The men were still painfully conscious of themselves and their aspect. The art of keeping step was still new to them.
Wherefore they walked—not marched—with stiff bodies and compass legs. Such of them as might survive would march home with a mile-eating swing of leg and body, and with a gait that involved the maximum of speed to the minimum of effort. But only months of campaigning could teach them that motion.
As the foremost rank turned into Main Street a thousand waving handkerchiefs caught the sunlight. A great, ragged cheer went up. A cheer to which wet-eyed, flushed women lent a shrill treble sub-tone.
The procession had scarce covered two hundred yards when it came to a shuffling and unsteady halt.
Something blocked its path. Something that seemed to have the right of way.
Debouching from a side street, and crossing Main Street to the opposite egress, crept a hearse, dourly resplendent in its sable panoply of plume and polished glass. Behind moved a line of musty black coaches filled with folk in mourning. The single touch of color was a little half-masted American flag carried by a crape-hatted foot mourner at the extreme rear of the cortège.
For the man who went to-day to his burial was Captain Otis, commander of the first militia company that Ideala had sent forth. He had been invalided home, a bullet in his lungs, directly after the battle of Bull Run. And, two days ago, he had died.
The recruits, as, halted, they watched the gruesome counter-parade cross their line of march, lost some of the patriotically eager look their faces had worn. From the crowd on the sidewalks went up something very like a groan. Then came a ruffle of half-stifled sobs.
The funeral had rubbed a black smear across the occasion’s glitter. People all at once began to realize what war meant, and just what their husbands and fathers and sons were facing.
An old woman on the curb’s edge reached forth a timid hand and touched the shoulder of a gray-bearded recruit who had halted near her. He turned, momentarily forgetting newly acquired discipline; and they looked into each other’s time-scarred faces. Then the man shifted slightly from his place in the ranks and, as she leaned forward, kissed her.