bed without
mercy. I do not believe that a hundred men of that regiment were left
alive; and the Frenchmen came back across our front, shouting at us and
waving their weapons, which were crimson down to the hilts. This they
did to draw our fire, but the colonel was too old a soldier; for we
could have done little harm at the distance, and they would have been
among us before we could reload.

These horsemen got behind the ridge on our right again, and we knew very
well that if we opened up from the squares they would be down upon us in
a twinkle. On the other hand, it was hard to bide as we were; for they
had passed the word to a battery of twelve guns, which formed up a few
hundred yards away from us, but out of our sight, sending their balls
just over the brow and down into the midst of us, which is called a
plunging fire. And one of their gunners ran up on to the top of the
slope and stuck a handspike into the wet earth to give them a guide,
under the very muzzles of the whole brigade, none of whom fired a shot
at him, each leaving him to the other. Ensign Samson, who was the
youngest subaltern in the regiment, ran out from the square and pulled
down the hand-spike; but quick as a jack after a minnow, a lancer came
flying over the ridge, and he made such a thrust from behind that not
only his point but his pennon too came out between the second and third
buttons of the lad's tunic. "Helen! Helen!" he shouted, and fell dead
on his face, while the lancer, blown half to pieces with musket balls,
toppled over beside him, still holding on to his weapon, so that they
lay together with that dreadful bond still connecting them.

But when the battery opened there was no time for us to think of
anything else. A square is a very good way of meeting a horseman, but
there is no worse one of taking a cannon ball, as we soon learned when
they began to cut red seams through us, until our ears were weary of the
slosh and splash when hard iron met living flesh and blood. After ten
minutes of it we moved our square a hundred paces to the right; but we
left another square behind us, for a hundred and twenty men and seven
officers showed where we had been standing. Then the guns found us out
again, and we tried to open out into line; but in an instant the
horsemen--lancers they were this time--were upon us from over the brae.

I tell you we were glad to hear the thud of their hoofs, for we knew
that that must stop the cannon