tions,
scattering death and hopeless confusion wherever they alighted, until
the whole field of carnage seemed ablaze with them.

At the end of this time three rockets soared up from her deck into
the dark sky, and burst into myriads of brilliant white stars, which
for a few moments shed an unearthly light upon the scene of
indescribable confusion and destruction below. But they made more
than this visible, for by their momentary light could be seen
seemingly interminable lines of grey-clad figures swiftly closing in
from all sides, chasing the Cossack scouts before them in upon the
completely disorganised Russian host.

A few minutes later a continuous roll of musketry burst out on front,
and flank, and rear, and a ceaseless hail of rifle bullets began to
plough its way through the helpless masses of the soldiers of the
Tsar. They formed as well as they could to confront these new
enemies, but the moment that the searchlight of the air-ship,
constantly sweeping the field, fell upon a company in anything like
order, a shell descended in the midst of it and broke it up again.

All night long the work of death and vengeance went on; the grey
lines ever closing in nearer and nearer upon the dwindling remnants
of the Russian army. Hour after hour the hail of bullets never
slackened. There was no random firing on the part of the Federation
soldiers. Every man had been trained to use his rifle rapidly but
deliberately, and never to fire until he had found his mark; and the
consequence was that the long nickel-tipped bullets, fired
point-blank into the dense masses of men, rent their way through half
a dozen bodies before they were spent.

At last the grey light began to break over an indescribably hideous
scene of slaughter. Scarcely ten thousand men remained of the three
hundred thousand who had started the day before in obedience to the
order of the Tsar; and these were split up into formless squads and
ragged companies fighting desperately amidst heaps of corpses for
dear life, without any pretence at order or formation.

The cannonade from the air had ceased, and the last scene in the
drama of death had come. With bayonets fixed and rifles lowered to
the charge, the long grey lines closed up, and, as the bugles rang
out the long-awaited order, they swept forward at the double, horses
and men went down like a field of standing corn under the
irresistible rush of a million bayonets, and in twenty minutes all
was over