clump of blue seemed to reel past them as boulders reel past a train.

Bursting through a smoke-wave, the scampering, unformed bunches came
upon the wreck of the brigade that had preceded them, a floundering mass
stopped afar from the hill by the swirling volleys.

It was as if a necromancer had suddenly shown them a picture of the
fate which awaited them; but the line with muscular spasm hurled itself
over this wreckage and onward, until men were stumbling amid the relics
of other assaults, the point where the fire from the ridge consumed.

The men, panting, perspiring, with crazed faces, tried to push against
it; but it was as if they had come to a wall. The wave halted, shuddered
in an agony from the quick struggle of its two desires, then toppled,
and broke into a fragmentary thing which has no name.

Veterans could now at last be distinguished from recruits. The new
regiments were instantly gone, lost, scattered, as if they never had
been. But the sweeping failure of the charge, the battle, could not make
the veterans forget their business. With a last throe, the band of
maniacs drew itself up and blazed a volley at the hill, insignificant to
those iron entrenchments, but nevertheless expressing that singular
final despair which enables men coolly to defy the walls of a city of
death.

After this episode the men renamed their command. They called it the
Little Regiment.