At a word he had leaped, with the others, to his feet, and stood drawn up for battle against the wood. Then it was that he saw the General of the day riding beside fluttering colours across the waste land to the crest of the hill. He was rallying the scattered brigades about the flag—so the fight had gone against them and gone badly, after all.
Around him the men drifted back, frightened, straggling, defeated, and the broken ranks closed up slowly. The standards dipped for a moment before a sharp fire, and then, as the colour bearers shook out the bright folds, soared like great red birds' wings above the smoke.
It seemed to Dan that he stood for hours motionless there against the pines. For a time the fight passed away from him, and he remembered a mountain storm which had caught him as a boy in the woods at Chericoke. He heard again the cloud burst overhead, the soughing of the pines and the crackling of dried branches as they came drifting down through interlacing boughs. The old childish terror returned to him, and he recalled his mad rush for light and space when he had doubled like a hare in the wooded twilight among the dim bodies of the trees. Then as now it was not the open that he feared, but the unseen horror of the shelter.
Again the affectionate voice came from the sunlight and he gripped his musket as he started forward. He had caught only the last words, and he repeated them half mechanically, as he stepped out from the brushwood. Once again, when he stood on the trampled broom-sedge, he said them over with a nervous jerk, “Wait until they come within fifty yards—and, for God's sake, boys, shoot at the knees!”
He thought of the jolly Colonel, and laughed hysterically. Why, he had been at that man's wedding—had kissed his bride—and now he was begging him to shoot at people's knees!
With a cheer, the regiment broke from cover and swept forward toward the summit of the hill. Dan's foot caught in a blackberry vine, and he stumbled blindly. As he regained himself a shell ripped up the ground before him, flinging the warm clods of earth into his face. A “worm” fence at a little distance scattered beneath the fire, and as he looked up he saw the long rails flying across the field. For an instant he hesitated; then something that was like a nervous spasm shook his heart, and he was no more afraid. Over the blackberries and the broom-sedge, on he went toward the swirls of golden dust that swept upward from the bright green slope. If this was a battle, what was the old engraving? Where were the prancing horses and the uplifted swords?
Something whistled in his ears and the air was filled with sharp sounds that set his teeth on edge. A man went down beside him and clutched at his boots as he ran past; but the smell of the battle—a smell of oil and smoke, of blood and sweat—was in his nostrils, and he could have kicked the stiff hands grasping at his feet. The hot old blood of his fathers had stirred again and the dead had rallied to the call of their descendant. He was not afraid, for he had been here long before.
Behind him, and beside him, row after row of gray men leaped from the shadow—the very hill seemed rising to his support—and it was almost gayly, as the dead fighters lived again, that he went straight onward over the sunny field. He saw the golden dust float nearer up the slope, saw the brave flags unfurling in the breeze—saw, at last, man after man emerge from the yellow cloud. As he bent to fire, the fury of the game swept over him and aroused the sleeping brute within him. All the primeval instincts, throttled by the restraint of centuries—the instincts of bloodguiltiness, of hot pursuit, of the fierce exhilaration of the chase, of the death grapple with a resisting foe—these awoke suddenly to life and turned the battle scarlet to his eyes.
Two hours later, when the heavy clouds were smothering the sunset, he came slowly back across the field. A gripping nausea had seized upon him—a nausea such as he had known before after that merry night at college. His head throbbed, and as he walked he staggered like a drunken man. The revulsion of his overwrought emotions had thrown him into a state of sensibility almost hysterical.