th of November, 1741, was fixed upon to assault the town.
It was a cold, clear night, with a moon that made all things white and
light.

At midnight, when the town was sleeping, and only the sentries waked
and walked, a tremendous cannonade broke out all around the walls,
heaviest toward the south. This was but a sham attack, but the best
part of the garrison hastened there to repel it. And then Count Saxe,
advancing from the gardens and cottages on the Wischerad side, came to
the walls. The men rushed forward with the scaling ladders, but they
were full ten feet too short. Despair and blankness fell upon us,
until Count Saxe, seeing a great, weird Thing standing gaunt and black
in the white moonlight--this Thing, the gallows tree--cried out
cheerfully:

"See, my lads, yonder are likely to be some short ladders; these we
will splice with rope, and so make the scalade!"

And it was done, Count Saxe himself being the first man on the
rampart. He had for his body-guard, my Uhlans--men fit to be the
body-guard of Mars himself. But the gods of war are invisibly
protected. All the books upon war say that generals should take care
of their skins. I have often noticed, however, that generals who try
to take care of their skins usually get shot every time they go within
the enemy's range.

Count Saxe, however, without getting a single scratch, found himself
at the head of his men in the great open market-place, where the
French made their rendezvous, and there we soon found ten thousand of
our fifteen thousand brave fellows. Prague was ours, and almost
without the loss of a man, so masterly had been Count Saxe's
dispositions.

There is something appalling in the sight of a town taken in the
night. Although Prague was supposed to be taken by assault, it was
really carried by strategy, and there were none of the horrors of a
capture by storming. But the horrible fears of the inhabitants,
the terrors of the women and children, the dreadful midnight
awakening--all, all, have in them something calculated to affright
the soul.

These things passed through my mind, when, with my men posted
according to Count Saxe's orders, I listened to the cries, the screams
of frightened creatures, and imagined the shuddering terrors behind
the walls of those tall old houses, their peaks shining in the white
moonlight. And then, by an accident in handling a torch, one of those
tall old houses by the market-place caught fire. Instantly, it wa