Every man Jack of them was bandaged
either about the head or about the arms, or else he favored an injured
leg as he hobbled slowly on. Eight guards were nursing them along;
their bayonets were socketed in their carbine barrels. No doubt the
magazines of the carbines were packed with those neat brass capsules
which carry doses of potential death; but the guards, except for the
moral effect of the thing, might just as well have been bare-handed.
None of the prisoners could have run away even had he been so minded.
The poor devils were almost past walking, let alone running. They
wouldn't even look up as we went by them.
The day is done of the courier who rode horseback with orders in his
belt and was winged in mid-flight; and the day of the secret messenger
who tried to creep through the hostile picket lines with cipher
dispatches in his shoe, and was captured and ordered shot at sunrise, is
gone, too, except in Civil War melodramas. Modern military science has
wiped them out along with most of the other picturesque fol-de-rols of
the old game of war.
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