But by this time another man, and yet other men, had followed the panic example. Here and there, from the chokingly tight front rank, men had begun to drop out, or to plunge back into the line just behind them, throwing out of gear the exactness of company formations, infecting hundreds with their terror.
It was no longer possible for officers to check individual cases of fear. Their whole attention was taken up in keeping the bulk of their men in line and in keeping them advancing.
The dead strewed the stubble ground in windrows. The fire-streaked smoke rolled out in a blinding, acrid wave from the nearing fringe of trees.
And at every yard of distance gained the Confederate volleys waxed more and more accurate, the piles of dead higher and thicker.
Unscathed, the wood’s defenders were killing by wholesale. And a corps commander’s folly was paid for in the lives of hundreds of better, wiser, braver men than himself.
A riderless horse, his back broken by a grapeshot, crawled along the space between the Federals and the wood, dragging his hind legs behind him and screaming hideously above the near-by din.
A major, sword in hand, running ten yards in advance of his regiment and hallooing to them to come on, stopped abruptly, his brown face turning suddenly to a mask of blood, and fell where he stood.
He was major in Dad’s regiment.
And Dad himself, as the men wavered on seeing their loved officer fall, leaped forward, sword aloft, to take the dead man’s place ahead of the line.
His lean body tense, his mild eyes aflame, the sword of old Ehud Sessions whirling in wild encouragement above his bared head, Captain James Dadd charged onward, yelling to his men to follow. And not only his own company, but the whole regiment, obeyed that call.