hing horrible in the certainty that we
were about to perish, and I would not wish my greatest enemy in such a
position as ours was then.

Sergeant Pinto continued:

"You will have a chance now, conscripts; and if any of you come out
alive, they will have something to boast of. Look at those blue lines
advancing, with their muskets on their shoulders, along Floss-Graben.
Each of those lines is a regiment. There are thirty of them. That
makes sixty thousand Prussians, without counting those lines of
horsemen, each of which is a squadron. Those advancing to their left,
near Rippach, glittering in the sun, are the dragoons and cuirassiers
of the Russian Imperial Guard. There are eighteen or twenty thousand
of them, and I first saw them at Austerlitz, where we fixed them
finely. Those masses of lances in the rear are Cossacks. We will have
a hundred thousand men on our hands in an hour. This is a fight to win
the cross in, and if one does not get it now he can never hope to do
so!"

"Do you think so, sergeant?" said Zebede, whose ideas were never very
clear, and who already imagined he held the cross in his fingers, while
his eyes glittered with excitement.

"It will be hand to hand," replied the sergeant; "and suppose that in
the _melee_, you see a colonel or a flag near you, spring on him or it;
never mind sabres or bayonets; seize them, and then your name goes on
the list."

As he spoke, I remembered that the Mayor of Phalsbourg had received the
cross for having gone to meet the Empress Marie Louise in carriages
garlanded with flowers, singing old songs, and I thought his method
much preferable to that of Sergeant Pinto.

But I had not time to think more, for the drama beat on all sides, and
each one ran to where the arms of his company were stacked and seized
his musket. Our officers formed us, great guns came at a gallop from
the village, and were posted on the brow of the hill a little to the
rear, so that the slope served them as a species of redoubt. Farther
away, in the villages of Rahna, of Kaya, and of Klein-Gorschen, all was
motion, but we were the first the Prussians would fall upon.

The enemy halted about twice a cannon-shot off, and the cavalry swarmed
by hundreds up the hill to reconnoitre us. I was in utter despair as I
gazed on their immense masses swarming on both sides of the river, the
advanced lines of which were already beginning to form in columns, and
I said to myself, "This time