Stupidly, she and Hannah Casey looked at one another.
II
THE HOME-COMING
Parsons knew little of the great wave of protest that swept over the Army of the Potomac when Hooker was replaced by Meade. The sad depression of the North, sick at heart since December, did not move him; he was too thoroughly occupied with his own sensations. He sat alone, when his comrades would leave him alone, brooding, his terror equally independent of victory or defeat. The horror of war appalled him. He tried to reconstruct the reasons for his enlisting, but found it impossible. The war had made of him a stranger to himself. He could scarcely visualize the little farm that he had left, or his mother. Instead of the farm, he saw corpse-strewn fields; instead of his mother, the mutilated bodies of young men. His senses seemed unable to respond to any other stimuli than those of war. He had not been conscious of the odors of the sweet Maryland spring, or of the song of mocking-birds; his nostrils were full of the smell of blood, his ears of the cries of dying men.
Worse than the recollection of what he had seen were the forebodings that filled his soul. In a day—yes, an hour, for the rumors of coming battle forced themselves to his unwilling ears—he might be as they. Presently he too would lie, staring, horrible, under the Maryland sky.
The men in his company came gradually to leave him to himself. At first they thought no less of him because he was afraid. They had all been afraid. They discussed their sensations frankly as they sat round the camp-fire, or lay prone on the soft grass of the fields.
"Scared!" laughed the oldest member of the company, who was speaking chiefly for the encouragement of Parsons, whom he liked. "My knees shook, and my chest caved in. Every bullet killed me. But by the time I'd been dead about forty times, I saw the Johnnies, and something hot got into my throat, and I got over it."
"And weren't you afraid afterwards?" asked Parsons, trying to make his voice sound natural.
"No, never."
"But I was," confessed another man. His face was bandaged, and blood oozed through from the wound that would make him leer like a satyr for the rest of his life. "I get that way every time. But I get over it. I don't get hot in my throat, but my skin prickles."
Young Parsons walked slowly away, his legs shaking visibly beneath him.