meant to convey to them an
invitation to dine with the French army: the other side of the table of
course.

To the credit of Prussian intelligence be it recorded, that this
pantomimic hint was at once taken and both sides went to dinner.

The fighting colonel, however, remained in the battery, and kept a
detachment of his gunners employed cooling the guns and repairing the
touch-holes. He ordered his two cutlets and his glass of water into the
battery.

Meantime, the enemy fired a single gun at long intervals, as much as to
say, "We had the last word."

Let trenches be cut ever so artfully, there will be a little space
exposed here and there at the angles. These spaces the men are ordered
to avoid, or whip quickly across them into cover.

Now the enemy had just got the range of one of these places with their
solitary gun, and had already dropped a couple of shot right on to it.
A camp follower with a tray, two cutlets, and a glass of water, came to
this open space just as a puff of white smoke burst from the bastion.
Instead of instantly seeking shelter till the shot had struck, he, in
his inexperience, thought the shot must have struck, and all danger be
over. He stayed there mooning instead of pelting under cover: the
shot (eighteen-pound) struck him right on the breast, knocked him into
spilikins, and sent the mutton cutlets flying.

The human fragments lay quiet, ten yards off. But a soldier that was
eating his dinner kicked it over, and jumped up at the side of "Death's
Alley" (as it was christened next minute), and danced and yelled with
pain.

"Haw! haw! haw!" roared a soldier from the other side of the alley.

"What is that?" cried Sergeant La Croix. "What do you laugh at, Private
Cadel?" said he sternly, for, though he was too far in the trench to
see, he had heard that horrible sound a soldier knows from every other,
the "thud" of a round shot striking man or horse.

"Sergeant," said Cadel, respectfully, "I laugh to see Private Dard, that
got the wind of the shot, dance and sing, when the man that got the shot
itself does not say a word."

"The wind of the shot, you rascal!" roared Private Dard: "look here!"
and he showed the blood running down his face.

The shot had actually driven a splinter of bone out of the sutler into
Dard's temple.

"I am the unluckiest fellow in the army," remonstrated Dard: and he
stamped in a circle.

"Seems to me you are only the second unluckiest this time," said