第17章

The lieutenant sprang forward bawling.The youth saw his features wrathfully red, and saw him make a dab with his sword.His one thought of the incident was that the lieutenant was a pecul-iar creature to feel interested in such matters upon this occasion.

He ran like a blind man.Two or three times he fell down.Once he knocked his shoulder so heavily against a tree that he went headlong.

Since he had turned his back upon the fight his fears had been wondrously magnified.Death about to thrust him between the shoulder blades was far more dreadful than death about to smite him between the eyes.When he thought of it later, he conceived the impression that it is better to view the appalling than to be merely within hearing.The noises of the battle were like stones; he believed himself liable to be crushed.

As he ran he mingled with others.He dimly saw men on his right and on his left, and he heard footsteps behind him.He thought that all the regiment was fleeing, pursued by these ominous crashes.

In his flight the sound of these following foot-steps gave him his one meager relief.He felt vaguely that death must make a first choice of the men who were nearest; the initial morsels for the dragons would be then those who were fol-lowing him.So he displayed the zeal of an insane sprinter in his purpose to keep them in the rear.

There was a race.

As he, leading, went across a little field, he found himself in a region of shells.They hurtled over his head with long wild screams.As he listened he imagined them to have rows of cruel teeth that grinned at him.Once one lit before him and the livid lightning of the explosion effectually barred the way in his chosen direc-tion.He groveled on the ground and then springing up went careering off through some bushes.

He experienced a thrill of amazement when he came within view of a battery in action.The men there seemed to be in conventional moods, altogether unaware of the impending annihila-tion.The battery was disputing with a distant antagonist and the gunners were wrapped in admiration of their shooting.They were con-tinually bending in coaxing postures over the guns.They seemed to be patting them on the back and encouraging them with words.The guns, stolid and undaunted, spoke with dogged valor.

The precise gunners were coolly enthusiastic.

They lifted their eyes every chance to the smoke-wreathed hillock from whence the hostile battery addressed them.The youth pitied them as he ran.Methodical idiots! Machine-like fools! The refined joy of planting shells in the midst of the other battery's formation would appear a little thing when the infantry came swooping out of the woods.

The face of a youthful rider, who was jerking his frantic horse with an abandon of temper he might display in a placid barnyard, was im-pressed deeply upon his mind.He knew that he looked upon a man who would presently be dead.

Too, he felt a pity for the guns, standing, six good comrades, in a bold row.