Directly he was working at his weapon like an automatic affair.

He suddenly lost concern for himself, and forgot to look at a
menacing fate. He became not a man but a member. He felt that
something of which he was a part--a regiment, an army, a cause,
or a country--was in crisis. He was welded into a common
personality which was dominated by a single desire.
For some moments he could not flee no more than a
little finger can commit a revolution from a hand.

If he had thought the regiment was about to be annihilated
perhaps he could have amputated himself from it. But its noise
gave him assurance. The regiment was like a firework that,
once ignited, proceeds superior to circumstances until its
blazing vitality fades. It wheezed and banged with a mighty power.
He pictured the ground before it as strewn with the discomfited.

There was a consciousness always of the presence of his comrades
about him. He felt the subtle battle brotherhood more potent
even than the cause for which they were fighting. It was a
mysterious fraternity born of the smoke and danger of death.

He was at a task. He was like a carpenter who has made many boxes,
making still another box, only there was furious haste in
his movements. He, in his thoughts, was careering off in
other places, even as the carpenter who as he works whistles
and thinks of his friend or his enemy, his home or a saloon.
And these jolted dreams were never perfect to him afterward,
but remained a mass of blurred shapes.