The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce — Volume 2: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians

HOW SOUNDS CAN FIGHT SHADOWS

Captain Ransome walked up and down behind his guns, which were firing rapidly but with steadiness.  The gunners worked alertly, but without haste or apparent excitement.  There was really no reason for excitement; it is not much to point a cannon into a fog and fire it.  Anybody can do as much as that.

The men smiled at their noisy work, performing it with a lessening alacrity.  They cast curious regards upon their captain, who had now mounted the banquette of the fortification and was looking across the parapet as if observing the effect of his fire.  But the only visible effect was the substitution of wide, low-lying sheets of smoke for their bulk of fog.  Suddenly out of the obscurity burst a great sound of cheering, which filled the intervals between the reports of the guns with startling distinctness!  To the few with leisure and opportunity to observe, the sound was inexpressibly strange—­so loud, so near, so menacing, yet nothing seen!  The men who had smiled at their work smiled no more, but performed it with a serious and feverish activity.

From his station at the parapet Captain Ransome now saw a great multitude of dim gray figures taking shape in the mist below him and swarming up the slope.  But the work of the guns was now fast and furious.  They swept the populous declivity with gusts of grape and canister, the whirring of which could be heard through the thunder of the explosions.  In this awful tempest of iron the assailants struggled forward foot by foot across their dead, firing into the embrasures, reloading, firing again, and at last falling in their turn, a little in advance of those who had fallen before.  Soon the smoke was dense enough to cover all.  It settled down upon the attack and, drifting back, involved the defense.  The gunners could hardly see to serve their pieces, and when occasional figures of the enemy appeared upon the parapet—­having had the good luck to get near enough to it, between two embrasures, to be protected from the guns—­they looked so unsubstantial that it seemed hardly worth while for the few infantrymen to go to work upon them with the bayonet and tumble them back into the ditch.

As the commander of a battery in action can find something better to do than cracking individual skulls, Captain Ransome had retired from the parapet to his proper post in rear of his guns, where he stood with folded arms, his bugler beside him.  Here, during the hottest of the fight, he was approached by Lieutenant Price, who had just sabred a daring assailant inside the work.  A spirited colloquy ensued between the two officers—­spirited, at least, on the part of the lieutenant, who gesticulated with energy and shouted again and again into his commander’s ear in the attempt to make himself heard above the infernal din of the guns.  His gestures, if coolly noted by an actor, would have been pronounced to be those of protestation:  one would have said that he was opposed to the proceedings.  Did he wish to surrender?

Captain Ransome listened without a change of countenance or attitude, and when the other man had finished his harangue, looked him coldly in the eyes and during a seasonable abatement of the uproar said: 

“Lieutenant Price, it is not permitted to you to know anything.  It is sufficient that you obey my orders.”

The lieutenant went to his post, and the parapet being now apparently clear Captain Ransome returned to it to have a look over.  As he mounted the banquette a man sprang upon the crest, waving a great brilliant flag.  The captain drew a pistol from his belt and shot him dead.  The body, pitching forward, hung over the inner edge of the embankment, the arms straight downward, both hands still grasping the flag.  The man’s few followers turned and fled down the slope.  Looking over the parapet, the captain saw no living thing.  He observed also that no bullets were coming into the work.

He made a sign to the bugler, who sounded the command to cease firing.  At all other points the action had already ended with a repulse of the Confederate attack; with the cessation of this cannonade the silence was absolute.