ed out in
English, "The Guard is coming! The Guard is coming!" and so vanished
away to the rear like a leaf blown before a storm. At the same instant
up there rode an aide-de-camp, with the reddest face that ever I saw
upon mortal man.

"You must stop 'em, or we are done!" he cried to General Adams, so that
all our company could hear him.

"How is it going?" asked the general.

"Two weak squadrons left out of six regiments of heavies," said he, and
began to laugh like a man whose nerves are overstrung.

"Perhaps you would care to join in our advance? Pray consider yourself
quite one of us," said the general, bowing and smiling as if he were
asking him to a dish of tea.

"I shall have much pleasure," said the other, taking off his hat; and a
moment afterwards our three regiments closed up, and the brigade
advanced in four lines over the hollow where we had lain in square, and
out beyond to the point whence we had seen the French army.

There was little of it to be seen now, only the red belching of the guns
flashing quickly out of the cloudbank, and the black figures--stooping,
straining, mopping, sponging--working like devils, and at devilish work.
But through the cloud that rattle and whirr rose ever louder and louder,
with a deep-mouthed shouting and the stamping of thousands of feet.
Then there came a broad black blurr through the haze, which darkened and
hardened until we could see that it was a hundred men abreast, marching
swiftly towards us, with high fur hats upon their heads and a gleam of
brasswork over their brows. And behind that hundred came another
hundred, and behind that another, and on and on, coiling and writhing
out of the cannon-smoke like a monstrous snake, until there seemed to be
no end to the mighty column. In front ran a spray of skirmishers, and
behind them the drummers, and up they all came together at a kind of
tripping step, with the officers clustering thickly at the sides and
waving their swords and cheering. There were a dozen mounted men too at
their front, all shouting together, and one with his hat held aloft upon
his swordpoint. I say again, that no men upon this earth could have
fought more manfully than the French did upon that day.

It was wonderful to see them; for as they came onwards they got ahead of
their own guns, so that they had no longer any help from them, while
they got in front of the two batteries which had been on either side of
us all day. Every gun had