on one side of them, and so brown and gray on the other, with their bare,
dark forests soughing from time to time as the wind swept up the pass.
The minds of the men seemed to go back to the time when they were
not so alone, but were part of a great and busy army, and some of them
fell to talking of the past, and the battles they had figured in,
and of the comrades they had lost. They told them off in a slow
and colorless way, as if it were all part of the past as much as the dead
they named. One hundred and nineteen times they had been in action.
Only seventeen men were left of the eighty odd who had first enlisted
in the battery, and of these four were at home crippled for life.
Two of the oldest men had been among the half-dozen who had fallen
in the skirmish just the day before. It looked tolerably hard
to be killed that way after passing for four years through such battles
as they had been in; and both had wives and children at home, too,
and not a cent to leave them to their names. They agreed calmly
that they'd have to "sort of look after them a little" if they ever got home.
These were some of the things they talked about as they pulled
their old worn coats about them, stuffed their thin, weather-stained hands
in their ragged pockets to warm them, and squatted down under the breastwork
to keep a little out of the wind. One thing they talked about a good deal
was something to eat. They described meals they had had
at one time or another as personal adventures, and discussed the chances
of securing others in the future as if they were prizes of fortune.
One listening and seeing their thin, worn faces and their wasted frames
might have supposed they were starving, and they were,
but they did not say so.

Towards the middle of the afternoon there was a sudden excitement in the camp.
A dozen men saw them at the same time: a squad of three men down the road
at the farthest turn, past their picket; but an advancing column