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 anguish and horror. Was
this, then, the War?

And now there appeared yet other figures among the trees, a straggling,
broken line, which fell back, halted, stood and fired always calmly,
coolly, at some unseen thing in front of them. But this line resolved
itself into individuals, who came back to the edge of the wood,
methodically picking their way through the abattis, climbing the