting to sentimentality. His short stories are widely anthologized for their economy and tonal control, while his poetry anticipates aspects of modernist concision. Critics continue to read Crane as a bridge between American realism and later experimental modes, a writer of lasting immediacy.
Historical Context
Stephen Crane’s short fiction emerged from the tumult of the United States in the 1890s, a decade framed by the Panic of 1893, industrial strikes, and the consolidation of mass-circulation newspapers and magazines. Born in Newark, New Jersey, on November 1, 1871, and dead by June 5, 1900, in Badenweiler, Germany, Crane condensed a cultural moment marked by urban poverty, sectional memory of the Civil War, and new imperial ambitions. His stories speak to readers shaped by the closing of the American frontier (1890 census), the rise of the yellow press, and the prestige of scientific determinism, which together encouraged skepticism about heroism and a fascination with environments that mold human behavior.
Crane’s upbringing in a devout Methodist household—his father Jonathan Townley Crane was a minister and moral essayist, his mother Mary Helen Peck Crane a temperance activist—contrasted with the boisterous realism he would pursue. Childhood years in Port Jervis, New York, later fictionalized as Whilomville, exposed him to small-town hierarchies and crowd dynamics. The 1892 lynching of Robert Lewis in Port Jervis offered a stark example of communal violence in the supposedly tranquil North, a historical reality that informs Crane’s attention to mobs, scapegoating, and moral panic. His brief stints at Lafayette College and Syracuse University honed his reporting instincts and fascination with American sport and slang.
Journalism shaped Crane’s art as much as any literary doctrine. The 1890s press culture—Scribner’s Magazine, Harper’s, McClure’s, Collier’s Weekly, and the competing empires of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst—rewarded compressed scenes, vivid incident, and psychological immediacy. Improved halftone printing and wire services sped stories to national audiences, while editors demanded tightly focused narratives that could sit beside illustrations. Crane learned to treat each episode as a dramatic cross-section of social forces, a habit visible across his war tales, Western sketches, and small-town studies. These venues also sustained him financially, pressuring him to produce even as his health and debts worsened.
Crane’s imagination was magnetized by war despite his 1871 birth after Appomattox. The Grand Army of the Republic and United Confederate Veterans orchestrated Blue-Gray reunions in the 1880s and 1890s, and the marketplace overflowed with reminiscences. Popular appetite for battle scenes coexisted with a sober realism that mistrusted patriotic rhetoric. Crane internalized both appetites, writing with sensory precision while suppressing grandiloquence. He wrote of soldiers as beleaguered organisms in indifferent landscapes, an approach consistent with American naturalism. His interest expanded beyond the United States to world conflicts, where he balanced anecdote with strategic overview, capturing the period’s intense curiosity about military technology and command.
Urban modernity—tenement overcrowding, mechanized labor, and mass immigration—supplied contexts for Crane’s depictions of fear, chance, and social masquerade. The Panic of 1893 deepened poverty across cities like New York, whose Bowery and Lower East Side generated both reform campaigns and sensational reportage. Anti-vice crusaders such as Anthony Comstock policed morality even as the Lexow Committee (1894–1895) exposed corruption in the New York Police Department. Crane’s own defense of a woman known as Dora Clark in 1896 made him enemies in the force, underscoring the fragility of reputation in a surveillance society. Such urban tensions reverberate through his portraits of rumor, prejudice, and quick judgment.
The shipwreck of the filibustering steamer Commodore off the Florida coast in January 1897, while Crane attempted to reach Cuba as a correspondent, crystallized his maritime vision. The Cuban War of Independence (1895–1898) had pulled American reporters south before Congress declared war on Spain in April 1898. Crane’s days adrift in a dinghy taught him the indifferent contours of nature more brutally than any theory. By the time he later covered the U.S. campaign in Cuba, the lesson had set: men improvise meanings under pressure; the sea, weather, and terrain remain implacable. That philosophical pivot echoes across his sea tales and war sketches alike.
Crane followed the U.S. Fifth Corps into eastern Cuba in 1898, observing terrain from Daiquirí to Santiago under Major General William R. Shafter’s command. Dispatches and later stories reflect on Las Guasimas (June 24), El Caney (July 1), and the San Juan Heights (July 1), as well as fever-ridden camps and logistical confusion. He registered modern war’s materiality: Mauser versus Krag–Jørgensen rifles, smokeless powder, blockhouses, and the press corps’ precarious vantage. Disease—yellow fever, malaria, dysentery—killed more soldiers than bullets, a grim calculus shaping Crane’s persistent irony. The surrender of Santiago on July 17, 1898, closed his Cuban chapter but seeded his most granular battle pieces.
The American West offered Crane a second proving ground for modern myths. With Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 frontier thesis announcing national transformation, railroads, hotels, and telegraphs were remaking prairie towns into commercial crossroads. Wild West shows curated nostalgia while dime novels encouraged melodrama. Crane’s Western scenes examine the ritual of hospitality, the currency of reputation, and the speed with which strangers forge and break narratives under communal pressure. He tracks how rumor, alcohol, cards, and lodging houses become theaters of identity, distilling the sociological drift from rough settlement to regulated space. This historical moment fuels his skeptical treatment of codes like honor and bravery.
Crane’s small-town fictions draw upon late nineteenth-century American provincial life, where schoolrooms, parades, and volunteer firehouses performed civic belonging. Such communities, often whitened in nostalgic memory, contained anxieties about race, immigration, and economic competition. The 1890s witnessed Jim Crow’s consolidation after Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), while northern towns wrestled with their own segregations. Vigilantism and mass sentiment could flare suddenly, as Port Jervis had shown in 1892. Crane’s interest in the psychology of crowds, ethical cowardice, and the punishment of perceived deviation reflects these historical pressures. Children in his stories are socialized within this matrix, rehearsing the triumphs and humiliations of adult authority.
Crane’s transatlantic life from 1897 on—residences in England, including a final home at Brede Place near Rye, Sussex—placed him in a circle that included Joseph Conrad, Henry James, H. G. Wells, and Ford Madox Hueffer (Ford Madox Ford). British publishers and critics had championed his work early, and he reciprocated by writing for London periodicals while dispatching American pieces to magazines like Collier’s. The salon at Brede linked his journalism with European modernism’s stylistic experiments. Conversation about imperial wars, naval power, and narrative technique influenced his late style: pared, ironic, and obliquely symbolic. His short stories thus sit at a crossroads of Anglo-American literary innovation.
Crane’s technique blends American realism with impressionist color and cadence. The short story form—compressed, episodic, angled toward epiphany—matched the 1890s magazine market and his own need for speed. He favored free-indirect perspective, anonymous or shifting focalization, and recurrent color motifs that imply moral ambiguities. Scientific discourse from Darwin and Spencer filtered into his causal logic, where environment and chance frequently overmatch intention. Yet his prose also tracks micro-gestures—how a hand trembles or a gaze falters—suggesting ethical possibility amid determinism. This synthesis enabled him to treat war fronts, river towns, hotel rooms, and schoolyards with the same analytic pressure and atmospheric shimmer.
The U.S. culture of commemoration in the 1890s framed Crane’s military interests beyond contemporary conflicts. Veterans’ reunions, battlefield preservation at places like Gettysburg, and the Centennial exhibitions had turned war into public pedagogy. Popular histories mixed anecdote with strategic narrative, and Crane’s own battle sketches harmonize with that appetite while resisting rhetorical inflation. He considers commanders and terrain but returns insistently to perception under fire: auditory confusion, optical distortion, the weird intimacy of fear. By situating individual experience within acknowledged historical episodes, he bridges the eyewitness authority prized by readers and the skeptical scrutiny characteristic of a generation disenchanted with triumphalist myth.
Crane’s financial precarity shaped his output and topics. He depended on fees from periodicals such as Scribner’s Magazine (where “The Open Boat” appeared in 1897), McClure’s (which showcased frontier and domestic pieces in 1898), and Collier’s Weekly (which ran new stories in 1899). Editors’ calendars influenced his story lengths and episodic structures. Contracts also pushed him toward composite volumes that repurposed magazine work into books, a common practice in the period’s transatlantic market. The need to sell to varied audiences partly explains his breadth—sea, war, Western, village—while the consistency of tone and moral inquiry reveals the coherent vision beneath the opportunistic surface.
Personal relationships propelled Crane into settings that later nourished fiction. In Jacksonville, Florida, he met Cora Taylor in 1896, a businesswoman and writer who would be known as Cora Crane; together they navigated the press world’s hazards and the Cuba venture. Their later life in England made their home a hub for writers and reporters who traded war stories and debated narrative form. These domestic environments—boardinghouses, hotels, manor rooms filled with manuscripts and bills—mirrored the transient spaces in his fiction where characters test their stories about themselves. The porous boundary between reportage, gossip, and literature became a method as well as a condition.
Crane’s health deteriorated rapidly under the pressures of war reporting, debt, and relentless production. Symptoms associated with tuberculosis appeared by the mid-1890s, with hemoptysis and exhaustion compromising his output. In early 1900 he traveled to Badenweiler, a German spa town in the Black Forest, seeking to recover in mountain air long believed curative for consumption. He died there on June 5, 1900, aged twenty-eight. The brevity of his life compresses his canon, making the posthumous gathering of fragments, sketches, and late war pieces part of the historical story. Publishers organized material left on desks and in magazines, shaping his reputation through editorial selection.
Race, ethnicity, and immigration were central to the period’s discourse and weave through Crane’s depictions of speech and stereotype. The 1890s saw heightened nativism, the rise of scientific racism, and patterns of residential segregation. Even when Crane focuses on small-town America or transient hotels, his characters operate within these hierarchies, negotiating honor and shame in mixed company. He grants interiority to figures pushed to the margins while tracking the mechanics of social exclusion: rumor, spectacle, and bureaucratic force. The ambivalences of Reconstruction’s aftermath, Jim Crow law, and northern complicity inform the tensions he renders in crowd scenes and private reckonings alike.
Crane’s corpus belongs to a media ecosystem enthralled by speed—trains, cables, steamships—and by a culture of spectacular risk. From the Commodore’s foundering in 1897 to the U.S. fleet off Santiago in 1898, he witnessed how technology magnified chance and compressed time. His stories mirror this velocity: sudden convergences, instantaneous misreadings, and swift reversals. Yet they also function as social diagnosis, tracing how institutions—armies, hotels, newspapers, schools—produce and discipline behavior. Placed against the transition from a sectional United States to an imperial republic and an international literary scene, his short fiction registers the pressures of a nation testing its myths in the machinery of modern life.
Synopsis (Selection)
The Little Regiment and Other Episodes from the American Civil War
Civil War vignettes of soldiers and civilians thrust into sudden combat, emphasizing confusion, courage, and the ironies of duty. The pieces pivot on split-second choices rather than grand strategy.
The Open Boat and Other Stories
Centered on survivors adrift after a shipwreck and companion tales of the West and the city, the volume charts ordinary people under indifferent nature and volatile social codes. Chance and shifting perception drive the narratives.
Blue Hotel & His New Mittens
A stark Western of suspicion and bravado escalating toward violence is paired with a brief domestic tale about a boy’s small misstep and its consequences. Together they probe perception, responsibility, and how minor frictions grow.
Whilomville Stories
Linked small-town episodes focused on children and neighbors in fictional Whilomville trace mischief, embarrassment, and local rituals. The stories show how reputations form and innocence collides with social expectations.
Wounds in the Rain: War Stories
Reportage-inflected tales from the Spanish–American War and other campaigns depict correspondents, soldiers, and civilians at the edge of action. Emphasis falls on exhaustion, rumor, and the blunt mechanics of modern battle.
Great Battles of the World
Stylized retellings of famous engagements from antiquity to the nineteenth century, presented as swift narrative panoramas. The sketches favor dramatic turns and individual courage over exhaustive military analysis.
Last Words
A posthumous gathering of late tales, sketches, and war pieces ranging from terse combat scenes to ironic metropolitan vignettes. The collection distills Crane’s compressed style and his interest in fate, fear, and fractured heroism.
Other Short Stories (Early Works)
Brief urban and campus sketches, ironic parables, and early war pieces that test perceptions of bravery, belief, and social pretense. They establish Crane’s naturalistic tone and quick, scene-driven storytelling.
Other Short Stories (Later Works)
Mature Westerns, sea tales, and city stories marked by psychological tension, terse dialogue, and abrupt moral pivots. These pieces refine Crane’s focus on chance, code, and the limits of self-knowledge.
The Complete Short Stories of Stephen Crane
The Little Regiment and Other Episodes from the American Civil War
THE LITTLE REGIMENT
I
The fog made the clothes of the men of the column in the roadway seem of a luminous quality. It imparted to the heavy infantry overcoats a new colour, a kind of blue which was so pale that a regiment might have been merely a long, low shadow in the mist. However, a muttering, one part grumble, three parts joke, hovered in the air above the thick ranks, and blended in an undertoned roar, which was the voice of the column.
The town on the southern shore of the little river loomed spectrally, a faint etching upon the grey cloud-masses which were shifting with oily languor. A long row of guns upon the northern bank had been pitiless in their hatred, but a little battered belfry could be dimly seen still pointing with invincible resolution toward the heavens.
The enclouded air vibrated with noises made by hidden colossal things. The infantry tramplings, the heavy rumbling of the artillery, made the earth speak of gigantic preparation. Guns on distant heights thundered from time to time with sudden, nervous roar, as if unable to endure in silence a knowledge of hostile troops massing, other guns going to position. These sounds, near and remote, defined an immense battle-ground, described the tremendous width of the stage of the prospective drama. The voices of the guns, slightly casual, unexcited in their challenges and warnings, could not destroy the unutterable eloquence of the word in the air, a meaning of impending struggle which made the breath halt at the lips.
The column in the roadway was ankle-deep in mud. The men swore piously at the rain which drizzled upon them, compelling them to stand always very erect in fear of the drops that would sweep in under their coat-collars. The fog was as cold as wet cloths. The men stuffed their hands deep in their pockets, and huddled their muskets in their arms. The machinery of orders had rooted these soldiers deeply into the mud, precisely as almighty nature roots mullein stalks.
They listened and speculated when a tumult of fighting came from the dim town across the river. When the noise lulled for a time they resumed their descriptions of the mud and graphically exaggerated the number of hours they had been kept waiting. The general commanding their division rode along the ranks, and they cheered admiringly, affectionately, crying out to him gleeful prophecies of the coming battle. Each man scanned him with a peculiarly keen personal interest, and afterward spoke of him with unquestioning devotion and confidence, narrating anecdotes which were mainly untrue.
When the jokers lifted the shrill voices which invariably belonged to them, flinging witticisms at their comrades, a loud laugh would sweep from rank to rank, and soldiers who had not heard would lean forward and demand repetition. When were borne past them some wounded men with grey and blood-smeared faces, and eyes that rolled in that helpless beseeching for assistance from the sky which comes with supreme pain, the soldiers in the mud watched intently, and from time to time asked of the bearers an account of the affair. Frequently they bragged of their corps, their division, their brigade, their regiment. Anon they referred to the mud and the cold drizzle. Upon this threshold of a wild scene of death they, in short, defied the proportion of events with that splendour of heedlessness which belongs only to veterans.
"Like a lot of wooden soldiers," swore Billie Dempster, moving his feet in the thick mass, and casting a vindictive glance indefinitely: "standing in the mud for a hundred years."
"Oh, shut up!" murmured his brother Dan. The manner of his words implied that this fraternal voice near him was an indescribable bore.
"Why should I shut up?" demanded Billie.
"Because you're a fool," cried Dan, taking no time to debate it; "the biggest fool in the regiment."
There was but one man between them, and he was habituated. These insults from brother to brother had swept across his chest, flown past his face, many times during two long campaigns. Upon this occasion he simply grinned first at one, then at the other.
The way of these brothers was not an unknown topic in regimental gossip. They had enlisted simultaneously, with each sneering loudly at the other for doing it. They left their little town, and went forward with the flag, exchanging protestations of undying suspicion. In the camp life they so openly despised each other that, when entertaining quarrels were lacking, their companions often contrived situations calculated to bring forth display of this fraternal dislike.
Both were large-limbed, strong young men, and often fought with friends in camp unless one was near to interfere with the other. This latter happened rather frequently, because Dan, preposterously willing for any manner of combat, had a very great horror of seeing Billie in a fight; and Billie, almost odiously ready himself, simply refused to see Dan stripped to his shirt and with his fists aloft. This sat queerly upon them, and made them the objects of plots.
When Dan jumped through a ring of eager soldiers and dragged forth his raving brother by the arm, a thing often predicted would almost come to pass. When Billie performed the same office for Dan, the prediction would again miss fulfilment by an inch. But indeed they never fought together, although they were perpetually upon the verge.
They expressed longing for such conflict. As a matter of truth, they had at one time made full arrangement for it, but even with the encouragement and interest of half of the regiment they somehow failed to achieve collision.
If Dan became a victim of police duty, no jeering was so destructive to the feelings as Billie's comment. If Billie got a call to appear at the headquarters, none would so genially prophesy his complete undoing as Dan. Small misfortunes to one were, in truth, invariably greeted with hilarity by the other, who seemed to see in them great re-enforcement of his opinion.
As soldiers, they expressed each for each a scorn intense and blasting. After a certain battle, Billie was promoted to corporal. When Dan was told of it, he seemed smitten dumb with astonishment and patriotic indignation. He stared in silence, while the dark blood rushed to Billie's forehead, and he shifted his weight from foot to foot. Dan at last found his tongue, and said: "Well, I'm durned!" If he had heard that an army mule had been appointed to the post of corps commander, his tone could not have had more derision in it. Afterward, he adopted a fervid insubordination, an almost religious reluctance to obey the new corporal's orders, which came near to developing the desired strife.
It is here finally to be recorded also that Dan, most ferociously profane in speech, very rarely swore in the presence of his brother; and that Billie, whose oaths came from his lips with the grace of falling pebbles, was seldom known to express himself in this manner when near his brother Dan.
At last the afternoon contained a suggestion of evening. Metallic cries rang suddenly from end to end of the column. They inspired at once a quick, business-like adjustment. The long thing stirred in the mud. The men had hushed, and were looking across the river. A moment later the shadowy mass of pale blue figures was moving steadily toward the stream. There could be heard from the town a clash of swift fighting and cheering. The noise of the shooting coming through the heavy air had its sharpness taken from it, and sounded in thuds.
There was a halt upon the bank above the pontoons. When the column went winding down the incline, and streamed out upon the bridge, the fog had faded to a great degree, and in the clearer dusk the guns on a distant ridge were enabled to perceive the crossing. The long whirling outcries of the shells came into the air above the men. An occasional solid shot struck the surface of the river, and dashed into view a sudden vertical jet. The distance was subtly illuminated by the lightning from the deep-booming guns. One by one the batteries on the northern shore aroused, the innumerable guns bellowing in angry oration at the distant ridge. The rolling thunder crashed and reverberated as a wild surf sounds on a still night, and to this music the column marched across the pontoons.
The waters of the grim river curled away in a smile from the ends of the great boats, and slid swiftly beneath the planking. The dark, riddled walls of the town upreared before the troops, and from a region hidden by these hammered and tumbled houses came incessantly the yells and firings of a prolonged and close skirmish.
When Dan had called his brother a fool, his voice had been so decisive, so brightly assured, that many men had laughed, considering it to be great humour under the circumstances. The incident happened to rankle deep in Billie. It was not any strange thing that his brother had called him a fool. In fact, he often called him a fool with exactly the same amount of cheerful and prompt conviction, and before large audiences, too. Billie wondered in his own mind why he took such profound offence in this case; but, at any rate, as he slid down the bank and on to the bridge with his regiment, he was searching his knowledge for something that would pierce Dan's blithesome spirit. But he could contrive nothing at this time, and his impotency made the glance which he was once able to give his brother still more malignant.
The guns far and near were roaring a fearful and grand introduction for this column which was marching upon the stage of death. Billie felt it, but only in a numb way. His heart was cased in that curious dissonant metal which covers a man's emotions at such times. The terrible voices from the hills told him that in this wide conflict his life was an insignificant fact, and that his death would be an insignificant fact. They portended the whirlwind to which he would be as necessary as a butterfly's waved wing. The solemnity, the sadness of it came near enough to make him wonder why he was neither solemn nor sad. When his mind vaguely adjusted events according to their importance to him, it appeared that the uppermost thing was the fact that upon the eve of battle, and before many comrades, his brother had called him a fool.
Dan was in a particularly happy mood. "Hurray! Look at 'em shoot," he said, when the long witches' croon of the shells came into the air. It enraged Billie when he felt the little thorn in him, and saw at the same time that his brother had completely forgotten it.
The column went from the bridge into more mud. At this southern end there was a chaos of hoarse directions and commands. Darkness was coming upon the earth, and regiments were being hurried up the slippery bank. As Billie floundered in the black mud, amid the swearing, sliding crowd, he suddenly resolved that, in the absence of other means of hurting Dan, he would avoid looking at him, refrain from speaking to him, pay absolutely no heed to his existence; and this done skilfully would, he imagined, soon reduce his brother to a poignant sensitiveness.
At the top of the bank the column again halted and rearranged itself, as a man after a climb rearranges his clothing. Presently the great steel-backed brigade, an infinitely graceful thing in the rhythm and ease of its veteran movement, swung up a little narrow, slanting street.
Evening had come so swiftly that the fighting on the remote borders of the town was indicated by thin flashes of flame. Some building was on fire, and its reflection upon the clouds was an oval of delicate pink.
II
All demeanour of rural serenity had been wrenched violently from the little town by the guns and by the waves of men which had surged through it. The hand of war laid upon this village had in an instant changed it to a thing of remnants. It resembled the place of a monstrous shaking of the earth itself. The windows, now mere unsightly holes, made the tumbled and blackened dwellings seem skeletons. Doors lay splintered to fragments. Chimneys had flung their bricks everywhere. The artillery fire had not neglected the rows of gentle shade-trees which had lined the streets. Branches and heavy trunks cluttered the mud in driftwood tangles, while a few shattered forms had contrived to remain dejectedly, mournfully upright. They expressed an innocence, a helplessness, which perforce created a pity for their happening into this caldron of battle. Furthermore, there was under foot a vast collection of odd things reminiscent of the charge, the fight, the retreat. There were boxes and barrels filled with earth, behind which riflemen had lain snugly, and in these little trenches were the dead in blue with the dead in grey, the poses eloquent of the struggles for possession of the town, until the history of the whole conflict was written plainly in the streets.
And yet the spirit of this little city, its quaint individuality, poised in the air above the ruins, defying the guns, the sweeping volleys; holding in contempt those avaricious blazes which had attacked many dwellings. The hard earthen sidewalks proclaimed the games that had been played there during long lazy days, in the careful, shadows of the trees. "General Merchandise," in faint letters upon a long board, had to be read with a slanted glance, for the sign dangled by one end; but the porch of the old store was a palpable legend of wide-hatted men, smoking.
This subtle essence, this soul of the life that had been, brushed like invisible wings the thoughts of the men in the swift columns that came up from the river.
In the darkness a loud and endless humming arose from the great blue crowds bivouacked in the streets. From time to time a sharp spatter of firing from far picket lines entered this bass chorus. The smell from the smouldering ruins floated on the cold night breeze.
Dan, seated ruefully upon the doorstep of a shot-pierced house, was proclaiming the campaign badly managed. Orders had been issued forbidding camp-fires.
Suddenly he ceased his oration, and scanning the group of his comrades, said: "Where's Billie? Do you know?"
"Gone on picket."
"Get out! Has he?" said Dan. "No business to go on picket. Why don't some of them other corporals take their turn?"
A bearded private was smoking his pipe of confiscated tobacco, seated comfortably upon a horse-hair trunk which he had dragged from the house. He observed: "Was his turn."
"No such thing," cried Dan. He and the man on the horse-hair trunk held discussion in which Dan stoutly maintained that if his brother had been sent on picket it was an injustice. He ceased his argument when another soldier, upon whose arms could faintly be seen the two stripes of a corporal, entered the circle. "Humph," said Dan, "where you been?"
The corporal made no answer. Presently Dan said: "Billie, where you been?"
His brother did not seem to hear these inquiries. He glanced at the house which towered above them, and remarked casually to the man on the horse-hair trunk: "Funny, ain't it? After the pelting this town got, you'd think there wouldn't be one brick left on another."
"Oh," said Dan, glowering at his brother's back. "Getting mighty smart, ain't you?"
The absence of camp-fires allowed the evening to make apparent its quality of faint silver light in which the blue clothes of the throng became black, and the faces became white expanses, void of expression. There was considerable excitement a short distance from the group around the doorstep. A soldier had chanced upon a hoop-skirt, and arrayed in it he was performing a dance amid the applause of his companions. Billie and a greater part of the men immediately poured over there to witness the exhibition.
"What's the matter with Billie?" demanded Dan of the man upon the horse-hair trunk.
"How do I know?" rejoined the other in mild resentment. He arose and walked away. When he returned he said briefly, in a weather-wise tone, that it would rain during the night.
Dan took a seat upon one end of the horse-hair trunk. He was facing the crowd around the dancer, which in its hilarity swung this way and that way. At times he imagined that he could recognise his brother's face.
He and the man on the other end of the trunk thoughtfully talked of the army's position. To their minds, infantry and artillery were in a most precarious jumble in the streets of the town; but they did not grow nervous over it, for they were used to having the army appear in a precarious jumble to their minds. They had learned to accept such puzzling situations as a consequence of their position in the ranks, and were now usually in possession of a simple but perfectly immovable faith that somebody understood the jumble. Even if they had been convinced that the army was a headless monster, they would merely have nodded with the veteran's singular cynicism. It was none of their business as soldiers. Their duty was to grab sleep and food when occasion permitted, and cheerfully fight wherever their feet were planted until more orders came. This was a task sufficiently absorbing.
They spoke of other corps, and this talk being confidential, their voices dropped to tones of awe. "The Ninth"—"The First"—"The Fifth"—"The Sixth"—"The Third"—the simple numerals rang with eloquence, each having a meaning which was to float through many years as no intangible arithmetical mist, but as pregnant with individuality as the names of cities.
Of their own corps they spoke with a deep veneration, an idolatry, a supreme confidence which apparently would not blanch to see it match against everything.
It was as if their respect for other corps was due partly to a wonder that organisations not blessed with their own famous numeral could take such an interest in war. They could prove that their division was the best in the corps, and that their brigade was the best in the division. And their regiment—it was plain that no fortune of life was equal to the chance which caused a man to be born, so to speak, into this command, the keystone of the defending arch.
At times Dan covered with insults the character of a vague, unnamed general to whose petulance and busy-body spirit he ascribed the order which made hot coffee impossible.
Dan said that victory was certain in the coming battle. The other man seemed rather dubious. He remarked upon the fortified line of hills, which had impressed him even from the other side of the river. "Shucks," said Dan. "Why, we——" He pictured a splendid overflowing of these hills by the sea of men in blue. During the period of this conversation Dan's glance searched the merry throng about the dancer. Above the babble of voices in the street a far-away thunder could sometimes be heard—evidently from the very edge of the horizon—the boom-boom of restless guns.
III
Ultimately the night deepened to the tone of black velvet. The outlines of the fireless camp were like the faint drawings upon ancient tapestry. The glint of a rifle, the shine of a button, might have been of threads of silver and gold sewn upon the fabric of the night. There was little presented to the vision, but to a sense more subtle there was discernible in the atmosphere something like a pulse; a mystic beating which would have told a stranger of the presence of a giant thing—the slumbering mass of regiments and batteries.
With tires forbidden, the floor of a dry old kitchen was thought to be a good exchange for the cold earth of December, even if a shell had exploded in it, and knocked it so out of shape that when a man lay curled in his blanket his last waking thought was likely to be of the wall that bellied out above him, as if strongly anxious to topple upon the score of soldiers.
Billie looked at the bricks ever about to descend in a shower upon his face, listened to the industrious pickets plying their rifles on the border of the town, imagined some measure of the din of the coming battle, thought of Dan and Dan's chagrin, and rolling over in his blanket went to sleep with satisfaction.
At an unknown hour he was aroused by the creaking of boards. Lifting himself upon his elbow, he saw a sergeant prowling among the sleeping forms. The sergeant carried a candle in an old brass candlestick. He would have resembled some old farmer on an unusual midnight tour if it were not for the significance of his gleaming buttons and striped sleeves.
Billie blinked stupidly at the light until his mind returned from the journeys of slumber. The sergeant stooped among the unconscious soldiers, holding the candle close, and peering into each face.
"Hello, Haines," said Billie. "Relief?"
"Hello, Billie," said the sergeant. "Special duty."
"Dan got to go?"
"Jameson, Hunter, McCormack, D. Dempster. Yes. Where is he?"
"Over there by the winder," said Billie, gesturing. "What is it for, Haines?"
"You don't think I know, do you?" demanded the sergeant. He began to pipe sharply but cheerily at men upon the floor. "Come, Mac, get up here. Here's a special for you. Wake up, Jameson. Come along, Dannie, me boy."
Each man at once took this call to duty as a personal affront. They pulled themselves out of their blankets, rubbed their eyes, and swore at whoever was responsible. "Them's orders," cried the sergeant. "Come! Get out of here." An undetailed head with dishevelled hair thrust out from a blanket, and a sleepy voice said: "Shut up, Haines, and go home."
When the detail clanked out of the kitchen, all but one of the remaining men seemed to be again asleep. Billie, leaning on his elbow, was gazing into darkness. When the footsteps died to silence, he curled himself into his blanket.
At the first cool lavender lights of daybreak he aroused again, and scanned his recumbent companions. Seeing a wakeful one he asked: "Is Dan back yet?"
The man said: "Hain't seen 'im."
Billie put both hands behind his head, and scowled into the air. "Can't see the use of these cussed details in the night-time," he muttered in his most unreasonable tones. "Darn nuisances. Why can't they——" He grumbled at length and graphically.
When Dan entered with the squad, however, Billie was convincingly asleep.
IV
The regiment trotted in double time along the street, and the colonel seemed to quarrel over the right of way with many artillery officers. Batteries were waiting in the mud, and the men of them, exasperated by the bustle of this ambitious infantry, shook their fists from saddle and caisson, exchanging all manner of taunts and jests. The slanted guns continued to look reflectively at the ground.
On the outskirts of the crumbled town a fringe of blue figures were firing into the fog. The regiment swung out into skirmish lines, and the fringe of blue figures departed, turning their backs and going joyfully around the flank.
The bullets began a low moan off toward a ridge which loomed faintly in the heavy mist. When the swift crescendo had reached its climax, the missiles zipped just overhead, as if piercing an invisible curtain. A battery on the hill was crashing with such tumult that it was as if the guns had quarrelled and had fallen pell-mell and snarling upon each other. The shells howled on their journey toward the town. From short-range distance there came a spatter of musketry, sweeping along an invisible line, and making faint sheets of orange light.
Some in the new skirmish lines were beginning to fire at various shadows discerned in the vapour, forms of men suddenly revealed by some humour of the laggard masses of clouds. The crackle of musketry began to dominate the purring of the hostile bullets. Dan, in the front rank, held his rifle poised, and looked into the fog keenly, coldly, with the air of a sportsman. His nerves were so steady that it was as if they had been drawn from his body, leaving him merely a muscular machine; but his numb heart was somehow beating to the pealing march of the fight.
The waving skirmish line went backward and forward, ran this way and that way. Men got lost in the fog, and men were found again. Once they got too close to the formidable ridge, and the thing burst out as if repulsing a general attack. Once another blue regiment was apprehended on the very edge of firing into them. Once a friendly battery began an elaborate and scientific process of extermination. Always as busy as brokers, the men slid here and there over the plain, fighting their foes, escaping from their friends, leaving a history of many movements in the wet yellow turf, cursing the atmosphere, blazing away every time they could identify the enemy.
In one mystic changing of the fog as if the fingers of spirits were drawing aside these draperies, a small group of the grey skirmishers, silent, statuesque, were suddenly disclosed to Dan and those about him. So vivid and near were they that there was something uncanny in the revelation.
There might have been a second of mutual staring. Then each rifle in each group was at the shoulder. As Dan's glance flashed along the barrel of his weapon, the figure of a man suddenly loomed as if the musket had been a telescope. The short black beard, the slouch hat, the pose of the man as he sighted to shoot, made a quick picture in Dan's mind. The same moment, it would seem, he pulled his own trigger, and the man, smitten, lurched forward, while his exploding rifle made a slanting crimson streak in the air, and the slouch hat fell before the body. The billows of the fog, governed by singular impulses, rolled between.
"You got that feller sure enough," said a comrade to Dan. Dan looked at him absent-mindedly.
V
When the next morning calmly displayed another fog, the men of the regiment exchanged eloquent comments; but they did not abuse it at length, because the streets of the town now contained enough galloping aides to make three troops of cavalry, and they knew that they had come to the verge of the great fight.
Dan conversed with the man who had once possessed a horse-hair trunk; but they did not mention the line of hills which had furnished them in more careless moments with an agreeable topic. They avoided it now as condemned men do the subject of death, and yet the thought of it stayed in their eyes as they looked at each other and talked gravely of other things.
The expectant regiment heaved a long sigh of relief when the sharp call: "Fall in," repeated indefinitely, arose in the streets. It was inevitable that a bloody battle was to be fought, and they wanted to get it off their minds. They were, however, doomed again to spend a long period planted firmly in the mud. They craned their necks, and wondered where some of the other regiments were going.
At last the mists rolled carelessly away. Nature made at this time all provisions to enable foes to see each other, and immediately the roar of guns resounded from every hill. The endless cracking of the skirmishers swelled to rolling crashes of musketry. Shells screamed with panther-like noises at the houses. Dan looked at the man of the horse-hair trunk, and the man said: "Well, here she comes!"
The tenor voices of younger officers and the deep and hoarse voices of the older ones rang in the streets. These cries pricked like spurs. The masses of men vibrated from the suddenness with which they were plunged into the situation of troops about to fight. That the orders were long-expected did not concern the emotion.
Simultaneous movement was imparted to all these thick bodies of men and horses that lay in the town. Regiment after regiment swung rapidly into the streets that faced the sinister ridge.
This exodus was theatrical. The little sober-hued village had been like the cloak which disguises the king of drama. It was now put aside, and an army, splendid thing of steel and blue, stood forth in the sunlight.
Even the soldiers in the heavy columns drew deep breaths at the sight, more majestic than they had dreamed. The heights of the enemy's position were crowded with men who resembled people come to witness some mighty pageant. But as the column moved steadily to their positions, the guns, matter-of-fact warriors, doubled their number, and shells burst with red thrilling tumult on the crowded plain. One came into the ranks of the regiment, and after the smoke and the wrath of it had faded, leaving motionless figures, every one stormed according to the limits of his vocabulary, for veterans detest being killed when they are not busy.
The regiment sometimes looked sideways at its brigade companions composed of men who had never been in battle; but no frozen blood could withstand the heat of the splendour of this army before the eyes on the plain, these lines so long that the flanks were little streaks, this mass of men of one intention. The recruits carried themselves heedlessly. At the rear was an idle battery, and three artillerymen in a foolish row on a caisson nudged each other and grinned at the recruits. "You'll catch it pretty soon," they called out. They were impersonally gleeful, as if they themselves were not also likely to catch it pretty soon. But with this picture of an army in their hearts, the new men perhaps felt the devotion which the drops may feel for the wave; they were of its power and glory; they smiled jauntily at the foolish row of gunners, and told them to go to blazes.
The column trotted across some little bridges, and spread quickly into lines of battle. Before them was a bit of plain, and back of the plain was the ridge. There was no time left for considerations. The men were staring at the plain, mightily wondering how it would feel to be out there, when a brigade in advance yelled and charged. The hill was all grey smoke and fire-points.
That fierce elation in the terrors of war, catching a man's heart and making it burn with such ardour that he becomes capable of dying, flashed in the faces of the men like coloured lights, and made them resemble leashed animals, eager, ferocious, daunting at nothing. The line was really in its first leap before the wild, hoarse crying of the orders.
The greed for close quarters, which is the emotion of a bayonet charge, came then into the minds of the men and developed until it was a madness. The field, with its faded grass of a Southern winter, seemed to this fury miles in width.
High, slow-moving masses of smoke, with an odour of burning cotton, engulfed the line until the men might have been swimmers. Before them the ridge, the shore of this grey sea, was outlined, crossed, and recrossed by sheets of flame. The howl of the battle arose to the noise of innumerable wind demons.
The line, galloping, scrambling, plunging like a herd of wounded horses, went over a field that was sown with corpses, the records of other charges.
Directly in front of the black-faced, whooping Dan, carousing in this onward sweep like a new kind of fiend, a wounded man appeared, raising his shattered body, and staring at this rush of men down upon him. It seemed to occur to him that he was to be trampled; he made a desperate, piteous effort to escape; then finally huddled in a waiting heap. Dan and the soldier near him widened the interval between them without looking down, without appearing to heed the wounded man. This little clump of blue seemed to reel past them as boulders reel past a train.
Bursting through a smoke-wave, the scampering, unformed bunches came upon the wreck of the brigade that had preceded them, a floundering mass stopped afar from the hill by the swirling volleys.
It was as if a necromancer had suddenly shown them a picture of the fate which awaited them; but the line with muscular spasm hurled itself over this wreckage and onward, until men were stumbling amid the relics of other assaults, the point where the fire from the ridge consumed.
The men, panting, perspiring, with crazed faces, tried to push against it; but it was as if they had come to a wall. The wave halted, shuddered in an agony from the quick struggle of its two desires, then toppled, and broke into a fragmentary thing which has no name.
Veterans could now at last be distinguished from recruits. The new regiments were instantly gone, lost, scattered, as if they never had been. But the sweeping failure of the charge, the battle, could not make the veterans forget their business. With a last throe, the band of maniacs drew itself up and blazed a volley at the hill, insignificant to those iron entrenchments, but nevertheless expressing that singular final despair which enables men coolly to defy the walls of a city of death.
After this episode the men renamed their command. They called it the Little Regiment.
VI
"I seen Dan shoot a feller yesterday. Yes, sir. I'm sure it was him that done it. And maybe he thinks about that feller now, and wonders if he tumbled down just about the same way. Them things come up in a man's mind."
Bivouac fires upon the sidewalks, in the streets, in the yards, threw high their wavering reflections, which examined, like slim, red fingers, the dingy, scarred walls and the piles of tumbled brick. The droning of voices again arose from great blue crowds.
The odour of frying bacon, the fragrance from countless little coffee-pails floated among the ruins. The rifles, stacked in the shadows, emitted flashes of steely light. Wherever a flag lay horizontally from one stack to another was the bed of an eagle which had led men into the mystic smoke.
The men about a particular fire were engaged in holding in check their jovial spirits. They moved whispering around the blaze, although they looked at it with a certain fine contentment, like labourers after a day's hard work.
There was one who sat apart. They did not address him save in tones suddenly changed. They did not regard him directly, but always in little sidelong glances.
At last a soldier from a distant fire came into this circle of light. He studied for a time the man who sat apart. Then he hesitatingly stepped closer, and said: "Got any news, Dan?"
"No," said Dan.
The new-comer shifted his feet. He looked at the fire, at the sky, at the other men, at Dan. His face expressed a curious despair; his tongue was plainly in rebellion. Finally, however, he contrived to say: "Well, there's some chance yet, Dan. Lots of the wounded are still lying out there, you know. There's some chance yet."
"Yes," said Dan.
The soldier shifted his feet again, and looked miserably into the air. After another struggle he said: "Well, there's some chance yet, Dan." He moved hastily away.
One of the men of the squad, perhaps encouraged by this example, now approached the still figure. "No news yet, hey?" he said, after coughing behind his hand.
"No," said Dan.
"Well," said the man, "I've been thinking of how he was fretting about you the night you went on special duty. You recollect? Well, sir, I was surprised. He couldn't say enough about it. I swan, I don't believe he slep' a wink after you left, but just lay awake cussing special duty and worrying. I was surprised. But there he lay cussing. He——"
Dan made a curious sound, as if a stone had wedged in his throat. He said: "Shut up, will you?"
Afterward the men would not allow this moody contemplation of the fire to be interrupted.
"Oh, let him alone, can't you?"
"Come away from there, Casey!"
"Say, can't you leave him be?"
They moved with reverence about the immovable figure, with its countenance of mask-like invulnerability.
VII
After the red round eye of the sun had stared long at the little plain and its burden, darkness, a sable mercy, came heavily upon it, and the wan hands of the dead were no longer seen in strange frozen gestures.
The heights in front of the plain shone with tiny camp-fires, and from the town in the rear, small shimmerings ascended from the blazes of the bivouac. The plain was a black expanse upon which, from time to time, dots of light, lanterns, floated slowly here and there. These fields were long steeped in grim mystery.
Suddenly, upon one dark spot, there was a resurrection. A strange thing had been groaning there, prostrate. Then it suddenly dragged itself to a sitting posture, and became a man.
The man stared stupidly for a moment at the lights on the hill, then turned and contemplated the faint colouring over the town. For some moments he remained thus, staring with dull eyes, his face unemotional, wooden.
Finally he looked around him at the corpses dimly to be seen. No change flashed into his face upon viewing these men. They seemed to suggest merely that his information concerning himself was not too complete. He ran his fingers over his arms and chest, bearing always the air of an idiot upon a bench at an almshouse door.
Finding no wound in his arms nor in his chest, he raised his hand to his head, and the fingers came away with some dark liquid upon them. Holding these fingers close to his eyes, he scanned them in the same stupid fashion, while his body gently swayed.
