Here and there a dead lancer lay flat in the grass, his scarlet pennon a vivid spot beside him.
The hill road to the burning bridge was now choked with Colonel Arran's regiment, returning to the crest of the hill; through the blackish and rolling smoke from the bridge infantry were creeping swiftly forward toward the river bank, and very soon the intermittent picket firing began again, running up and down the creek bank and out across the swamp lands, noisily increasing as it woke up vicious volleys from the woods on the opposite bank, and finally aroused the cannon to thunderous anger.
Berkley, standing to horse with his regiment on the sparsely wooded hill crest, could see the crowding convolutions of smoke rising from the thickets, as each gun spoke from the Confederate batteries.

But to him their thunder was like the thunder in a dream.
Hour after hour the regiment stood to horse; hour after hour the battle roared west and south of them.

An irregular cloud, slender at the base, spreading on top, towered to mid zenith above the forest.

Otherwise, save for the fleecy explosion of shells in the quivering blue vault above, nothing troubled the sunshine that lay over hill and valley, wood and river and meadowland.
McDunn's battery was not firing; the Zouaves lay dozing awake in the young clover, the Lancers, standing to horse, looked out across the world of trees and saw nothing stirring save a bird or two winging hastily northward.
Berkley could distinguish a portion of the road that ran down to the burning bridge, where part of McDunn's battery was in position.
Across the hills to the left a scarlet windrow undulating on either flank of the battery marked the line of battle where the Zouaves lay in a clover-field, within supporting distance of the guns.
Except for these, and a glimpse of Lowe's balloon overhead, Berkley could not see anything whatever even remotely connected with the uproar which continued steadily in the west and south.

Nobody seemed to know whose troops were engaged, where they came from, whither they were trying to force a fiery road through a land in arms against their progress.
At times, to Berkley, it seemed as though every tree, every hill, every thicket was watching him with sombre intent; as if Nature herself were hostile, stealthy, sinister, screening terrors yet unloosed, silently storing up violence in dim woods, aiding and abetting ambush with all her clustering foliage; and that every river, every swamp, every sunny vista concealed some hidden path to death.
He stood rigid at his horse's head, lance in hand, dirty, smoke-blackened, his ears deafened by the cannonade, his eyes cool and alert, warily scanning hill and hollow and thicket.
Dead men of his regiment were borne past him; he glanced furtively at them, not yet certain that the lower form of fear had left him, not yet quite realising that he had blundered into manhood--that for the first time in his life he was ready to take his chance with life.
But, little by little, as the hours passed, there in the trodden grass he began to understand something of the unformulated decision that had been slowly growing in him--of the determination, taking shape, to deal more nobly with himself--with this harmless self which had accepted unworthiness and all its attributes, and which riven pride would have flung back at the civilisation which branded him as base.
It came--this knowledge--like a slowly increasing flare of light; and at last he said under his breath, to himself: "Nothing is unworthily born that is born of God's own law.