be required.

It was a quiet enough spot--the fork of an old wood-road, on the two
branches of which, prolonging themselves deviously forward in the dim
moonlight, the sergeants were themselves stationed, a few paces in
rear of the line. If driven sharply back by a sudden onset of the
enemy--and pickets are not expected to make a stand after firing--the
men would come into the converging roads and naturally following them
to their point of intersection could be rallied and "formed." In his
small way the author of these dispositions was something of a
strategist; if Napoleon had planned as intelligently at Waterloo he
would have won that memorable battle and been overthrown later.

Second-Lieutenant Brainerd Byring was a brave and efficient officer,
young and comparatively inexperienced as he was in the business of
killing his fellow-men. He had enlisted in the very first days of
the war as a private, with no military knowledge whatever, had been
made first-sergeant of his company on account of his education and
engaging manner, and had been lucky enough to lose his captain by a
Confederate bullet; in the resulting promotions he had gained a
commission. He had been in several engagements, such as they were--
at Philippi, Rich Mountain, Carrick's Ford and Greenbrier--and had
borne himself with such gallantry as not to attract the attention of
his superior officers. The exhilaration of battle was agreeable to
him, but the sight of the dead, with their clay faces, blank eyes and
stiff bodies, which when not unnaturally shrunken were unnaturally
swollen, had always intolerably affected him. He felt toward them a
kind of reasonless antipathy that was something more than the
physical and spiritual repugnance common to us all. Doubtless this
feeling was due to his unusually acute sensibilities--his keen sense