ers, were seen driven or falling through the smoke. Some of these
last came quite clear of the ruins, ay, into the French and Prussian
lines, that even the veterans put their hands to their eyes. Raynal felt
something patter on him from the sky--it was blood--a comrade's perhaps.

The smoke cleared. Where, a moment before, the great bastion stood and
fought, was a monstrous pile of blackened, bloody stones and timbers,
with dismounted cannon sticking up here and there.

And, rent and crushed to atoms beneath the smoking mass, lay the relics
of the gallant brigade, and their victorious colors.

CHAPTER XXII.

A few wounded soldiers of the brigade lay still till dusk. Then they
crept back to the trenches. These had all been struck down or disabled
short of the bastion. Of those that had taken the place no one came
home.

Raynal, after the first stupefaction, pressed hard and even angrily for
an immediate assault on the whole Prussian line. Not they. It was on
paper that the assault should be at daybreak to-morrow. Such leaders as
they were cannot IMPROVISE.

Rage and grief in his heart, Raynal waited chafing in the trenches till
five minutes past midnight. He then became commander of the brigade,
gave his orders, and took thirty men out to creep up to the wreck of the
bastion, and find the late colonel's body.

Going for so pious a purpose, he was rewarded by an important discovery.
The whole Prussian lines had been abandoned since sunset, and, mounting
cautiously on the ramparts, Raynal saw the town too was evacuated, and
lights and other indications on a rising ground behind it convinced
him that the Prussians were in full retreat, probably to effect that
junction with other forces which the assault he had recommended would
have rendered impossible.

They now lighted lanterns, and searched all over and round the bastion
for the poor colonel, in the rear of the bastion they found many French
soldiers, most of whom had died by the bayonet. The Prussian dead had
all been carried off.

Here they found the talkative Sergeant La Croix. The poor fellow was
silent enough now. A terrible sabre-cut on the skull. The colonel was
not there. Raynal groaned, and led the way on to the bastion. The ruins
still smoked. Seven or eight bodies were discovered by an arm or a foot
protruding through the masses of masonry. Of these some were Prussians;
a proof that some devoted hand had fired the train, and destroyed both