Billy Maydew and Allan Gold saw each other through a rift in the smoke. They were close together.
“Billy,” said Allan, “I wish you were out of this.”
“I reckon it’s the end,” said Billy, loading. “You look all kind of shining and bright, Allan.—Don’t you reckon Heaven’ll be something like Thunder Run?”
“Yes, I do. Sairy and Tom, and the flowers and Christianna—”
“And all the boys,” said Billy, “and the colonel—Here air the darn Yanks again—”
A short-range engagement changed into hand-to-hand fighting. Already the aiding battery had suffered horribly. Now with a shout the blue pushed against it, seizing and silencing one of the two remaining guns. The grey infantry thrust back by the same onset, the grey artillerymen beaten from the guns, were now as one—four hundred grey men, perhaps, in a death clutch with twice their number. Down the road broke out a wilder noise of fighting—it would seem, somehow, that there was an access of forces.... The blue, immediate swarm was somehow pushed back. Another was seen detaching itself. The ranking officer was now a captain. He hurried along the front of the torn and panting line. “Don’t let’s fail, men!—Don’t let’s fail! Everybody at home—everybody at home knows we couldn’t—Give them as good as we take! Here they come!—Now—now!—”
There was, however, a wavering. The thing was hopeless and the Sixty-fifth was deadly tired. With the fall of Erskine the trumpets had ceased to call. The Sixty-fifth looked at the loud and wide approach of the enemy, and then it looked sideways. Its lips worked, its eyelids twitched. The field of sedge expanded to a limitless plain, heaped all with the dead and dying. The air no longer went in waves of red; the air was sinking to a greenish pallor, with a sickness trembling through it. Here was the swarm of the enemy.... The Sixty-fifth knew in its heart that there was some uncertainty as to whether it would continue to stand. The day was dead somehow, the heart beating slow and hard....
The blue overpassed the ruined, almost obliterated line of the rail fence, came on over the sedge. “Don’t let’s fail, men!” cried the captain. “Don’t let’s fail! We’ve never done it—Stand your ground!”—A minie ball entered his side. A man caught him, eased him down upon the earth. “Stand it out, men! stand it out!” he gasped.
“Sixty-fifth Virginia! Front! Fix bayonets! Forward! Charge!”
The Sixty-fifth Virginia obeyed. It wheeled, it fixed bayonets, it charged. It charged with a shout. As by magic, even to itself, its aspect changed. It was as though a full regiment, determined, clothed in the habit of victory, vowed to and protected by War himself, sprang across the sedge, struck against, broke and drove the blue. All the pallor went out of the atmosphere, all the faintness out of life. Every hue came strong, every line came clear, life was buoyant as a rubber ball.