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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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tesque agonies. The regiment left a coherent trail of bodies. They had passed into a clearer atmosphere. There was an effect like a revelation in the new appearance of the landscape. Some men work- ing madly at a battery were plain to them, and the opposing infantry's lines were defined by the gray walls and fringes of smoke. It seemed to the youth that he saw every- thing. Each blade of the green grass was bold and clear. He thought that he was aware of every change in the thin, transparent vapor that floated idly in sheets. The brown or gray trunks of the trees showed each roughness of their sur- faces. And the men of the regiment, with their starting eyes and sweating faces, running madly, or falling, as if thrown headlong, to queer, heaped-up corpses--all were comprehended. His mind took a mechanical but firm impression, so that afterward everything was pictured and ex- plained to him, save why he himself was there. But there was a frenzy made from this furious rush. The men, pitching forward insanely, had burst into cheerings, moblike and barbaric, but tuned in strange keys that can arouse the dullard and the stoic. It made a mad enthusiasm that, it seemed, would be incapable of checking itself before granite and brass. There was the deli- rium that encounters despair and death, and is heedless and blind to the odds. It is a temporary but sublime absence of selfishness. And because it was of this order was the reason, perhaps, why the youth wondered, afterward, what reasons he could have had for being there. Presently the straining pace ate up the ener- gies of the men. As if by agreement, the leaders began to slacken their speed. The volleys di- rected against them had had a seeming windlike effect. The regiment snorted and blew. Among some stolid trees it began to falter and hesitate. The men, staring intently, began to wait for some |
