EVERY FIFTH MAN
Half of our company stood on a height near a heavy battery of cannon. I was with the other half which took its position among the furrows of a potato-field, a considerable distance from our main army, which for two hours had kept up a fusillade with the enemy infantry, thinly spread out beyond a swampy meadow, on a low green hill. In the potato-field among the yellowish, frosted stalks where we lay, chiefly as guard for observing the left flank, the smoke whitened every little while and a ball sped idly somewhere into the broad pasture land on the elevated ground, where the enemy soldiers looked like small, bluish, sparsely planted flowers in a green field.
A shot whistled past my ear and lost itself in the soft and, as yet, transparently clear air.
I was lying in a deep unraked ridge of pebbly loam, holding in my hand a loaded gun aimed straight ahead. I was not shooting. It seemed useless to me. The potato-vine was near my eyes and exhaled an odor of decaying leaves. I looked about over the country and everything that appeared before me in the broad picture pleased me. The view was unobstructed and
105
