The Deserter Read Online Free Page B

not particularly interested in shoring anything up, but there was no help for it. He trudged along with the others in the gathering dusk, and when everybody jogged to the right, he jogged that way too.
    Otis was captivated by the sight of a small stone building along this road. It was obviously a schoolhouse. A man stood in the doorway looking out at them. The schoolmaster, thought Otis. At once he was distracted by the memory of a class in the postulates of Euclid under Professor Eustis, and he wanted to fall out of line and offer his services to the schoolmaster. “ Now, class, this morning we will study the axiom that halves of equals are equal.” How delightful, the cheery faces of the little boys and girls !
    But as they drew away from the schoolhouse Otis looked back and saw a couple of medical stewards with a litter. The school was now a hospital.
    â€œColumn left.” They were turning into another road, and the boom of artillery and the crash of rifle fire was louder, and now the marching regiments began encountering the side effects of a bloody battle. A train of white-topped ambulance wagons pulled out of the way to let them go by, and every one of the marching men—all walking upright on two legs—looked in at the litters and winced at the sight of bleeding heads and smashed limbs. Crowds of the walking wounded were on the road too, and so was a band of jolly skulkers, cheering at them, shouting, “Go in and give them Jerrie.”
    But nobody up front seemed to know where they were going. Behind them Culp’s Hill was in the thick of a battle at last, because you could hear the crashing and thundering from back there, and over the brow of the ridge in this neighborhood something huge was going on because you couldn’t hear yourself think for the artillery.
    Were they lost? Stepping out of line and staring forward, Otis could make out some kind of excited conference up in front, and now Lockwood’s brigade was taking off at a trot toward the fighting on the other side of the ridge.
    Would they be next? Otis could feel his heart pounding, but then it settled down because it looked like they weren’t about to follow the unlucky Second Brigade. And then Tom Robeson walked along the line and told them to move back into the trees.
    Oh, yes, sir, gladly, Your Honor, sir . By this time Otis was dead tired, so he was grateful to drop to the ground and lean against a tree and close his eyes. When he opened them again it was nearly dark, and the battle noises were dying away. Otis didn’t give a damn which side had won the day, as long as Private Otis Mathias Pike had not been called into gallant action in the line of fire.
    It was absurd, he knew it was, and philosophically unsupportable, and yet it seemed to Otis a fact that his own death in battle would be more tragic than the deaths of other men, sadder than Lem’s or Rufe’s, for instance, or even of those noble souls, his classmates Mudge and Robeson, Morgan and Fox. Those high-class people would no doubt be useful members of society if they lived, highly respectable statesmen and pillars of the church. But if his own life were ruthlessly cut short, something more important would be lost.
    Dreamily Otis imagined the world going on without him. In the theaters where he had been welcomed in the old carefree days before he had been dragged into this war—in Boston and Baltimore, in Washington and Philadelphia, even in Richmond and Lynchburg, Virginia—would they miss him, the actors, the managers, the musicians, the pretty singers, the buxom dancers?
    Would Rosalie miss him, the rose of Philadelphia? Or that adorable sweetheart of Washington, darling Flora, the nymph of the Grove? Unfortunately the lovely Lily LeBeau would not miss him, because they had never met. Bitterly Otis imagined the lighted carriages sweeping up to the doors of the famous theaters after he was gone. He envisioned all the fine ladies and