He heard the shouts of the outriders, the crack of the stout whips,
the rattle of the caissons, and, before it passed, he had caught the
excited gestures of the men upon the guns. The battery unlimbered, as he
watched it, shot a few rounds from the summit of the hill, and retreated
rapidly to a new position. When the wind scattered the heavy smoke, he saw
only the broom-sedge and several ridges of poor corn; some of the gaunt
stalks blackened and beaten to the ground, some still flaunting their brave
tassels beneath the whistling bullets. It was all in sunlight, and the gray
smoke swept ceaselessly to and fro over the smiling face of the field.
Then, as he turned a little in his shelter, he saw that there was a single
Confederate battery in position under a slight swell on his left. Beyond it
he knew that the long slope sank gently into a marshy stream and the broad
turnpike, but the brow of the hill went up against the sky, and hidden in
the brushwood he could see only the darkened line of the horizon. Against
it the guns stood there in the sunlight, unsupported, solitary, majestic,
while around them the earth was tossed up in the air as if a loose plough
had run wild across the field. A handful of artillerymen moved back and
forth, like dim outlines, serving the guns in a group of fallen horses that
showed in dark mounds upon the hill. From time to time he saw a rammer
waved excitedly as a shot went home, or heard, in a lull, the hoarse voices
of the gunners when they called for "grape!"
As he lay there, with his eyes on the solitary battery, he forgot, for an
instant, his own part in the coming work.
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