home
***
CD-ROM
|
disk
|
FTP
|
other
***
search
/
Software Vault: The Gold Collection
/
Software Vault - The Gold Collection (American Databankers) (1993).ISO
/
cdr11
/
redbadge.zip
/
FILE23.TXT
< prev
next >
Wrap
Text File
|
1993-06-14
|
11KB
|
169 lines
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The colonel came running along back of the line. There were
other officers following him. "We must charge them!" they shouted.
"We must charge them!" they cried with resentful voices, as if
anticipating a rebellion against this plan by the men.
The youth, upon hearing the shouts, began to study the
distance between him and the enemy. He made vague calculations. He
saw that to be firm soldiers they must go forward. It would be
death to stay in the present place, and with all the circumstances
to go backward would exalt too many others. Their hope was to push
the galling foes away from the fence.
He expected that his companions, weary and stiffened, would
have to be driven to this assault, but as he turned toward them he
perceived with a certain surprise that they were giving quick and
unqualified expressions of assent. There was an ominous, clanging
overture to the charge when the shifts of the bayonets rattled upon
the rifle barrels. At the yelled words of command the soldiers
sprang forward in eager leaps. There was new and unexpected force
in the movement of the regiment. A knowledge of its faded and jaded
condition made the charge appear like a paroxysm, a display of the
strength that comes before a final feebleness. The men scampered in
insane fever of haste, racing as if to achieve a sudden success
before an exhilarating fluid should leave them. It was a blind and
despairing rush by the collection of men in dusty and tattered
blue, over a green sward and under a sapphire sky, toward a fence,
dimly outlined in smoke, from behind which spluttered the fierce
rifles of enemies.
The youth kept the bright colors to the front. He was waving
his free arm in furious circles, the while shrieking mad calls and
appeals, urging on those that did not need to be urged, for it
seemed that the mob of blue men hurling themselves on the dangerous
group of rifles were again grown suddenly wild with an enthusiasm
of unselfishness. From the many firings starting toward them, it
looked as if they would merely succeed in making a great sprinkling
of corpses on the grass between their former position and the
fence. But they were in a state of frenzy, perhaps because of
forgotten vanities, and it made an exhibition of sublime
recklessness. There was no obvious questioning, nor figurings, nor
diagrams. There was, apparently, no considered loopholes. It
appeared that the swift wings of their desires would have shattered
against the iron gates of the impossible.
He himself felt the daring spirit of a savage religion-mad. He
was capable of profound sacrifices, a tremendous death. He had no
time for dissections, but he knew that he thought of the bullets
only as things that could prevent him from reaching the place of
his endeavor. There were subtle flashings of joy within him that
thus should be his mind.
He strained all his strength. His eyesight was shaken and
dazzled by the tension of thought and muscle. He did not see
anything excepting the mist of smoke gashed by the little knives of
fire, but he knew that in it lay the aged fence of a vanished
farmer protecting the snuggled bodies of the gray men.
As he ran a thought of the shock of contact gleamed in his
mind. He expected a great concussion when the two bodies of troops
crashed together. This became a part of his wild battle madness. He
could feel the onward swing of the regiment about him and he
conceived of a thunderous, crushing blow that would prostrate the
resistance and spread consternation and amazement for miles. The
flying regiment was going to have a catapultian effect. This dream
made him run faster among his comrades, who were giving vent to
hoarse and frantic cheers.
But presently he could see that many of the men in gray did
not intend to abide the blow. The smoke, rolling, disclosed men who
ran, their faces still turned. These grew to a crowd, who retired
stubbornly. Individuals wheeled frequently to send a bullet at the
blue wave.
But at one part of the line there was a grim and obdurate
group that made no movement. They were settled firmly down behind
posts and rails. A flag, ruffled and fierce, waved over them and
their rifles dinned fiercely.
The blue whirl of men got very near, until it seemed that in
truth there would be a close and frightful scuffle. There was an
expressed disdain in the opposition of the little group, that
changed the meaning of the cheers of the men in blue. They became
yells of wrath, directed, personal. The cries of the two parties
were now in sound an interchange of scathing insults.
They in blue showed their teeth; their eyes shone all white.
They launched themselves as at the throats of those who stood
resisting. The space between dwindled to an insignificant distance.
The youth had centered the gaze of his soul upon that other
flag. Its possession would be high pride. It would express bloody
minglings, near blows. He had a gigantic hatred for those who made
great difficulties and complications. They caused it to be as a
craved treasure of mythology, hung amid tasks and contrivances of
danger.
He plunged like a mad horse at it. He was resolved it should
not escape if wild blows and darings of blows could seize it. His
own emblem, quivering and aflare, was winging toward the other. It
seemed there would shortly be an encounter of strange beaks and
claws, as of eagles.
The swirling body of blue men came to a sudden halt at close
and disastrous range and roared a swift volley. The group in gray
was split and broken by this fire, but its riddled body still
fought. The men in blue yelled again and rushed in upon it.
The youth, in his leapings, saw, as through a mist, a picture
of four or five men stretched upon the ground or writhing upon
their knees with bowed heads as if they had been stricken by bolts
from the sky. Tottering among them was the rival color bearer, whom
the youth saw had been bitten vitally by the bullets of the last
formidable volley. He perceived this man fighting a last struggle,
the struggle of one whose legs are grasped by demons. It was a
ghastly battle. Over his face was the bleach of death, but set upon
it were the dark and hard lines of desperate purpose. With this
terrible grin of resolution he hugged his precious flag to him and
was stumbling and staggering in his design to go the way that led
to safety for it.
But his wounds always made it seem that his feet were
retarded, held, and he fought a grim fight, as with invisible
ghouls fastened greedily upon his limbs. Those in advance of the
scampering blue men, howling cheers, leaped at the fence. The
despair of the lost was in his eyes as he glanced back at them.
The youth's friend went over the obstruction in a tumbling
heap and sprang at the flag as a panther at prey. He pulled at it
and, wrenching it free, swung up its red brilliancy with a mad cry
of exultation even as the color bearer, gasping, lurched over in a
final throe and, stiffening convulsively, turned his dead face to
the ground. There was much blood upon the grass blades.
At the place of success there began more wild clamorings of
cheers. The men gesticulated and bellowed in an ecstasy. When they
spoke it was as if they considered their listener to be a mile
away. What hats and caps were left to them they often slung high in
the air.
At one part of the line four men had been swooped upon, and
they now sat as prisoners. Some blue men were about them in an
eager and curious circle. The soldiers had trapped strange birds,
and there was an examination. A flurry of fast questions was in the
air.
One of the prisoners was nursing a superficial wound in the
foot. He cuddled it, baby-wise, but he looked up from it often to
curse with an astonishing utter abandon straight at the noses of
his captors. He consigned them to red regions; he called upon the
pestilential wrath of strange gods. And with it all he was
singularly free from recognition of the finer points of the conduct
of prisoners of war. It was as if a clumsy clod had trod upon his
toe and he conceived it to be his privilege, his duty, to use deep,
resentful oaths.
Another, who was a boy in years, took his plight with great
calmness and apparent good nature. He conversed with the men in
blue, studying their faces with his bright and keen eyes. They
spoke of battles and conditions. There was an acute interest in all
their faces during this exchange of viewpoints. It seemed a great
satisfaction to hear voices from where all had been darkness and
speculation.
The third captive sat with a morose countenance. He preserved
a stoical and cold attitude. To all advances he made one reply
without variation, "Ah, go to hell!"
The last of the four was always silent and, for the most part,
kept his face turned in unmolested directions. From the views the
youth received he seemed to be in a state of absolute dejection.
Shame was upon him, and with it profound regret that he was,
perhaps, no more to be counted in the ranks of his fellows. The
youth could detect no expression that would allow him to believe
that the other was giving a thought to his narrowed future, the
pictured dungeons, perhaps, and starvations and brutalities, liable
to the imagination. All to be seen was shame for captivity and
regret for the right to antagonize.
After the men had celebrated sufficiently they settled down
behind the old rail fence, on the opposite side to the one from
which their foes had been driven. A few shot perfunctorily at
distant marks.
There was some long grass. The youth nestled in it and rested,
making a convenient rail support the flag. His friend, jubilant and
glorified, holding his treasure with vanity, came to him there.
They sat side by side and congratulated each other.