                             CHAPTER EIGHT
     
          The trees began softly to sing a hymn of twilight. The sun
     sank until slanted bronze rays struck the forest. There was a lull
     in the noises of insects as if they had bowed their beaks and were
     making a devotional pause. There was silence save for the chanted
     chorus of the trees.
          Then, upon this stillness, there suddenly broke a tremendous
     clangor of sounds. A crimson roar came from the distance.
          The youth stopped. He was transfixed by this terrific medley
     of all noises. It was as if worlds were being rended. There was the
     ripping sound of musketry and the breaking crash of artillery.
          His mind flew in all directions. He conceived the two armies
     to be at each other panther fashion. He listened for a time. Then
     he began to run in the direction of the battle. He saw that it was
     an ironical thing for him to be running thus toward that which he
     had been at such pains to avoid. But he said, in substance, to
     himself that if the earth and the moon were about to clash, many
     persons would doubtless plan to get upon the roofs to witness the
     collision.
          As he ran, he became aware that the forest had stopped its
     music, as if at last becoming capable of hearing the foreign
     sounds. The trees hushed and stood motionless. Everything seemed to
     be listening to the crackle and clatter and ear-shaking thunder.
     The chorus pealed over the still earth.
          It suddenly occurred to the youth that the fight in which he
     had been was, after all, but perfunctory popping. In the hearing of
     this present din he was doubtful if he had seen real battle scenes.
     This uproar explained a celestial battle; it was tumbling hordes
     a-struggle in the air.
          Reflecting, he saw a sort of humor in the point of view of
     himself and his fellows during the late encounter. They had taken
     themselves and the enemy very seriously and had imagined that they
     were deciding the war. Individuals must have supposed that they
     were cutting the letters of their names deep into everlasting
     tablets of brass, or enshrining their reputations forever in the
     hearts of their countrymen, while, as to fact, the affair would
     appear in printed reports under a meek and immaterial title. But he
     saw that it was good, else, he said, in battle everyone would
     surely run save forlorn hopes and their ilk.
          He went rapidly on. He wished to come to the edge of the
     forest that he might peer out.
          As he hastened, there passed through his mind pictures of
     stupendous conflicts. His accumulated thought upon such subjects
     was used to form scenes. The noise was as the voice of an eloquent
     being, describing.
          Sometimes the brambles formed chains and tried to hold him
     back. Trees, confronting him, stretched out their arms and forbade
     him to pass. After its previous hostility this new resistance of
     the forest filled him with a fine bitterness. It seemed that Nature
     could not be quite ready to kill him.
          But he obstinately took roundabout ways, and presently he was
     where he could see long gray walls of vapor where lay battle lines.
     The voices of cannon shook him. The musketry sounded in long
     irregular surges that played havoc with his ears. He stood
     regardant for a moment. His eyes had an awestruck expression. He
     gawked in the direction of the fight.
          Presently he proceeded again on his forward way. The battle
     was like the grinding of an immense and terrible machine to him.
     Its complexities and powers, its grim processes, fascinated him. He
     must go close and see it produce corpses.
          He came to a fence and clambered over it. On the far side, the
     ground was littered with clothes and guns. A newspaper, folded up,
     lay in the dirt. A dead soldier was stretched with his face hidden
     in his arm. Farther off there was a group of four or five corpses
     keeping mournful company. A hot sun had blazed upon the spot.
          In this place the youth felt that he was an invader. This
     forgotten part of the battle ground was owned by the dead men, and
     he hurried, in the vague apprehension that one of the swollen forms
     would rise and tell him to begone.
          He came finally to a road from which he could see in the
     distance dark and agitated bodies of troops, smoke-fringed. In the
     lane was a blood-stained crowd streaming to the rear. The wounded
     men were cursing, groaning, and wailing. In the air, always, was a
     mighty swell of sound that it seemed could sway the earth. With the
     courageous words of the artillery and the spiteful sentences of the
     musketry mingled red cheers. And from this region of noises came
     the steady current of the maimed.
          One of the wounded men had a shoe full of blood. He hopped
     like a schoolboy in a game. He was laughing hysterically.
          One was swearing that he had been shot in the arm through the
     commanding general's mismanagement of the army. One was marching
     with an air imitative of some sublime drum major. Upon his features
     was an unholy mixture of merriment and agony. As he marched he sang
     a bit of doggerel in a high and quavering voice:
     
                    "Sing a song of victory,
                    A pocketful of bullets,
                    Five and twenty dead men
                    Baked in a---pie."
     
          Parts of the procession limped and staggered to this tune.
          Another had the gray seal of death already upon his face. His
     lips were curled in hard lines and his teeth were clinched. His
     hands were bloody from where he had pressed them upon his wound. He
     seemed to be awaiting the moment when he should pitch headlong. He
     stalked like the specter of a soldier, his eyes burning with the
     power of a stare into the unknown.
          There were some who proceeded sullenly, full of anger at their
     wounds, and ready to turn upon anything as an obscure cause.
          An officer was carried along by two privates. He was peevish.
     "Don't joggle so, Johnson, you fool," he cried. "Think my leg is
     made of iron? If you can't carry me decent, put me down and let
     someone else do it."
          He bellowed at the tottering crowd who blocked the quick march
     of his bearers. "Say, make way there, can't you? Make way, dickens
     take it all."
          They sulkily parted and went to the roadsides. As he was
     carried past they made pert remarks to him. When he raged in reply
     and threatened them, they told him to be damned.
          The shoulder of one of the tramping bearers knocked heavily
     against the spectral soldier who was staring into the unknown.
          The youth joined this crowd and marched along with it. The
     torn bodies expressed the awful machinery in which the men had been
     entangled.
          Orderlies and couriers occasionally broke through the throng
     in the roadway, scattering wounded men right and left, galloping
     on, followed by howls. The melancholy march was continually
     disturbed by the messengers, and sometimes by bustling batteries
     that came swinging and thumping down upon them, the officers
     shouting orders to clear the way.
          There was a tattered man, fouled with dust, blood and powder
     stain from hair to shoes, who trudged quietly at the youth's side.
     He was listening with eagerness and much humility to the lurid
     descriptions of a bearded sergeant. His lean features wore an
     expression of awe and admiration. He was like a listener in a
     country store to wondrous tales told among the sugar barrels. He
     eyed the story-teller with unspeakable wonder. His mouth was agape
     in yokel fashion.
          The sergeant, taking note of this, gave pause to his elaborate
     history while he administered a sardonic comment. "Be careful,
     honey, you'll be a-catching flies," he said.
          The tattered man shrank back abashed.
          After a time he began to sidle near to the youth, and in a
     different way try to make him a friend. His voice was gentle as a
     girl's voice and his eyes were pleading. The youth saw with
     surprise that the soldier had two wounds, one in the head, bound
     with a blood-soaked rag, and the other in the arm, making that
     member dangle like a broken bough.
          After they had walked together for some time the tattered man
     mustered sufficient courage to speak. "Was pretty good fight,
     wasn't it?" he timidly said. The youth, deep in thought, glanced up
     at the bloody and grim figure with its lamb-like eyes, "What?"
          "Was pretty good fight, wasn't it?"
          "Yes," said the youth shortly. He quickened his pace.
          But the other hobbled industriously after him. There was an
     air of apology in his manner, but he evidently thought that he
     needed only to talk for a time and the youth would perceive that he
     was a good fellow.
          "Was pretty good fight, wasn't it?" he began in a small voice
     and then he achieved the fortitude to continue. "Darn me if I ever
     see fellows fight so. Laws, how they did fight! I knowed the boys'd
     like it when they once got square at it. The boys ain't had no fair
     chance up to now, but this time they showed what they was. I knowed
     it'd turn out this way. You can't lick them boys. No, sir! They're
     fighters, they be."
          He breathed a deep breath of humble admiration. He had looked
     at the youth for encouragement several times. He received none, but
     gradually he seemed to get absorbed in his subject.
          "I was talking across pickets with a boy from Georgie once,
     and that boy he says, `Your fellows will all run like hell when
     they once hear a gun,' he says. `Maybe they will,' I says, `but I
     don't believe none of it,' I says; `and by jiminey' I says back to
     him, `maybe your fellows will all run like hell when they once hear
     a gun,' I says. He laughed. Well, they didn't run today, did they,
     hey? No, sir! They fought and fought and fought." 
          His homely face was suffused with a light of love for the army
     which was to him all things beautiful and powerful.
          After a time he turned to the youth. "Where you hit old boy?"
     he asked in a brotherly tone.
          The youth felt instant panic at this question, although at
     first its full import was not borne in upon him.
          "What?" he asked.
          "Where you hit?" repeated the tattered man.
          "Why," began the youth, "I---that is---why---I---"
          He turned away suddenly and slid through the crowd. His brow
     was heavily flushed, and his fingers were picking nervously at one
     of his buttons. He bent his head and fastened his eyes studiously
     upon the button as if it were a little problem.
          The tattered man looked after him in astonishment.
     
     
