The Red Badge of Courage

I'm still reading The Middle Ground. I'm about to head out the door to a screening of The Red Badge of Courage for my Civil War class, so here's a snippet from the 1917 Appleton & Co. edition:

At times, he thought he could see heaving masses of men. He hurried on in the dusk. The day had faded until he could barely distinguish place for his feet.

Oh, late 19th-/early 20th-century novels! How I hunger for your simple sentence structure! How I long for paragraphs that begin and end on the same page! We can run away together and neither of us will ever see a semicolon again.

Then again, I am a sucker for adjectives. It would never work out between us. Besides, you'd drag me toward Hemingway, and I don't want to go there.

For now, I will content myself with Audie Murphy and a nice, fat monograph on French-Algonquian relations in the mid-to-late 17th century.