Crane Stephen. The Red Badge of Courage

Webster’s Thesaurus Edition for PSAT, SAT, GRE, LSAT, GMAT, and AP English Test Preparation.The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed
an army stretched out on the hills, resting. As the landscape changed from brown
to green, the army awakened, and began to tremble with eagerness at the noise
of rumors. It cast its eyes upon the roads, which were growing from long troughs
of liquid mud to proper thoroughfares. A river, amber-tinted in the shadow of
its banks, purled at the army's feet; and at night, when the stream had become of
a sorrowful blackness, one could see across it the red, eyelike gleam of hostile
camp-fires set in the low brows of distant hills.
Once a certain tall soldier developed virtues and went resolutely to wash a
shirt. He came flying back from a brook waving his garment bannerlike. He was
swelled with a tale he had heard from a reliable friend, who had heard it from a
truthful cavalryman, who had heard it from his trustworthy brother, one of the
orderlies at division headquarters. He adopted the important air of a herald in
red and gold.
"We're goin' t' move t'morrah-sure," he said pompously to a group in the
company street. "We're goin' 'way up the river, cut across, an' come around in
behint 'em."
To his attentive audience he drew a loud and elaborate plan of a very brilliant
campaign. When he had finished, the blue-clothed men scattered into small
arguing groups between the rows of squat brown huts. A negro teamster who