The Debatable Land by Arthur Willis Colton

The war suited Morgan. It was action in simple terms of purpose and accomplishment. It was sensible and genuine. There no man's complicated trivial tastes and instincts needed to be bothered about; he carried them at his own risk and exercise; they were not in the army lists. Orders were not disguised in requests and reasons. The gradations and shades, the cautions and compunctions, the ten thousand odds and ends of ten thousand years' accumulation for the most part were swept away in bulk. Men battled with men and threw off their shamming benevolences, showed what they were, and enjoyed themselves in the burly lust of struggle. The life satisfied at least half of him to completion.

A fortnight before the late battle he had seen Helen on the steps of the wooden warehouse, that they used as a hospital and filled from wall to wall with blanketed cots. She had looked pale, tired, and smiling. After a moment she had flushed and broken away angrily. And that night he had lain twenty miles off with his troop in the open, a lot of blinking, idiotic stars over him, and could not sleep, and damned in disciplined order the ways of woman and the impalpable barriers around them -- Thaddeus Bourn, for keeping his skinny corpse unburied beyond the limit of reason or utility; and Gard Windham to the discomfort of the blistered stars.