at the latter is by far the more ignorant of
the two. Now that they are under fire, though, Louis is as good a man as
Adolphe--"

Jean, who had been watching events in silence, gave utterance to a
distressful cry:

"They will have to give it up! No troops in the world could stand such a
fire."

Within the space of five minutes the second position had become as
untenable as was the first; the projectiles kept falling with the
same persistency, the same deadly precision. A shell dismounted a gun,
fracturing the chase, killing a lieutenant and two men. Not one of the
enemy's shots failed to reach, and at each discharge they secured a
still greater accuracy of range, so that if the battery should remain
there another five minutes they would not have a gun or a man left. The
crushing fire threatened to wipe them all out of existence.

Again the captain's ringing voice was heard ordering up the limbers.
The drivers dashed up at a gallop and wheeled their teams into place to
allow the cannoneers to hook on the guns, but before Adolphe had time to
get up Louis was struck by a fragment of shell that tore open his throat
and broke his jaw; he fell across the trail of the carriage just as
he was on the point of raising it. Adolphe was there instantly, and
beholding his prostrate comrade weltering in his blood, jumped from his
horse and was about to raise him to his saddle and bear him away. And at
that moment, just as the battery was exposed flank to the enemy in the
act of wheeling, offering a fair target, a crashing discharge came, and
Adolphe reeled and fell to the ground, his chest crushed in, with arms
wide extended. In his supreme convulsion he seized his comrade about the
body, and thus they lay, locked in each other's arms in a last embrace,
"married" even in death.

Notwithstanding the slaughtered horses and the confusion that that
death-dealing discharge had caused among the men, the battery had
rattled up the slope of a hillock and taken post a few yards from the
spot where Jean and Maurice were lying. For the third time the guns were
unlimbered, the drivers retired to the rear and faced the enemy, and the
cannoneers, with a gallantry that nothing could daunt, at once reopened
fire.

"It is as if the end of all things were at hand!" said Maurice, the
sound of whose voice was lost in the uproar.

It seemed indeed as if heaven and earth were confounded in that hideous
din. Great rocks were cleft asunder, the sun