But the two platoons seemed steady enough as they rose from the trenches in extended order, and waited for the word that should launch them forward.
Then a bugle rang, and the entire two battalions started silently and stolidly onward. In a few minutes the silence would be broken--from the front. On to the screen of the woods they went at a rapid quickstep, and through the foliage they broke into view, like circus riders through paper hoops. As they emerged into the open rice-fields, and could see the straw hats at the top of the trenches four hundred yards to the north, the stillness was ripped in one wild roar of musketry, and their terrific welcome had begun. Its echoes rolled away in waves of sound that merged with fresh outburstings, and nearer at hand, in weird shrieks, piercing the louder detonations, whimpered the lost-soul wail of the Mauser bullets. As the straw hats bobbed hysterically up and disappeared again, the men of the two battalions began stumbling and lying grotesquely down in the rice-fields.
They reached the road, which the brigade order said was to be their resting place. But neither brigade nor division orders can keep men alive in a place where the physical topography forbids. The road ran at the right and left in a sunken band between banks two or three feet high, affording--to east and west--a natural protection; but for the length of several furlongs it elected to rise and proceed in a level flush with the rice-fields and gave to even the closest-lying and most prostrate figures pitiless conspicuousness as targets. On each side, the troops were at work, improving their cover, and for their work they had partial security; but the Kentuckians were left mercilessly exposed. They were firing desperately at the solid earth ahead and receiving in response a death-hail which they could not for many minutes endure.
Sergeant Peter Spooner, running in a crouching attitude, dropping, rising, his rifle barking, was doing all that mortal being could do to make moles of his men and burrow them into the earth. The situation was intolerable. The Shirt-tail battalion and the bluegrass battalion stood in peril of decimation in their maiden engagement.
Newt Spooner lay stretched behind a mound of earth some seven inches high. He lay spraddled and flattened like a large drab lizard, hugging the earth with his feet stretched apart, and even his heels held tight to the clay. At each report of his piece Private Spooner opened the block and blew through the breech, as a trap-shooter blows the powder out of a shot-gun. Private Spooner's face was sweating with exertion, and the dust turned to mud as it gathered on his chin and jaws.