em behind their own strong ramparts. There
was consequently but little difficulty in effecting a surprise.

All the arrangements were made with the utmost precision and secrecy for
a midnight attack. The favorable hour came. The sun went down in clouds,
and a night of Egyptian darkness enveloped the armies. The glimmer of
innumerable camp-fires only pointed out the position of the foe, without
throwing any illumination upon the field. Eugene visited all the posts
of the army, ordered abundant refreshment to be distributed to the
troops, addressed them in encouraging words, to impress upon them the
importance of the enterprise, and minutely assigned to each battalion,
regiment, brigade and division its duty, that there might be no
confusion. The whole plan was carefully arranged in all its details and
in all its grand combination. As the bells of Belgrade tolled the hour
of twelve at midnight, three bombs, simultaneously discharged, put the
whole Austrian army in rapid and noiseless motion.

A dense fog had now descended, through which they could with difficulty
discern the twinkling lights of the Turkish camp. Rapidly they traversed
the intervening space, and in dense, solid columns, rushed over the
ramparts of the foe. Bombs, cannon, musketry, bayonets, cavalry, all
were employed, amidst the thunderings and the lightnings of that
midnight storm of war, in the work of destruction. The Turks, roused
from their slumber, amazed, bewildered, fought for a short time with
maniacal fury, often pouring volleys of bullets into the bosoms of their
friends, and with bloody cimeters smiting indiscriminately on the right
hand and the left, till, in the midst of a scene of confusion and horror
which no imagination can conceive, they broke and fled. Two hundred
thousand men, lighted only by the flash of guns which mowed their ranks,
with thousands of panic-stricken cavalry trampling over them, while the
crash of musketry, the explosions of artillery, the shouts of the
assailants and the fugitives, and the shrieks of the dying, blended in a
roar more appalling than heaven's heaviest thunders, presented a scene
which has few parallels even in the horrid annals of war.

The morning dawned upon a field of blood and death. The victory of the
Austrians was most decisive. The flower of the Turkish army was cut to
pieces, and the remnant was utterly dispersed. The Turkish camp, with
all its abundant booty of tents, provisions, ammunition and