“Ooooh-h! Country’s turned over and river’s on top! Get up, Patsy! Get up, Pansy! Get up—This ain’t a mud-hole, it’s a bayou! God knows, if I lived in this country I’d tear all that long, waving, black moss out of the trees! It gives me the horrors.”—“Get on, men! get on!”—“Captain, we can’t!”

Pioneers came back. “It’s a bayou—but there’s a corduroy bridge, not more than a foot under water.”

Infantry crossed, the two guns crossed. Beyond the arm of the 4bayou the earth was mere quaking morass. The men cut canes, armfuls and armfuls of canes, threw the bundles down, and made some sort of roadbed. Over it came those patient, famished, piteous soldiers, the horses, and behind them, heavily, heavily through the thickened mire, guns and caissons. Gun and wheel and caisson were all plastered with mud, not an inch of bright metal showing. The horses, too, were all masked and splashed. The men were in no better case, wet through, covered from head to foot with mud and mire, the worn, worn uniforms worsened yet by thorn and briar from the tangled forest. The water dripped from the rifles, stock and barrel, the water dripped from the furled and covered colours. The men’s shoes were very bad; only a few had overcoats. The clouds were leaden, the rain streamed, the comfortless day was drawing down. The detachment came into a narrow, somewhat firmer road set on either hand with tall cypresses and water oaks, from every limb of which hung the grey moss, long, crêpe-like, swaying in the chill and fretting wind. “For the Lord’s sake,” said Virginia in Louisiana, “sing something!”

4

A man in the colour guard started “Roll, Jordan, roll”—

The line protested. “Don’t sing about a river! There’s river enough in ours now!—That darkey, back there, said the levees were breaking.”

“Don’t sing that either! We’re nine hundred miles from the Blue Ridge and Canaan Land.... Sech a fool to sing about mountains and home!”

“Well,” said Colour Guard, “that was what I was thinking about. If anybody knows a cheerful hymn, I’ll be glad if he’ll line it out—”

“Don’t sing a hymn,” said the men. “Sing something gay. Edward Cary, you sing something.”

“All right,” said Edward. “What do you want?”

“Anything that’ll light a fire in the rain! Sing us something funny. Sing us a story.”

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