Crittenden

* * * * *

It was fiercer firing now than ever. The Spaniards were in the second

line of trenches and were making a sortie. Under the hill sat Grafton

and another correspondent while the storm of bullets swept over them.

Grafton was without glasses--a Mauser had furrowed the skin on the

bridge of his nose, breaking his spectacle-frame so that one glass

dropped on one side of his nose and the other on the other. The other

man had several narrow squeaks, as he called them, and, even as they

sat, a bullet cut a leaf over his head and it dropped between the pages

of his note-book. He closed the book and looked up.

"Thanks," he said. "That's just what I want--I'll keep that."

"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.