on the ground, their long black hair hanging down uncared for, they chewed, smoked, swore, and cooked as though there was no jarring in the earth, no wide foreboding on the air.  One man, sitting over his little fire, alternately removed and touched his lips to the sooty rim of his tin cup, swearing because it was too hot.  He swore still more loudly and in tones more aggrieved when a bullet, finding that line, cut off a limb from a tree above and dropped it into his fire, upsetting the frying pan in which he had other store of things desirable.  Repairing all this damage as he might, he lit his pipe and leaned against the tree, sitting with his knees high in front of him.  There came other bullets, singing, sighing.  Another bullet found that same line as the man sat there smoking.

Overhead were small birds, chirping, singing, twittering.  A long black line of crows passed, tumbling in the air, with much confusion of chatter and clangour of complaint that their harvest, too, had been disturbed.  They had been busy.  Why should men play this game when there were serious things of life?

The general played calmly, and ever the points and edges and fronts of his advance came on, pressing in toward the last row of the board, toward the line where lay the boys of Louisburg.  Many a boy was pale and sick that day, in spite of the encouraging calm or the biting jests of the veterans.  The strange sighings in the air became more numerous and more urgent.  Now and then bits of twigs and boughs and leaves came sifting down, cut by invisible shears, and now and then a sapling jarred with the thud of an unseen blow.  The long line in the trenches moved and twisted restlessly.

In front of the trenches were other regiments, out ahead in the woods, unseen, somewhere toward that place whence came the steadiest jarring of artillery and the loudest rattling of the lesser arms.  It was very hard to lie and listen, to imagine, to suspect, to dread.  For hours the game went on, the reserves at the trenches hearing now distinctly and now faintly the tumult of the lines, now receding, now coming on.  But the volume of the tumult, and its separation into a thousand distinct and terrifying sounds, became in the average ever an increasing and not a lessening thing.  The cracker-popping of the musketry became less and less a thing of sport, of reminiscences.  The whinings that passed overhead bore more and more a personal message.  These young men, who but lately had said good-bye to the women of their kin, began to learn what war might mean.  It had been heretofore a distant, unmeasured, undreaded thing, conquerable, not to be feared.  It seemed so sweet and fit to go forth, even though it had been hard to say good-bye!