Recitations for the Social Circle. Selected and Original

by Unknown

Did you ever see a battery take position?

It hasn't the thrill of a cavalry charge, nor the grimness of a line of bayonets moving slowly and determinedly on, but there is peculiar excitement about it that makes old veterans rise in the saddle and cheer.

We have been fighting at the edge of the woods. Every cartridge-box has been emptied once and more, and a fourth of the brigade has melted away in dead and wounded and missing. Not a cheer is heard in the whole brigade. We know that we are being driven foot by foot, and that when we break back once more, the line will go to pieces and the enemy will pour through the gap.

Here comes help!

Down the crowded highway gallops a battery, withdrawn from some other position to save ours. The field fence is scattered while you could count thirty, and the guns rush for the hill behind us. Six horses to a piece, three riders to each gun. Over dry ditches where a farmer could not drive a wagon; through clumps of bushes, over logs a foot thick, every horse on the gallop, every rider lashing his team and yelling,—the sight behind us makes us forget the foe in front. The guns jump two feet high as the heavy wheels strike rock or log, but not a horse slackens his pace, not a cannoneer loses his seat. Six guns, six caissons, sixty horses, eighty men, race for the brow of the hill as if he who reached it first was to be knighted.

A moment ago the battery was a confused mob. We look again and the six guns are in position, the detached horses hurrying away, the ammunition-chests open, and along our line runs the command: "Give them one more volley and fall back to support the guns!" We have scarcely obeyed when boom! boom! boom! opens the battery, and jets of fire jump down and scorch the green trees under which we fought and despaired.

The shattered old brigade has a chance to breathe for the first time in three hours as we form a line of battle behind the guns and lie down. What grim, cool fellows these cannoneers are. Every man is a perfect machine. Bullets plash dust in their faces, but they do not wince. Bullets sing over and around them, but they do not dodge. There goes one to the earth, shot through the head as he sponged his gun. The machinery loses just one beat,—misses just one cog in the wheel, and then works away again as before.

Every gun is using short-fuse shell. The ground shakes and trembles—the roar shuts out all sounds from a battle-line three miles long, and the shells go shrieking into the swamp to cut trees short off—to mow great gaps in the bushes—to hunt out and shatter and mangle men until their corpses cannot be recognized as human. You would think a tornado was howling through the forest, followed by billows of fire, and yet men live through it—aye! press forward to capture the battery! We can hear their shouts as they form for the rush.

Now the shells are changed for grape and canister, and the guns are served so fast that all reports blend into one mighty roar. The shriek of a shell is the wickedest sound in war, but nothing makes the flesh crawl like the demoniac singing, purring, whistling grape-shot and the serpent-like hiss of canister. Men's legs and arms are not shot through, but torn off. Heads are torn from bodies and bodies cut in two. A round shot or shell takes two men out of the ranks as it crashes through. Grape and canister mow a swath and pile the dead on top of each other.

Through the smoke we see a swarm of men. It is not a battle-line, but a mob of men desperate enough to bathe their bayonets in the flame of the guns. The guns leap from the ground, almost, as they are depressed on the foe—and shrieks and screams and shouts blend into one awful and steady cry. Twenty men out of the battery are down, and the firing is interrupted. The foe accept it as a sign of wavering, and come rushing on. They are not ten feet away when the guns give them a last shot. That discharge picks living men off their feet and throws them into the swamp, a blackened, bloody mass.