"Colonel, those boys have been under their first strain. They'll rest easier if they can shoot a few volleys—and it won't burn much powder."
So, the two battalions, as a matter of indulgence, were permitted to contribute a salute of challenge, and then, as the bugler sounded "cease firing," they were ordered to dispose themselves as well as they could in the trenches and behind the rice-dykes, and rest until morning.
Thus they spent their first night in the field with the unending, but comparatively harmless, roar from the north as a clangorous lullaby, and the tropic starlight in their faces, and the breeze which whispered gently across the salt marshes from the sea fanning their foreheads.
When the dawn broke with tropical suddenness like the ringing up of a quick curtain, the theater of last night's drama stood revealed. With daylight came a slackening of the night-long Insurgent thunder, which slowly dropped away to desultory firing, and then to complete quiet. Off to the left of the line, where the Kentuckians had lain, stretched the broken wastes of the salt marshes, with here and there in the distance blue glimpses of the sea. But directly ahead, where all night the trenches had been barking and vomiting, the landscape was naked of visible life. The rice-fields went off for a short distance, broken only by their dykes, and farther away rose a dense screen of bamboo and woodland, a solid mass of green, from which waved a ragged top of shredded palms.
As the men crouched over their hard-tack and coffee, they were thinking of the day's work, which they hoped would include passing beyond that screen and those trenches.
CHAPTER XVIII
During the night a siege-gun had been brought up by hand, and now, from its place where the road cut through the entrenchments, it opened with the morning greeting of a hoarse bark, as the crew serving it began feeling over the landscape for the field-piece which had boomed so insistently last night.
Then, as the morning wore on, and orders to advance came, the slow rifle-firing began again and increased in volume as the sun climbed.
The night-long rain of random lead had taken its toll in a few wounded, though none had sustained mortal hurt. Two or three men from B Company came back to the front from the improvised dressing-station at the rear, wearing reddened bandages, which they displayed with the cocky pride of medals, as they picked up their pieces and joined again in the game.