, and the
colonel's clarion voice pealed high above all:--

"Twenty-fourth brigade--FORWARD!"

They went so swiftly out of the trenches that they were not seen through
their own smoke until they had run some sixty yards. As soon as they
were seen, coming on like devils through their own smoke, two thousand
muskets were levelled at them from the Prussian line. It was not a
rattle of small arms--it was a crash, and the men fell fast: but in a
moment they were seen to spread out like a fan, and to offer less mark,
and when the fan closed again, it half encircled the bastion. It was a
French attack: part swarmed at it in front like bees, part swept round
the glacis and flanked it. They were seen to fall in numbers, shot down
from the embrasures. But the living took the place of the dead: and the
fight ranged evenly there. Where are the colors? Towards the rear
there. The colonel and a hundred men are fighting hand to hand with
the Prussians, who have charged out at the back doors of the bastion.
Success there, and the bastion must fall--both sides know this.

The colors disappeared. There was a groan from the French lines. The
colors reappeared, and close under the bastion.

And now in front the attack was so hot, that often the Prussian gunners
were seen to jump down, driven from their posts; and the next moment
a fierce hurrah from the rear told that the French had won some great
advantage there. The fire slackening told a similar tale and presently
down came the Prussian flag-staff. That might be an accident. A few
moments of thirsting expectation, and up went the colors of the 24th
brigade upon the Bastion St. Andre.

The French army raised a shout that rent the sky, and their cannon began
to play on the Prussian lines and between the bastion and the nearest
fort, to prevent a recapture.

Sudden there shot from the bastion a cubic acre of fire: it carried up a
heavy mountain of red and black smoke that looked solid as marble. There
was a heavy, sullen, tremendous explosion that snuffed out the sound of
the cannon, and paralyzed the French and Prussian gunners' hands, and
checked the very beating of their hearts. Thirty thousand pounds of
gunpowder were in that awful explosion. War itself held its breath,
and both armies, like peaceable spectators, gazed wonder-struck,
terror-struck. Great hell seemed to burst through the earth's crust,
and to be rushing at heaven. Huge stones, cannons, corpses, and limbs of
soldi