Then he stood motionless, with quivering lips, looking down upon the wreck.

A SON OF THE GODS

A STUDY IN THE PRESENT TENSE

A breezy day and a sunny landscape.  An open country to right and left and forward; behind, a wood.  In the edge of this wood, facing the open but not venturing into it, long lines of troops, halted.  The wood is alive with them, and full of confused noises—­the occasional rattle of wheels as a battery of artillery goes into position to cover the advance; the hum and murmur of the soldiers talking; a sound of innumerable feet in the dry leaves that strew the interspaces among the trees; hoarse commands of officers.  Detached groups of horsemen are well in front—­not altogether exposed—­many of them intently regarding the crest of a hill a mile away in the direction of the interrupted advance.  For this powerful army, moving in battle order through a forest, has met with a formidable obstacle—­the open country.  The crest of that gentle hill a mile away has a sinister look; it says, Beware!  Along it runs a stone wall extending to left and right a great distance.  Behind the wall is a hedge; behind the hedge are seen the tops of trees in rather straggling order.  Among the trees—­what?  It is necessary to know.

Yesterday, and for many days and nights previously, we were fighting somewhere; always there was cannonading, with occasional keen rattlings of musketry, mingled with cheers, our own or the enemy’s, we seldom knew, attesting some temporary advantage.  This morning at daybreak the enemy was gone.  We have moved forward across his earthworks, across which we have so often vainly attempted to move before, through the debris of his abandoned camps, among the graves of his fallen, into the woods beyond.

How curiously we had regarded everything! how odd it all had seemed!  Nothing had appeared quite familiar; the most commonplace objects—­an old saddle, a splintered wheel, a forgotten canteen—­everything had related something of the mysterious personality of those strange men who had been killing us.  The soldier never becomes wholly familiar with the conception of his foes as men like himself; he cannot divest himself of the feeling that they are another order of beings, differently conditioned, in an environment not altogether of the earth.  The smallest vestiges of them rivet his attention and engage his interest.  He thinks of them as inaccessible; and, catching an unexpected glimpse of them, they appear farther away, and therefore larger, than they really are—­ like objects in a fog.  He is somewhat in awe of them.

From the edge of the wood leading up the acclivity are the tracks of horses and wheels—­the wheels of cannon.  The yellow grass is beaten down by the feet of infantry.  Clearly they have passed this way in thousands; they have not withdrawn by the country roads.  This is significant—­it is the difference between retiring and retreating.