The woods went around behind the hill on the right. On the left a grassy field stretched off in the dark. One knew by remembrance that it sloped down a gradual mile, till it came somewhere to a slow creek with a mud bottom. Outposts lay forward in a thin line of woods. Some one said that the pickets were in an open field beyond, and that some of them belonged to the other side. In that tense, visionary hour one did not conceive of an enemy as of separate men, watchful in fields, sleeping in distant woods, but of a creature, a thing of folded miles, crouching, sinister, hostile, with red tongue and bitter fangs, waiting for the dawn.
Some of the dark lumps in the grass were motionless, some stirred and muttered. Through the open door of the barn a group of men could be seen around a lantern and leaning forward. One of them marked and pointed with his finger. A horse kicked and squealed on the hill among the guns. A dog howled in some indefinite distance and direction. The birds began to twitter in the trees of the beetling woods. A creeping wind chilled the dew on the faces of sleepers and watchers in the open. The blackness grew conscious—dimly gray.
Two or three came out of the barn and ran behind it. In a moment there was a cluttered thudding of horses' feet, which died away down the field. Pickets began shooting in front. Little things whimpered and whined overhead. An officer, by the glimmer of his straps, went forward and shouted in the woods. The near firing stopped, or most of it, but the things overhead continued to whimper and whine. The lumps on the grass began to sit up and strip off blankets.
"What's he stopping 'em for?"
"Nothing in it."
"The Johnnies keep it up."
"They're firing high."
Fires of gathered dead-wood sprang up on the woods' edge—a score in sight, then a hundred, smoking and crackling. A low murmur, a sense of multitude, grew as the darkness lifted its oppression. Men sipped and munched by the fires. Some one shouted, "Get ready, men!" A cannon belched and bellowed on the hill to the right, then another and another, to a passionate, throbbing roar.
"Company B, forward! Halt here!"
Men poured around in crowds and formed in triple lines. A shell dropped through the roof of the empty barn and splintered some of the boards outward with its burst.