They were men.  They crept upon their hands and knees.  They used their hands only, dragging their legs.  They used their knees only, their arms hanging idle at their sides.  They strove to rise to their feet, but fell prone in the attempt.  They did nothing naturally, and nothing alike, save only to advance foot by foot in the same direction.  Singly, in pairs and in little groups, they came on through the gloom, some halting now and again while others crept slowly past them, then resuming their movement.  They came by dozens and by hundreds; as far on either hand as one could see in the deepening gloom they extended and the black wood behind them appeared to be inexhaustible.  The very ground seemed in motion toward the creek.  Occasionally one who had paused did not again go on, but lay motionless.  He was dead.  Some, pausing, made strange gestures with their hands, erected their arms and lowered them again, clasped their heads; spread their palms upward, as men are sometimes seen to do in public prayer.

Not all of this did the child note; it is what would have been noted by an elder observer; he saw little but that these were men, yet crept like babes.  Being men, they were not terrible, though unfamiliarly clad.  He moved among them freely, going from one to another and peering into their faces with childish curiosity.  All their faces were singularly white and many were streaked and gouted with red.  Something in this—­ something too, perhaps, in their grotesque attitudes and movements—­ reminded him of the painted clown whom he had seen last summer in the circus, and he laughed as he watched them.  But on and ever on they crept, these maimed and bleeding men, as heedless as he of the dramatic contrast between his laughter and their own ghastly gravity.  To him it was a merry spectacle.  He had seen his father’s negroes creep upon their hands and knees for his amusement—­had ridden them so, “making believe” they were his horses.  He now approached one of these crawling figures from behind and with an agile movement mounted it astride.  The man sank upon his breast, recovered, flung the small boy fiercely to the ground as an unbroken colt might have done, then turned upon him a face that lacked a lower jaw—­from the upper teeth to the throat was a great red gap fringed with hanging shreds of flesh and splinters of bone.  The unnatural prominence of nose, the absence of chin, the fierce eyes, gave this man the appearance of a great bird of prey crimsoned in throat and breast by the blood of its quarry.  The man rose to his knees, the child to his feet.  The man shook his fist at the child; the child, terrified at last, ran to a tree near by, got upon the farther side of it and took a more serious view of the situation.  And so the clumsy multitude dragged itself slowly and painfully along in hideous pantomime—­moved forward down the slope like a swarm of great black beetles, with never a sound of going—­in silence profound, absolute.