, in
advance of but in touch with the regular dead lines of the Guard, a
little group, friend and foe, lay intermingled. There was a young
officer of the Fifty-second infantry, one of Colborne's. He was
conscious but suffering frightfully from mortal wounds. One side of
his face where he had been thrown into the mud was covered with a red
compound of earth and blood; his bright head was dabbled with the same
hideous mixture. Blood frothed out of his mouth as he breathed. He
murmured from time to time a woman's name. "Water," was sometimes the
sputtering syllable that came from him.

His left hand clutched uneasily at his breast, where his torn uniform
showed a gaping wound. But his right hand was still. The arm was
broken, paralyzed, but the fingers of his right hand were tightly
closed around a broken blue staff and next to his cheek, the
blood-stained one, and cold against it, was a French Eagle. He had
seized that staff in the heat of battle and in the article of death he
held it.

At the feet of the English officer lay a French officer wearing the
insignia of a Colonel of the Guard. He was covered with wounds,
bayonet thrusts, a saber-slash, and was delirious. Although helpless,
he was really in much better case than the young Englishman. He, too,
in his delirium muttered a woman's name.

They spoke different tongues, these two. They were born in different
lands. They were children of the same God, although one might have
doubted it, but no one could mistake the woman's name. For there Frank
Yeovil and Jean Marteau, incapable of doing each other any further
harm, each thought of the same woman.

Did Laure d'Aumenier back in England waiting anxiously for news of
battle, fearing for one of those men, hear those piteous, broken
murmurs of a woman's name--her own?

Around these two were piled the dead. Marteau had seized the Eagle.
Yes, he and a few brave men had stayed on the field when the great Ney,
raging like a madman, and seeking in vain the happy fortune of a bullet
or sword-thrust, had been swept away, and on him had fallen Yeovil with
another group of resolute English, and together they had fought their
little battle for the Eagle. And Marteau had proved the Englishman's
master. He had beaten him down. He had shortened his sword to strike
when he recognized him. Well, the battle was over, the Eagle was lost,
the Emperor was a fugitive, hope died with the retreating Guard, the
Empire w