For hours the game went on, the reserves at the trenches hearing now distinctly and now faintly the tumult of the lines, now receding, now coming on.
But the volume of the tumult, and its separation into a thousand distinct and terrifying sounds, became in the average ever an increasing and not a lessening thing.

The cracker-popping of the musketry became less and less a thing of sport, of reminiscences.

The whinings that passed overhead bore more and more a personal message.
These young men, who but lately had said good-bye to the women of their kin, began to learn what war might mean.

It had been heretofore a distant, unmeasured, undreaded thing, conquerable, not to be feared.
It seemed so sweet and fit to go forth, even though it had been hard to say good-bye! Now there began to appear in the woods before the trenches the figures of men, at first scattered, then becoming steadily more numerous.
There came men bearing other men whose arms lopped loosely.

Some men walked with a hand gripped tightly to an arm; others hobbled painfully.
Two men sometimes supported a third, whose head, heavy and a-droop, would now and then be kept erect with difficulty, the eyes staring with a ghastly, sheepish gaze, the face set in a look of horrified surprise.
This awful rabble, the parings of the defeated line in front, dropped back through the woods, dropped back upon the young reserves, who lay there in the line.