IV.
The regiment trotted in double time along the street, and the colonelseemed to quarrel over the right of way with many artillery officers.Batteries were waiting in the mud, and the men of them, exasperated bythe bustle of this ambitious infantry, shook their fists from saddle andcaisson, exchanging all manner of taunts and jests. The slanted gunscontinued to look reflectively at the ground.
On the outskirts of the crumbled town a fringe of blue figures werefiring into the fog. The regiment swung out into skirmish lines, and thefringe of blue figures departed, turning their backs and going joyfullyaround the flank.
The bullets began a low moan off toward a ridge which loomed faintly inthe heavy mist. When the swift crescendo had reached its climax, themissiles zipped just overhead, as if piercing an invisible curtain. Abattery on the hill was crashing with such tumult that it was as if theguns had quarrelled and had fallen pell-mell and snarling upon eachother. The shells howled on their journey toward the town. From shortrange distance there came a spatter of musketry, sweeping along aninvisible line and making faint sheets of orange light.
Some in the new skirmish lines were beginning to fire at various shadowsdiscerned in the vapour, forms of men suddenly revealed by some humourof the laggard masses of clouds. The crackle of musketry began todominate the purring of the hostile bullets. Dan, in the front rank,held his rifle poised, and looked into the fog keenly, coldly, with theair of a sportsman. His nerves were so steady that it was as if they hadbeen drawn from his body, leaving him merely a muscular machine; but hisnumb heart was somehow beating to the pealing march of the fight.
The waving skirmish line went backward and forward, ran this way andthat way. Men got lost in the fog, and men were found again. Once theygot too close to the formidable ridge, and the thing burst out as ifrepulsing a general attack. Once another blue regiment was apprehendedon the very edge of firing into them. Once a friendly battery began anelaborate and scientific process of extermination. Always as busy asbrokers, the men slid here and there over the plain, fighting theirfoes, escaping from their friends, leaving a history of many movementsin the wet yellow turf, cursing the atmosphere, blazing away every timethey could identify the enemy.
In one mystic changing of the fog, as if the fingers of spirits weredrawing aside these draperies, a small group of the gray skirmishers,silent, statuesque, were suddenly disclosed to Dan and those about him.So vivid and near were they that there was something uncanny in therevelation.
There might have been a second of mutual staring. Then each rifle ineach group was at the shoulder. As Dan's glance flashed along the barrelof his weapon, the figure of a man suddenly loomed as if the musket hadbeen a telescope. The short black beard, the slouch hat, the pose of theman as he sighted to shoot, made a quick picture in Dan's mind. The samemoment, it would seem, he pulled his own trigger, and the man, smitten,lurched forward, while his exploding rifle made a slanting crimsonstreak in the air, and the slouch hat fell before the body. The billowsof the fog, governed by singular impulses, rolled between.
"You got that feller sure enough," said a comrade to Dan. Dan looked athim absent-mindedly.