Dawn came, but the guns smeared her translucence with black. The sun rose, but the ravens’ wings hid him. Dull red and sickly copper was this day, hidden and smothered by dark wreaths. Many things happened in it, variation and change that cast a tendril toward the future. Day drove on; sultry and loud and smoky. A squad of soldiers in a fence corner, waiting for the order forward, exchanged opinions. “Three days. We’re going to fight forever—and ever—and ever.”—“You may be. I ain’t. I’m going to fight through to where there’s peace—” “‘Peace!’ How do you spell it?”—“‘They cry Peace! Peace! and there is no Peace!’”—“D’ye reckon if one of us took a bucket and went over to that spring there, he’d be shot?”—“Of course he would! Besides, where’s the bucket?”—“I’ve got a canteen.”—“I’ve got a cup—” “Say, Sergeant, can we go?”—“No. You’ll be killed.”—“I’d just as soon be killed as to perish of thirst! Besides, a shell’ll come plumping down directly and kill us anyhow.”—“Talk of something pleasant.”—“Jim’s caught a grasshopper! Poor little hoppergrass, you oughtn’t to be out here in this wide and wicked world! Let him go, Jim.”—“How many killed and wounded do you reckon there are?”—“Thirty thousand of us, and sixty thousand of them.”—“I wish that smoke would lift so’s we could see something!“—”_Look out! Look out! Get out of this!_” Two men crawled away from the crater made by the shell. A heavy tussock of grass in their path stopped them. One rose to his knees, the other, who was wounded, took the posture of the dying Gaul in the Capitoline. “Who are you?” said the one.—“I am Jim Dudley. Who are you?”—“I—I didn’t know you, Jim. I’m Randolph.—Well, we’re all that’s left.” The dead horses lay upon this field one and two and three days in the furnace heat. They were fearful to see and there came from them a fetid odour. But the scream of the wounded horses was worse than the sight of the dead. There were many wounded horses. They lay in wood and field, in country lane and orchard. No man tended them, and they knew not what it was all about. To and fro and from side to side of the vast, cloud-wreathed Mars’s Shield galloped the riderless horses. At one of the clock all the guns, blue and grey, opened in a cannonade that shook the leaves of distant trees. A smoke as of Vesuvius or Ætna, sulphurous, pungent, clothed the region of battle. The air reverberated and the hills trembled. The roar was like the roar of the greatest cataract of a larger world, like the voice of a storm sent by the King of all the Genii. Amid its deep utterance the shout even of many men could not be heard.