There was not a smile on the face of the youngest of them all, but deepest anxiety was written alike on young and old.
John and Fleury sat together at the edge of the brook, and for a while forgot their chagrin at not being on the battle line.

The battle itself which they could not see, but which they could hear, absorbed them so thoroughly that they had no time to think of regrets.
John had thought that man's violence, his energy in destruction on the first day could not be equalled, but it seemed to him now that the second day surpassed the first.

The cannon fire was distant, yet the waves of air beat heavily upon them, and the earth shook without ceasing.

Wisps of smoke floated toward them and the air was tainted again with the acrid smell of burned gunpowder.
"You're a mountaineer, Fleury, you told me," said Scott, "and you should be able to judge how sound travels through gorges.

I suppose you yodel, of course ?" "Yodel, what's that ?" "To make a long singing cry on a peak which is supposed to reach to somebody on another peak who sends back the same kind of a singing cry.
We have a general impression in America that European mountaineers don't do much but stand in fancy costumes on crests and ridges and yodel to one another." "It may have been so once," said the young Savoyard, "but this is a bad year for yodeling.