The fact of a Christian church--assuming it to have been a
Christian church--giving name to a wholesale cutting of Christian throats
by Christian hands need not be dwelt on here; the frequency of its
recurrence in the history of our species has somewhat abated the moral
interest that would otherwise attach to it.
VII
Owing to the darkness, the storm and the absence of a road, it had been
impossible to move the artillery from the open ground about the Landing.
The privation was much greater in a moral than in a material sense. The
infantry soldier feels a confidence in this cumbrous arm quite unwarranted
by its actual achievements in thinning out the opposition. There is
something that inspires confidence in the way a gun dashes up to the
front, shoving fifty or a hundred men to one side as if it said, "_Permit
me!_" Then it squares its shoulders, calmly dislocates a joint in its
back, sends away its twenty-four legs and settles down with a quiet
rattle which says as plainly as possible, "I've come to stay." There is a
superb scorn in its grimly defiant attitude, with its nose in the air; it
appears not so much to threaten the enemy as deride him.
Our batteries were probably toiling after us somewhere; we could only hope
the enemy might delay his attack until they should arrive. "He may delay
his defense if he like," said a sententious young officer to whom I had
imparted this natural wish. He had read the signs aright; the words were
hardly spoken when a group of staff officers about the brigade commander
shot away in divergent lines as if scattered by a whirlwind, and galloping
each to the commander of a regiment gave the word.
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