Not a look backward. Oh, if he would but
turn - if he could but see the love, the adoration, the atonement!
Not a word is spoken; the populous depths of the forest still murmur
with their unseen and unseeing swarm, but all along the fringe there is
silence absolute. The burly commander is an equestrian statue of
himself. The mounted staff officers, their field-glasses up, are
motionless all. The line of battle in the edge of the wood stands at a
new kind of "attention," each man in the attitude in which he was caught
by the consciousness of what is going on. All these hardened and
impenitent man-killers, to whom death in its awfulest forms is a fact
familiar to their every-day observation; who sleep on hills trembling
with the thunder of great guns, dine in the midst of streaming missiles,
and play at cards among the dead faces of their dearest friends, - all
are watching with suspended breath and beating hearts the outcome of an
act involving the life of one man. Such is the magnetism of courage and
devotion.
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