ntry,
too, behaved ill, and when ordered to advance, wavered and were driven
back at the very first charge from the Austrians. Their cavalry pursued
the advantage thus gained and pressed forward, advancing in three lines
and driving the disordered French troops before them up the hill. At
this juncture, Lafayette, with six thousand men and two thousand horse,
arrived, having been sent for in hot haste by Gouvion when the action
first began, and, attacking the Austrian and emigres from the flank,
after a sharp and bloody struggle, succeeded by nightfall in putting
them to flight. Although the forces engaged in this action were small,
the slaughter was terrible and the little battle-field by the Sambre
presented a ghastly sight in the moonlight of that June night. Gouvion
himself was killed leading the last attack, and the Austrian and
emigrant forces suffered severely. The regiment which Calvert commanded
was in the thick of the engagement the whole time, once it arrived on
the scene of action, and no officer of either side more exposed or
distinguished himself than did the young American. Indeed, it was not
from reckless bravery that he offered himself a target for the bullets
of the enemy, but from a feeling that he would not be sorry to end
there, to close forever the book of his life. And, as usual with those
who seek, rather than avoid, death in battle, from this action, which
was the only one he was destined to engage in, he came out unscathed,
while many another poor fellow who longed to live, lay quiet and cold
on the bloody ground.

So close was the fighting during the late afternoon that Calvert once
thought he caught a glimpse of d'Azay and, with a strange presentiment
of evil, he determined to look for him among the slain. Accompanied by
an orderly bearing a lantern--though the moonlight was so bright that
one could easily recognize the pallid, upturned faces--he began his
search an hour after the firing had ceased, with many others engaged in
the same ghastly work of finding dead comrades. He had looked but a
short while, or so it seemed to him, when he came upon d'Azay lying
prone upon a little hillock of Austrian slain. As Calvert looked down
upon him, grief for this dead friend and an awful sense of the futility
of the sacrifice which had been made for him, came upon him. He knelt
beside him for a few minutes and looked into the quiet, dead face. He
had never before thought that d'Azay resembled Adrienne,