Turn and turn about, they carried the body into a house on the road which quartered southwest from Gettysburg; that seemed safe enough for the moment, and well past any position which the Confederates were apt to attain for another hour or two. It was the house of George George—an utterly impossible name: you wouldn’t have believed it unless you were there. Later came the ambulance, and more soldiers, and orders. The guns still argued sternly out past those low hills; the sun hissed.

Steele went with the body, and they jolted along a country road into the south. He thought of the fifes, and that labored two-four they often played for a guard-mount: when we go down to Washington, when we go down to Washington, I was shot five times in the ankle-bone and once at Manassas Junction. Here he was, going down to Washington. Horses flashed past them—untold dust, now rushing north, now south. They saw flags ahead, an approaching horde of troops. The columns deployed to let the ambulance rattle through. Steele rode in a daze, and he looked down at perspiring faces, and he heard a name passed from man to man. Reynolds. Reynolds. You kept saying those two syllables over and over, and soon they meant nothing at all. Flies got into the ambulance—occasionally Steele would climb in at the rear and drive them out with his hat.

The sun worked hard at melting the green and gold world which glared up at it. You imagined at times that the fences were melting, that the groves had become soft and were pouring green candle-grease into the shadows of the hard little valleys … A face was looking at him: severe eyes, pointed mustache, wide goatee. “How did he meet his death?” inquired the rigid voice. “He was at the lines, sir. A sharp-shooter picked him off; he was struck in the temple, instantly killed, sir.” Hancock said, “Can I see him?” “Yes, sir. He’s—” Hancock came away from the ambulance; he turned and clicked his boot-heels. Then he went on toward Gettysburg. It was the hottest day which had yet come in that year of heat.

Chapter 5

5.

Until nearly one o’clock Adam Duffey worked like a slave. Dan counted twenty-nine men whose bodies he had stitched or cut or swabbed; two of them died quietly, lying on blankets in the shade of the cherry tree. Then ambulances pitched in at the gate, and there was a coatless medical officer who roared orders in mixed German and English as the soldiers carried off the dead and the wounded. He did not criticize Duffey for his ministrations, save to object to a double-flap method of hip amputation which Duffey had employed in one case. The house seemed very quiet, after these murmuring cargoes were led away; between lulls in the firing you could hear flies gossiping above loose-turned dirt in the garden and knowing well what lay underneath.