ds; the air resounded with the shouts
of the combatants, who assailed each other with the fury of rage and hate,
fearing not death, but defeat; scorning life if it must be owed to the
conqueror's mercy, neither giving nor taking quarter, and in dying, praying
not for their own souls, but for the defeat and humiliation of the enemy!

Never since those years of battle between France and Austria has the
fighting been characterized by such animosity, such fierce fury on both
sides. Austria was struggling to avenge Austerlitz, France not to permit
the renown of that day to be darkened.

"We will conquer or die!" was the shout with which the Austrians, for the
twenty-first time, had begun the battle against the enemy, who pressed
forward across three bridges from the island of Lobau in the middle of the
Danube, and whom the Austrians hated doubly that day, because another
painful wound had been dealt by the occupation of their capital--beautiful,
beloved Vienna--the expulsion of the emperor and his family, and the
possession of the German city.

Thus conquest to the Austrians meant also the release of Vienna from the
mastery of the foe, the opening the way to his capital to the Emperor
Francis, who had fled to Hungary.

If the French were vanquished, it meant the confession to the world that
the star of Napoleon's good fortune was paling; that he, too, was merely a
mortal who must bow to the will of a higher power; it meant destroying the
faith of the proud, victorious French army in its own invincibility.

These were the reasons which rendered the battle so furious, so
bloodthirsty on both sides; which led the combatants to rend each other
with actual pleasure, with exulting rage. Each yawning wound was hailed
with a shout of joy by the person who inflicted it; each man who fell dying
heard, instead of the gentle lament of pity, the sigh of sympathy, the
jeering laugh, the glad, victorious shout of the pitiless foe.

Then Austrian generals, eagerly encouraging their men by their own example
of bravery, pressed forward at the head of their troops. The Archduke
Charles, though ill and suffering, had himself lifted upon his horse, and,
in the enthusiasm of the struggle, so completely forgot his sickness that
he grasped the standard of a wavering battalion, dashed forward with it,
and thereby induced the soldiers to rush once more, with eager shouts of
joy, upon the foe.

More than ten times the village of Aspern was taken