“‘The charge, trumpeter!’
“I let go with the bugle and we slapped into them right at the edge of the water. There was a bad mess for a few minutes, then back we went with the gray boys at our heels. We fought up and down the road, as though we were only playing a game; sometimes we drove them and then they drove us. On our second dash I felt my horse’s hoof plunk soft onto a dead man, and I remember how queer it made me feel. We had to win that ford, and the other fellows wanted it just as bad as we did. Well, it was nearly dark when we began that foolishness, and a good many of the boys had dropped out of their saddles, and a few horses were running up and down with us, just for company I guess, or because they knew the calls and followed the bugle. I remember how the little moon hung over the trees and the stars came out, but our captain kept up the fight. It was all like a lark, but silly, for we were in between the lines where we might have brought on a general engagement with all the racket we were making. I remember thinking the game would last forever, as we charged and wheeled and flung ourselves at the gray boys; and every time we swung at them again there were more soft thumps where my horse struck dead men. I have dreamed about that a thousand times—the scared little moon, and the rattle of accoutrements and the pounding hoofs, and the yells, and the crack of pistols; but it was mostly the sabre, splashing and cutting. I felt that now I had got the hang of it, it would be just as easy to bugle the stars out of the sky as to sound charge and recall there by the ford. Well, we got the ford all right, but when we splashed through to the other side there was only about half of us left, and I felt sick and giddy when I looked down and saw the little captain was gone and the lieutenant was riding by me where that brown-eyed boy had been.
“That was only the beginning and I got hardened fast enough; but when the war was over I used to wake up at night and think of all the battles I’d fought in, and try to count up the men I had bugled out to die. Then I married and had a home for a while, but my wife died, and those old times began to get bigger and bigger and now I never look back to anything but just those days of the camp, and the fights; and the bugle sings in my ears all the time as though it was calling to the men I sent into battles where they died!”
“War’s an ugly business; somebody has to be killed,” said Wayne kindly, moved to pity by the veteran’s emotion.
“I’ve trumpeted my thousands down to death,” he answered; and then, clearing his throat, he went on:
“I dream every night that I’m on a high place—not here, but a grayish sort of hill with a gray cloud hanging over it, and I look down and see long lines of them marching.”
“Them?” Wayne asked.
“GHOSTS, THE GHOSTS OF DEAD SOLDIERS”
“Ghosts, the ghosts of dead soldiers, marching with their heads bowed down the way tired soldiers march at night. And when one line passes, another trumpeter strikes up and another army of the same tired ghosts follows right after. It’s all mighty still—you never hear any sounds at all except the trumpet, and it’s muffled and choked—not even when the cavalry come along or the artillery. You know how moving guns rumble like thunder when they go along a hard road? Well, you never hear even the cannon, but the cavalry ride with their heads down, like the infantry, and the horses with their noses against their knees almost; and the artillerymen sit on the caissons with their arms folded and their heads bowed as though they were asleep. I can’t make out where they came from or where they are going; they just came out of nowhere and go nowhere—but they never stop coming. And the trumpeters blow back all the men that have ever died in battle since the world began—so that they are years and years passing by—that’s the way it seems in my dream. Then I’m all alone on the hill, and I know it’s my turn to sound the trumpet; and something clicks in my throat when I try to blow, and I can’t make a sound, and as I keep trying and trying I wake up; but I never can make them come. I can’t bring back my dead men out of the dust the way the others did, and I sit up and cry when I remember how I killed them.”