The Firing Was Quite Close Now, And The Trail Was No Longer Filled
With Blanket Rolls And Haversacks, Nor Did Pitiful, Prostrate Figures
Lie In Wait Behind Each Rock.
I guessed this must mean that I now
was well in advance of the farthest point to which Capron's
Troop had
moved, and I was running forward feeling confident that I must be
close on our men, when I saw the body of a sergeant blocking the
trail and stretched at full length across it. Its position was a
hundred yards in advance of that of any of the others - it was
apparently the body of the first man killed. After death the bodies
of some men seem to shrink almost instantly within themselves; they
become limp and shapeless, and their uniforms hang upon them
strangely. But this man, who was a giant in life, remained a giant
in death - his very attitude was one of attack; his fists were
clinched, his jaw set, and his eyes, which were still human, seemed
fixed with resolve. He was dead, but he was not defeated. And so
Hamilton Fish died as he had lived - defiantly, running into the very
face of the enemy, standing squarely upright on his legs instead of
crouching, as the others called to him to do, until he fell like a
column across the trail. "God gives," was the motto on the watch I
took from his blouse, and God could not have given him a nobler end;
to die, in the fore-front of the first fight of the war, quickly,
painlessly, with a bullet through the heart, with his regiment behind
him, and facing the enemies of his country.
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