"Ah! you are of my mind.Attention! the attack is fixed for five o'clock.Suppose you and I were to carry the bastion ten minutes before the colonel from Egypt can bring his men upon the ground."At this there was a fierce burst of joy and laughter; the strange laughter of veterans and born invincibles.Then a yell of exulting assent, accompanied by the thunder of impatient drums, and the rattle of fixing bayonets.
The colonel told off a party to the battery.
"Level the guns at the top tier.Fire at my signal, and keep firing over our heads, till you see our colors on the place."He then darted to the head of the column, which instantly formed behind him in the centre of Death's Alley.
"The colors! No hand but mine shall hold them to-day."They were instantly brought him: his left hand shook them free in the afternoon sun.
A deep murmur of joy rolled out from the old hands at the now unwonted sight.Out flashed the colonel's sword like steel lightning.He pointed to the battery.
Bang! bang! bang! bang! went his cannon, and the smoke rolled over the trenches.At the same moment up went the colors waving, and the colonel's clarion voice pealed high above all:--"Twenty-fourth brigade--FORWARD!"
They went so swiftly out of the trenches that they were not seen through their own smoke until they had run some sixty yards.As soon as they were seen, coming on like devils through their own smoke, two thousand muskets were levelled at them from the Prussian line.It was not a rattle of small arms--it was a crash, and the men fell fast: but in a moment they were seen to spread out like a fan, and to offer less mark, and when the fan closed again, it half encircled the bastion.It was a French attack: part swarmed at it in front like bees, part swept round the glacis and flanked it.
They were seen to fall in numbers, shot down from the embrasures.
But the living took the place of the dead: and the fight ranged evenly there.Where are the colors? Towards the rear there.The colonel and a hundred men are fighting hand to hand with the Prussians, who have charged out at the back doors of the bastion.
Success there, and the bastion must fall--both sides know this.
The colors disappeared.There was a groan from the French lines.
The colors reappeared, and close under the bastion.
And now in front the attack was so hot, that often the Prussian gunners were seen to jump down, driven from their posts; and the next moment a fierce hurrah from the rear told that the French had won some great advantage there.The fire slackening told a similar tale and presently down came the Prussian flag-staff.That might be an accident.A few moments of thirsting expectation, and up went the colors of the 24th brigade upon the Bastion St.Andre.
The French army raised a shout that rent the sky, and their cannon began to play on the Prussian lines and between the bastion and the nearest fort, to prevent a recapture.
Sudden there shot from the bastion a cubic acre of fire: it carried up a heavy mountain of red and black smoke that looked solid as marble.There was a heavy, sullen, tremendous explosion that snuffed out the sound of the cannon, and paralyzed the French and Prussian gunners' hands, and checked the very beating of their hearts.Thirty thousand pounds of gunpowder were in that awful explosion.War itself held its breath, and both armies, like peaceable spectators, gazed wonder-struck, terror-struck.Great hell seemed to burst through the earth's crust, and to be rushing at heaven.Huge stones, cannons, corpses, and limbs of soldiers, were seen driven or falling through the smoke.Some of these last came quite clear of the ruins, ay, into the French and Prussian lines, that even the veterans put their hands to their eyes.Raynal felt something patter on him from the sky--it was blood--a comrade's perhaps.
The smoke cleared.Where, a moment before, the great bastion stood and fought, was a monstrous pile of blackened, bloody stones and timbers, with dismounted cannon sticking up here and there.
And, rent and crushed to atoms beneath the smoking mass, lay the relics of the gallant brigade, and their victorious colors.
