The rising sun lifted its first curved rim of dazzling light above the dark line of distant treetops just as the brigade band began a new tune—"The Faded Coat of Blue." The musicians themselves, huddled together under the shelter of a mound of rocks where the road descended into the ravine, did not get their share of this early morning radiance, but remained in the shadows.
Only a yard or two away from the outermost drummer-boy these shadows ended, and a picture began that was full of action and color, and flooded with golden sunshine.
The bandsmen, as they played, observed this picture, and thanked their stars they were no part of it. Better a whole life spent in the shade, than sunlight at such a price as was being paid for it out there in the road!
This road had never before been anything but a narrow, grass-grown, out-of-the-way track for mule-carts. Now it had become the bed of a broad, endless, moving human flood—filling it compactly from side to side, with ever a fresh wave of blue-coated men entering at the rear, where the scrub-oak opening began, and ever a front wave gliding off downward from view with that sinister slipperiness which arches the brow of a cataract.
The sense of motion conveyed by these thousands of passing men was at its perfection of rhythm just opposite the band. They were marching in eights, so close together that they trod continually on any lagging heel.
The ranks, when they first came in view, seemed pressing forward without much order. Then, as they drew close to the musicians, they fell into step instinctively, swung along in swaying unison for a few rods, and again lapsed into jagged irregularity as they swept downward behind the rock.
It was indeed only this shifting section of the dozen nearest ranks that could catch the strains of the band. The others, whether in van or rear, moved on with their hearing numbed by a ceaseless and terrible uproar which came from the ravine in front, and, mounting upward, seemed to shake the earth on which they trod.
The musicians might blow themselves red in the face, the drummers beat the strained sheepskins to bursting, and make no headway against this din of cannon.
The men of Boyce\'s brigade, as they came into the little space where they could hear the music above the artillery, and caught the step it was setting, hardly looked that way, but pushed forward with eyes straight ahead, and grave, drawn faces on which the cheerful sunlight seemed a mockery.
When the band had finished "The Faded Coat of Blue" the sky was still clear overhead, but from the gully below a dense cloud of smoke had spread upward to choke the morning light. While the bandsmen paused, blowing their instruments clear and breathing hard, this smoke began to thicken the air about the rock which sheltered them.
In a minute more the front figures of the endless moving chain before them seemed to be walking off into a fog, and the atmosphere was all at once heavy with the smell of gunpowder.
Curiously enough, the men\'s faces brightened at this. There came a block now somewhere on the road ahead, and the column halted. The regimental flags, with the color-guard, were just abreast of the band. The sergeant took out his knife to cut one of the furling strings that was in a hard knot, and untied the rest, shaking out the silken folds of the banners.
"I always untie \'em when we get into the smoke," he said, speaking at large.
The drummer-boy nearest the road moved over to study the flags. He held his head to one side and scrutinized them critically.
"No bullet holes in \'em yet, to speak of, I notice," he remarked to the sergeant, raising a clear, sharp young voice above the universal racket. "Guess you\'ll get enough to-day to make up!" he added.
The old sergeant nodded his head. "Something besides flags will get holes in \'em, too," he returned, lifting his voice also, like a man talking in the teeth of a roaring gale.
"What are you? Michiganders?" shouted the boy.
"No—Ohio!" the sergeant bawled back. "When they changed the corps, they brigaded us all up fresh, so that we don\'t know our own mothers. We\'ve got in with some New Yorkers that ain\'t got no more sense than to chew fine-cut tobacco. You can\'t raise a plug in a whole regiment of \'em. Regular pumpkin-heads!"
"They\'ll show you fellows the way, down below there, though!" retorted the boy, his injured state pride adding shrillness to his tone. "Ohio\'s no good, anyhow!"
He instinctively moved beyond reach of the sergeant\'s boot, as he passed this last remark. Some of the men in the crowded ranks close by laughed at his impudence, and he himself was grinning with a sense of successful repartee, when he felt a hand laid on his shoulder. He looked up, and found himself confronting a young, fair-faced officer, who was regarding him with gravely gentle eyes.
"Don\'t say that about any men who are going out to die," this officer said; and though he did not seem to be speaking loudly, the words fell very distinctly. "I\'ve got a brother at home about your size. So have lots of the rest of us here. We want to carry down there with us a pleasant notion of the last boy we saw."
"I was only fooling!" the drummer-boy rejoined.
There was no time for further words, as the preparatory rattle on the drum-edge behind warned him. In another minute he was back in his place, and the band was hurling forth into the general uproar the strains of "The Red, White, and Blue."
The column had begun to move again. The flags, the color-guard, the young officer with the sad, gentle eyes, had passed downward out of sight, and company after company of their regiment came pressing onward now.
The boy, as he kept up with his part of the familiar work, watched these Ohio men swing past. They seemed young fellows, for the most part, and their uniforms were significantly new and clean. Everything about them showed that they were going under fire for the first time, though they pushed forward as stoutly as veterans. The boy found himself hoping that a good many of these Ohio men would come back all right—and most of all that young officer who had a brother about his size.
All this while a group of field officers had been standing on the ridge up above the rocky mound which sheltered the band. Their figures, with broad hats and big-cuffed gauntlets, had grown indistinct against the sky as the smoke thickened. Now they gave up trying to follow through their glasses the movements in the vale below, and turned to descend.
Their horses, which men had been holding near the musicians, were hastily brought forward, and the general and his staff sprang into the saddle and trotted over toward the road.
The end of the column was in view, with its disorder of servants, baggage-carriers, soldiers who had lost their places, and behind, the looming canvas covers of ambulance-wagons and the train. Into the thick of this straggling mass General Boyce, sitting splendidly erect and with a bold smile on his rosy-cheeked face, spurred his way, and the staff in turn clattered after him down out of sight. The brigade had passed, and the band stopped playing.
Files of mules, heavily laden with stacks of cartridge-boxes, were still pouring along the road and being whacked down the ravine path; but the big wagons, as they came, halted, and were drawn off into the field to the left. Tall poles were taken out and set up. Coils of rope were unwound, stakes driven, and huge cylinders of canvas unrolled on the grass.
Soon there arose the gray outlines of tents—one dominating structure fully thirty yards long, and around it, like little mushrooms about the parent stool, a number of smaller tents, some square, some conical. The drummer-boy, his task ended, sauntered over with his companions toward the tents.
He paused to watch the heavy folds of canvas being hauled up to the ridge-pole of the big one. In one way it recalled those preparations on the old circus-ground at home which he used to watch with such zest. But in another way it was strangely different.
While some men tugged at the ropes or drove in stakes for the guy-lines, others were busy brin............