try pealed over the plain.

For once the Desert avenged, in like, that terrible inexhaustibility
of supply wherewith the Empire so long had crushed them beneath the
overwhelming difference of numbers. It was the Day of Mazagran once
more, as the light of the morning broke--gray, silvered, beautiful--in
the far, dim distance, beyond the tawny seas of reeds. Smoke and sand
soon densely rose above the struggle, white, hot, blinding; but out from
it the lean, dark Bedouin faces, the snowy haicks, the red burnous, the
gleam of the Tunisian muskets, the flash of the silver-hilted yataghans,
were seen fused in a mass with the brawny, naked necks of the Zouaves,
with the shine of the French bayonets; with the tossing manes and
glowing nostrils of the Chasseurs' horses; with the torn, stained silk
of the raised Tricolor, through which the storm of balls flew thick and
fast as hail, yet whose folds were never suffered to fall, though again
and again the hand that held its staff was cut away or was unloosed in
death, yet ever found another to take its charge before the Flag could
once have trembled in the enemy's sight.

The Chasseurs could not charge; they were hemmed in, packed between
bodies of horsemen that pressed them together as between iron plates;
now and then they could cut their way through, clear enough to reach
their comrades of the demi-cavalry, but as often as they did so, so
often the overwhelming numbers of the Arabs urged in on them afresh like
a flood, and closed upon them, and drove them back.

Every soldier in the squadron that lived kept his life by sheer,
breathless, ceaseless, hand-to-hand sword-play, hewing right and left,
front and rear, without pause, as, in the great tangled forests of the
west, men hew aside branch and brushwood ere they can force one step
forward.

The gleam of the dawn spread in one golden glow of morning, and the
day rose radiant over the world; they stayed not for its beauty or its
peace; the carnage went on, hour upon hour; men began to grow drunk
with slaughter as with raki. It was sublimely grand; it was hideously
hateful--this wild-beast struggle, this heaving tumult of striving
lives, that ever and anon stirred the vast war-cloud of smoke and broke
from it as the lightning from the night. The sun laughed in its warmth
over a thousand hills and streams, over the blue seas lying northward,
and over the yellow sands of the south; but the touch of its heat only
made the flame