* * * * *
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.