Finally the river was reached, and, plunging into it, the two horses bore their burdens safely across. Pollard might easily have been fifty yards in advance of his sergeant-major, seeing that he had the better horse, and that his companion’s animal was carrying double. But that was not Marshall Pollard’s way. Instead of riding as fast as he could toward the river and the comparative safety that lay beyond it, he rode with his horse’s head just overlapping the flanks of the animal which bore the girl and her rescuer. In this way he managed to make of himself and his horse a protecting barrier between the enemy and the girl whom Kilgariff was so gallantly trying to bear to safety. This was not a battle, or anything remotely resembling a battle. If it had been, these two men would not have left their posts in the battery. It was only an insignificant “operation of outposts,” which the commanders in the front of both armies that night reported as “some slight skirmishing along the outer lines.” On neither side was it thought worth while to add that fifty or sixty brave young fellows had been done to death in the “slight skirmishing.” The war was growing old in the spring of 1864. Officers, hardened by experience of human butchery on a larger scale, no longer thought it necessary to report death losses that did not require three figures for their recording. When Pollard and Kilgariff reached the bit of woodland in which the battery had been posted for a special purpose, they found the guns already gone. The battery had been ordered during their absence to return to its more permanent camp two or three miles in the rear, and in Captain Pollard’s absence his senior lieutenant had taken command to execute the order. It is the way of war that “men may come and men may go,” but there is always some one next in command to take the place of one in authority who meets death or is absent for any other cause. An army organisation resembles Nature herself in its scrupulous care for the general result, and in its absolute indifference to the welfare or the fate of the individual. War is a merciless thing—inhuman, demoniacal, devilish. But incidentally it calls into activity many of the noblest qualities of human nature. It had done so in this instance. Having fired the house on the enemy’s side of the river, and having thus driven away a company of sharp-shooters who were grievously annoying the Confederate line, Captain Pollard’s duty was fully done. But, at the suggestion that some wounded enemy might have been left in the house to perish in the torture of the flames, he and his companion had deliberately crossed the river into the enemy’s country, and had ridden under a galling fire to the burning building, as earnestly and as daringly intent upon their mission of mercy as they had been a little while before upon their work of slaughter and destruction. “Man’s a strange animal,” sings the poet, and his song is an echo of truth.