That fierce elation in the terrors of war, catching a man's heart and
making it burn with such ardour that he becomes capable of dying,
flashed in the faces of the men like coloured lights, and made them
resemble leashed animals, eager, ferocious, daunting at nothing. The
line was really in its first leap before the wild, hoarse crying of the
orders.

The greed for close quarters, which is the emotion of a bayonet charge,
came then into the minds of the men and developed until it was a
madness. The field, with its faded grass of a Southern winter, seemed to
this fury miles in width.

High, slow-moving masses of smoke, with an odour of burning cotton,
engulfed the line until the men might have been swimmers. Before them
the ridge, the shore of this grey sea, was outlined, crossed, and
recrossed by sheets of flame. The howl of the battle arose to the noise
of innumerable wind demons.

The line, galloping, scrambling, plunging like a herd of wounded
horses, went over a field that was sown with corpses, the records of
other charges.

Directly in front of the black-faced, whooping Dan, carousing in this
onward sweep like a new kind of fiend, a wounded man appeared, raising
his shattered body, and staring at this rush of men down upon him. It
seemed to occur to him that he was to be trampled; he made a desperate,
piteous effort to escape; then finally huddled in a waiting heap. Dan
and the soldier near him widened the interval between them without
looking down, without appearing to heed the wounded man. This little