“I observe,” said Grafton, “that the way one of these infernal bullets sounds depends entirely on where you happen to be when you hear it.  When a sharpshooter has picked you out and is plugging at you, they are intelligent and vindictive.  Coming through that bottom, they were for all the world like a lot of nasty little insects.  And listen to ’em now.”  The other man listened.  “Hear ’em as they pass over and go out of hearing.  That is for all the world like the last long note of a meadow lark’s song when you hear him afar off and at sunset.  But I notice that simile didn’t occur to me until I got under the lee of this hill.”  He looked around.  “This hill will be famous, I suppose.  Let’s go up higher.”  They went up higher, passing a crowd of skulkers, or men in reserve—­Grafton could not tell which—­and as they went by a soldier said: 

“Well, if I didn’t have to be here, I be damned if I wouldn’t like to see anybody get me here.  What them fellers come fer, I can’t see.”

The firing was still hot when the two men got up to the danger line, and there they lay down.  A wounded man lay at Grafton’s elbow.  Once his throat rattled and Grafton turned curiously.

“That’s the death-rattle,” he said to himself, and he had never heard a death-rattle before.  The poor fellow’s throat rattled again, and again Grafton turned.

“I never knew before,” he said to himself, “that a dying man’s throat rattled but once.”  Then it flashed on him with horror that he should have so little feeling, and he knew it at once as the curious callousness that comes quickly to toughen the heart for the sights of war.  A man killed in battle was not an ordinary dead man at all—­he stirred no sensation at all—­no more than a dead animal.  Already he had heard officers remarking calmly to one another, and apparently without feeling: 

“Well, So and So was killed to-day.”  And he looked back to the disembarkation, when the army was simply in a hurry.  Two negro troopers were drowned trying to get off on the little pier.  They were fished up; a rope was tied about the neck of each, and they were lashed to the pier and left to be beaten against the wooden pillars by the waves for four hours before four comrades came and took them out and buried them.  Such was the dreadful callousness that sweeps through the human heart when war begins, and he was under its influence himself, and long afterward he remembered with shame his idle and half-scientific and useless curiosity about the wounded man at his elbow.  As he turned his head, the soldier gave a long, deep, peaceful sigh, as though he had gone to sleep.  With pity now Grafton turned to him—­and he had gone to sleep, but it was his last sleep.

“Look,” said the other man.  Grafton looked upward.  Along the trenches, and under a hot fire, moved little Jerry Carter, with figure bent, hands clasped behind him—­with the manner, for all the world, of a deacon in a country graveyard looking for inscriptions on tombstones.