other. The shells howled on their journey toward the town. From short-
range distance there came a spatter of musketry, sweeping along an
invisible line, and making faint sheets of orange light.

Some in the new skirmish lines were beginning to fire at various
shadows discerned in the vapour, forms of men suddenly revealed by some
humour of the laggard masses of clouds. The crackle of musketry began to
dominate the purring of the hostile bullets. Dan, in the front rank,
held his rifle poised, and looked into the fog keenly, coldly, with the
air of a sportsman. His nerves were so steady that it was as if they had
been drawn from his body, leaving him merely a muscular machine; but his
numb heart was somehow beating to the pealing march of the fight.

The waving skirmish line went backward and forward, ran this way and
that way. Men got lost in the fog, and men were found again. Once they
got too close to the formidable ridge, and the thing burst out as if
repulsing a general attack. Once another blue regiment was apprehended
on the very edge of firing into them. Once a friendly battery began an
elaborate and scientific process of extermination. Always as busy as
brokers, the men slid here and there over the plain, fighting their
foes, escaping from their friends, leaving a history of many movements
in the wet yellow turf, cursing the atmosphere, blazing away every time
they could identify the enemy.

In one mystic changing of the fog as if the fingers of spirits were
drawing aside these draperies, a small group of the grey skirmishers,
silent, statuesque, were suddenly disclosed to Dan and those about him.
So vivid and near were they that there was something uncanny in the
revelation.