at all a part of him, but belonged to another man. His sober and
reflective charger went slowly. The officer's face was grimy and
perspiring, and his uniform was tousled as if he had been in direct
grapple with an enemy. He smiled grimly when the men stared at him. He
turned his horse toward the meadow.

Collins, of A Company, said: "I wisht I had a drink. I bet there's
water in that there ol' well yonder!"

"Yes; but how you goin' to git it?"

For the little meadow which intervened was now suffering a terrible
onslaught of shells. Its green and beautiful calm had vanished utterly.
Brown earth was being flung in monstrous handfuls. And there was a
massacre of the young blades of grass. They were being torn, burned,
obliterated. Some curious fortune of the battle had made this gentle
little meadow the object of the red hate of the shells, and each one as
it exploded seemed like an imprecation in the face of a maiden.

The wounded officer who was riding across this expanse said to himself:
"Why, they couldn't shoot any harder if the whole army was massed here!"

A shell struck the grey ruins of the house, and as, after the roar, the
shattered wall fell in fragments, there was a noise which resembled the
flapping of shutters during a wild gale of winter. Indeed, the infantry
paused in the shelter of the bank appeared as men standing upon a shore
contemplating a madness of the sea. The angel of calamity had under its
glance the battery upon the hill. Fewer white-legged men laboured about
the guns. A shell had smitten one of the pieces, and after the flare,
the smoke, the dust, the wrath of this blow were gone, it was possible