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Do you think we could run ahead, while a cowardly massacre by Boxers and savage soldiery was hourly thinning out the stragglers and defenceless people in the rear? Never! Hardly anybody thought of eating all that long evening. Most of us were trying to find out whether some sensible understanding could not be arrived at; whether we could not prepare before it was too late.
The next day Sir John Moore issued an order strongly condemning the conduct of the troops, and stating that he intended to give battle to the enemy. The news effected an instant transformation. The stragglers who had left their regiments and entered the town by twos and threes at once rejoined their corps.
Others who had passed that way had left many of their footsore beasts behind them horses, oxen, cows, and sheep to fall a prey at once to the great gray prairie wolves that hung behind every wagon train, waiting for the stragglers who could not keep up. "It is only the human beings who have the courage to go on," Abner Blythe said to Felix.
The demarcation that his policy had tended to efface was afterwards more weakened by his successor, the Duke of Wellington; and had it not been for the question of Reform that again drew the stragglers on either side around one determined banner, it is likely that Whig and Tory would, among the many minute sections and shades of difference, have lost for ever the two broad distinguishing colours of their separate factions.
The governor's army amounted to five hundred men, two hundred of them soldiers in uniform, and the remainder half*d stragglers, fond of pillage, but too cowardly to fight for it. It was agreed that I and my men, being all on horseback, would occupy the prairie, where we would conceal ourselves in an ambush.
Then the commotion seemed suddenly to subside. After an interval the hounds splashed by once more among the alder-roots, and the thud of human footsteps resounded in the "holt." In the silence that followed, Lutra, reassured, dived from her "holt," and, paddling gently to the surface, saw the last stragglers of the Hunt climbing the slope towards the farm.
In this way the news was spread to the stragglers off the road, when they, too, turned their faces to the front and marched toward the enemy, changing in a moment from the depths of depression, to the extreme of enthusiasm.
After that and far into the evening all the country roads were filled with drunken stragglers, who were trying to forget what they had seen. One thing that makes the work of searching for the bodies very slow is the strange way that great masses of objects were rolled into intricate masses of rubbish. Horrible Masses.
We ate our dinner on the bare sod while all around us the birds of spring-time moved in myriads, and over the swells to the east other wagons laden with other land-seekers crept like wingless beetles stragglers from the main skirmish line. Having erected our pine-board straddle-bugs with our names written thereon, we jubilantly started back toward the railway.
The sweat, not of heat but of mental agony, stood upon their faces. Grant was not the only one who suffered. Now they met some of those stragglers who flee from every battlefield, no matter what the nation. Their faces were white with fear and they cried out that the Northern army was destroyed.
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