up the little redoubts known as No. 11 and No.
15, which covered the advancing earthwork leading to where our second
parallel was to begin. Redoubt No. 11 was a good hundred yards, and
Redoubt No. 15 was more than three times that distance outside of our
lines; and everybody knew that these two advanced posts would be in
great danger until our second parallel was well under way. So very
possible was it that they might be surprised, and the guns turned on our
own lines in support of a general attack, that in each of them spikes
and hammers were kept in readiness against the need for spiking the guns
before they fell into the enemy's hands. Our regiment lay just behind
these redoubts, in the rear of the artillerymen who manned our trenches;
and as the gunners had plenty to do all day long, and through the night
too sometimes, the work of keeping up the night pickets fell to our
share.

"It was while things were this way that I was on picket early one
morning on our extreme left, close over the edge of the Carenage Ravine.
I had come on with the midnight relief, and by five o'clock in the
morning, when day wras just breaking, my teeth were chattering and I was
stiff with cold. Name of a name, but it was cold those winter mornings!
We have nothing like it, even when the worst mistral is blowing, in our
winters here in Provence. Down in the ravine there was a thick mist,
into which I could not see at all; but every now and then a whiff of
wind would come in from the seaward and thin it a little, and then I
would give a good look below me, for it was along the ravine that any
party sent out to surprise us almost certainly would come.

"It was while the light still was faint that I thought I heard, coming
up through the mist, a little rattling sound, such as might be made by a
man stumbling and dropping his musket among the broken rocks. Just then
the mist was too thick for me to see twenty feet below me. I was sure
that something bad was going on down there, but I did not want to make a
fool of myself by giving a false alarm. All that I could do was to cock
my musket and to hold it pointed towards where the sound seemed to come
from, all ready, should there be need for it, to give the alarm and get
in a shot at the enemy at the same time. Truly, Monsieur, it seemed to
me that I stood that way, while my heart went pounding against my ribs,
for a whole year! I was no longer cold: the blood was racing through
my veins, and I w