Some of the dark lumps in the grass were motionless, some stirred and muttered. Through the open door of the barn a group of men could be seen around a lantern and leaning forward. One of them marked and pointed with his finger. A horse kicked and squealed on the hill among the guns. A dog howled in some indefinite distance and direction. The birds began to twitter in the trees of the beetling woods. A creeping wind chilled the dew on the faces of sleepers and watchers in the open. The blackness grew conscious--dimly gray. Two or three came out of the barn and ran behind it. In a moment there was a cluttered thudding of horses' feet, which died away down the field. Pickets began shooting in front. Little things whimpered and whined overhead. An officer, by the glimmer of his straps, went forward and shouted in the woods. The near firing stopped, or most of it, but the things overhead continued to whimper and whine. The lumps on the grass began to sit up and strip off blankets. "What's he stopping 'em for?" "Nothing in it." "The Johnnies keep it up." "They're firing high." Fires of gathered dead-wood sprang up on the woods' edge--a score in sight, then a hundred, smoking and crackling. A low murmur, a sense of multitude, grew as the darkness lifted its oppression. Men sipped and munched by the fires. Some one shouted, "Get ready, men!" A cannon belched and bellowed on the hill to the right, then another and another, to a passionate, throbbing roar. "Company B, forward! Halt here!" Men poured around in crowds and formed in triple lines. A shell dropped through the roof of the empty barn and splintered some of the boards outward with its burst. The misty sky was breaking for a clear day. Red clouds of sunrise streamed like pennants in the southwest. A man in the front line pitched forward and lay still. "Who's that?" "I do' know." "Aiken, I guess." "There, now! You jabbed me twice. Hold up your bayonet." Men panted as if they had already been running, and shifted their feet nervously. "To-day's my birthday." "Going to celebrate it all right." Several laughed in high, strained cackles. "What we waiting for, cap'n?" "Don't know. Here. Where's your cartridge-belt? Stay where you are. Who's that down? Hand up his belt." A shout came up the line, like the ripple of a shaken rope. They were suddenly in the woods. Men jumped from the ground and joined. They were in another field of grass. One heard nothing more but the thump of his own feet and the singing blood in his ears; not the throb of the artillery; not the cry of the man who threw up his arms and fell against him; not the discharge of his own rifle, though he saw the smoke, and with the next stride his face went through the smoke.