THE BATTLE
1
Jeremy’s orders had been to meet the Speaker near the church on the
hill; and thither he rode, not staying to look about him. By the
long, cold shadow of the church tower stood a little knot of people
whom he recognized for the Speaker and his staff. He rode up to them,
dismounted stiffly, and saluted, as the old man came forward to meet
him.
“You have come, then,” said the Speaker, in his usual thick soft voice,
laying an almost affectionate hand on his arm. “And are the guns safe?”
“Quite safe,” Jeremy answered, shivering a little and stamping his feet
for warmth.
“I knew I could trust you to bring them,” the Speaker murmured. “Come
over here and they shall give you a warm drink.”
Jeremy went with him to the little knot of officers, who were standing
just in the growing sunlight, and took from a servant a great mug which
he found to be full of inferior, sickly-flavored whisky and hot water,
highly sweetened. He lifted his head from it, coughing and gasping a
little, but immediately found that he was warmer and stronger.
“All the army is assembled,” the Speaker told him. “We continue the
march in half-an-hour. The enemy pushed past St. Albans last night and
they are camped between here and there. The battle will be two or three
miles north of this.”
Jeremy was now sufficiently revived to look about him with interest.
Here, as almost everywhere in the farthest limits of London, the
restorations of time had been complete. The little town had returned
to what it was before the nineteenth century. The long rows of small
houses had gone, like a healed rash, as though they had never been;
and on all sides of the few buildings that clustered round the church
and to the north of it, grazing land stretched out unbroken, save
here and there by rude and overgrown walls of piled bricks. On this
narrow platform, which fell away rapidly on the right hand and on the
left, the troops were bivouacking, huddled in little clusters around
miserable fires or dancing about to keep themselves warm.
Jeremy’s eye ran from one end of the prospect to the other and back
again, until he became conscious that somebody was standing at his
elbow waiting for him to turn. He turned accordingly and found the
Canadian, whose customary barbaric fineness of dress seemed to have
been enhanced for the occasion by a huge dull red tie and a dull red
handkerchief pinned carelessly in a bunch on the brim of his hat.
“What do you think of them?” asked Thomas Wells in his hard, incisive
tones, indicating the shivering soldiers by a jerk of his head.
“I’ve not seen enough of them to think anything,” Jeremy answered
defensively. “I daresay they’re not at their best now.”
“Poor stuff!” snapped the Canadian, between teeth almost closed.
“Poor stuff at the best. I could eat them all with half of one of our
regiments. Yes ...” he continued, drawling as though the words had an
almost physical savor for him, “if I got among them with two or three
hundred of my own chaps, I bet we wouldn’t leave a live man anywhere
within sight in half-an-hour. We’d cut all their throats. It’d be like
killing sheep.”
Jeremy shuddered involuntarily and moved a step away. “Where’s all the
rest of the army?” he asked.
“The rest? There isn’t any rest. You can see all there is of it.”
“But surely ...” Jeremy began, and paused.
The Canadian laughed with malicious and evil amusement. “They’re not
great at fighting here,” he said. “If they’d taken only those that
wanted to come there’d be you and me and the Speaker. And they wouldn’t
take people from the fields--or not many at all events. And there’s
nobody come from Gloucestershire or the West, though the Speaker sent
to them twice. The farmers over there are waiting to see what happens.
They don’t want to quarrel with the bosses that buy their wool. No,
it’s not a big army--eight thousand at most. And yet,” he went on
reflectively, “it’s more than I had when I tore the guts out of Boston.
I tell you, we got into that city....”
“Yes,” Jeremy interrupted him nervously, not desiring in the least to
know what happened in Boston, “but how many have the northerners got?”
“Oh, not many more, by all accounts,” the Canadian answered airily.
“Ten or twelve thousand, I reckon. Oh, yes, we’re going to get whipped
all right, but I’ve got a good horse, and I expect the Chairman will
want to stand well with my dad. Yes--I’ve got a good horse, a lot
better than yours.” As he spoke he glanced at Jeremy’s tubby nag, and
his narrow mouth stretched again in the same smile of evil amusement.
Jeremy’s heart sank. But, as he was wondering whether his dismay was
betrayed by his face, a gentle bustle rose around them.
“We’re marching off,” cried the Speaker, as he strode by with the vigor
of a boy of twenty. “Back to your--to your charge, Jeremy Tuft.”
It was not until the whole army was well on the road that Jeremy found
himself sufficiently unoccupied to examine it carefully. His old men
resumed the march, with, if anything, a little too much enthusiasm.
They were extravagantly keen to show the twenty-first century what
their guns could do; but in their anxiety to take their place on the
battlefield they behaved, as Jeremy bitterly though unintelligibly
told them, like a crowd of children scrambling outside the door of a
Sunday-school tea. Even Jabez, whom he had chosen to act as a sort of
second-in-command, danced about from wagon to wagon and gun to gun like
the infant he was just, for the second time, becoming. A company of the
ordinary soldiers, who, in accordance with plan, had been attached to
the battery so that they might help in man-handling the guns, watched
the excited gyrations of the old men in solemn silence. The march
northwards out of the little town was well begun before Jeremy could
feel sure that his own command was smoothly and safely in hand. As soon
as he was satisfied he left it and rode on ahead to see what he could
make of the army.
He had had little enough time to make himself familiar with the new
methods of warfare. He had, in his rare, idle moments, questioned
everybody he met who seemed likely to be able to tell him; but he
found much the same uncertainty as to the deadliness of modern weapons
as he dimly remembered to have existed in the long past year of 1914.
The troops with whom he was riding to battle were armed, and had, many
of them, been drilled; but what would be the effect of their arms and
how their drill would answer in warfare no one knew, for they had never
been tried. He formed himself, this gray and early morning, a most
unfavorable impression of them.
Their uniforms were shabby and shoddy, uncouth, loosely-cut garments,
varying in shape and color. On their feet they wore rude rawhide shoes
or sandals and round their legs long strips of rag were shapelessly
wrapped. Their bearing was execrable. They made only the emptiest
pretense at march discipline, they slouched and shuffled, left the
ranks as they pleased, held themselves and their arms anyhow. The
officers were for the most part young men of good family who had been
appointed to commands only during the past four or five days. A few,
those who had trained the army in times of peace, were soldiers of
fortune, who had been drawn by the Speaker’s lavish offers to them from
the wars in the Polish Marches and in the Balkans, from every place
where a living could be earned by the slitting of throats. They were
old, debauched, bloated and lazy, low cunning peeping out from their
eyes like the stigma of a disease. They looked much better suited
to any kind of private villainy than to the winning of battles; and
the contingents under their command had an appearance of hang-dog
shiftiness rather than the sheepish reluctance of the rest.
Not much more than half the army was provided with rifles; and these,
as Jeremy knew, were hardly to be described as weapons of precision.
The rest had a sort of pikes; or some had cutlasses, some bayonets
lashed to the ends of poles. The rifles reminded Jeremy a little of
those of his earlier experience, but suffering from the thickening and
clumsy degeneration of extreme old age. They had no magazines: the
workshops were not equal to the production of a magazine that would not
result in fatal stoppages. The breech-loading action was retained and
was frequently efficient, so Jeremy learnt, for as many as twenty-five
rounds. After that it was liable to jam altogether and, at the best,
permitted only a reduced rate of fire. The range was supposed to be
five hundred yards, but the best and most careful marksman could rarely
at that distance hit a target the size of a man. Jeremy calculated
that the effective range was not more than two hundred yards at the
outside; and he thought that very little damage would be done at more
than half that distance. As he rode along by the side of the marching
regiments, he observed the pikes and cutlasses, and the sheathless
bayonets which hung at the belts of the riflemen, and wondered what
would happen when it came to close fighting. Neither the carriage nor
the expressions of the men inspired him with confidence. Many of them,
especially the new recruits, haled in at the last moment from field
and farm, were healthy, sturdy fellows; but, unless he was mightily
mistaken, an abhorrence of fighting was in their blood. He himself had
only a blunderbuss of a double-barreled pistol, which reminded him of
the highwaymen stories of his boyhood, and a most indifferent horse....
He reached the end of this train of thought, found it disagreeable, and
paused, as it were, on the edge of an abyss. Then he drew in his horse
against the roadside, halted, and let the column march past him. At
the end came his battery, plodding along with more enthusiasm than all
the rest of the army put together. Jabez, perched beside the driver
on the seat of the first wagon, hailed his reappearance with delight,
scrambled down and ran to him, putting one hand on his stirrup.
“Well, Jabez,” said Jeremy kindly, as he might have addressed an
affectionate dog, “and how do you think we are getting along?” As he
spoke he tapped his horse lightly and began to move on again. Jabez
hopped by his side, ecstatically proclaiming in cracked tones that
he expected the beautiful guns to blow the damned Yorkshiremen to
hell. The only thing that annoyed him was this great press of useless
infantry in front of them. They might be useful enough, he felt, to
drag the guns into position and perhaps to remove what was left of the
enemy when he had done with them. But he certainly envisaged the coming
battle as a contest between the army of the north on the one hand and
two doubtful sixty-pounder guns on the other. Jeremy listened to him
tolerantly, as if in a dream. Faint wreaths of mist were rising up from
the fields all around them and scattering into the sparkling air. The
tramp of the soldiers sounded heavy and sodden, a presage of defeat.
Far ahead Jeremy could see the column steadily but slowly following the
slight curves in the road. Right at the van, as he knew, though they
were out of his sight, were the Speaker and his staff--Thomas Wells,
on the swift horse to which he trusted, close at the old man’s right
hand. Somewhere just behind them was Roger Vaile, who, like many of the
clerks in the Treasury, had chosen to be a trooper in the cavalry and
had obtained admission to the Speaker’s own guard. Miles away in the
rear of the army was the Lady Eva, doubtless asleep; and around her,
who was now to him the one significant point in it, London, asleep or
waking, awaited the issue of the struggle. Jeremy felt terribly alone.
This was very different from being in charge of two guns out of some
five hundred or so bombarding the German front line before a push.
An unexpected wave of lassitude came over him, and, defeat seeming
certain, he wished that he could be done with it all at once.
As he sagged miserably in the saddle, a sudden check ran down the
column, followed by an ever-increasing babel of whispered conjectures.
The men behaved as infantry suddenly halted on the march always have
done. They were divided between pleasure at the relief and a suspicion
that something untoward had happened out of sight in front of them.
They murmured to one another, unceasingly and eloquently, that their
leaders were born fools and were taking them into a death-trap. But the
check continued and no certain orders came down; and at last Jeremy
rode forward, so that he might pass a slight rise in the ground and see
what had happened. When he did so he found that the head of the column
was already slowly deploying on both sides of the road.
“We’ve begun,” he murmured sharply to himself, and stayed a moment
hesitating. Then, as he remembered that he had not yet heard a single
shot, he spurred his horse on to make further enquiries. He found the
Speaker, Thomas Wells, and two or three others just leaving the road by
a farm-track to gain the top of a little mound close by.
The old man greeted him with a boyish wave of the hand. “There they
are!” he called out, while Jeremy was still some yards away; and,
following the sweep of his arm, Jeremy saw on the forward slope of a
hill, about half a mile off, a flurry of horsemen plunging wildly about
together. It looked at first like a rather crowded and amateurish game
of polo; but, while he watched, he saw the sun sparkling again and
again on something in the crowded mass. Then a body fell inertly from
the saddle and a riderless horse galloped off over the hill. A minute
later a few riders extricated themselves and smartly followed it.
“There they are!” said the Speaker again, this time in a quieter voice.
The greater body of horsemen was now cantering back; and, before they
had covered half the distance, a few scattered parties of infantry
began to appear on the low crest above. Shots were fired here and
there. The reports came over, dull and vague, against a contrary breeze.
“I must go back to my guns,” Jeremy gasped breathlessly. “I must go
back.” He turned his horse and began to gallop lumberingly along the
fields beside the road.
“Goo-ood luck to you!” came after him in a high-pitched mocking yell
from the Canadian.
In a minute he had reached the battery. When he pulled up there he had
to spend the best part of five minutes calming Jabez and his men, who
wished to drag the guns incontinently into the next field and let them
off at random over the slope before them. By liberal cursing he subdued
the enraged ancients and got them at a sedate pace past the infantry
immediately in front, who were in reserve and had not yet received
orders to proceed. When he reached the top of the rise again he found
that the whole of the enemy’s line had come into sight. It stretched
out on both sides of the road, and its left flank seemed to be resting
on a wood. It had ceased in its advance; and across its front a body of
cavalry was riding slow and unmolested.
2
The sound of firing broke out again and increased rapidly. From the
almost hidden line of the Speaker’s troops, and from the enemy on the
opposite slope, black puffs of smoke arose, looking solid and sharply
defined in the clear air. They drifted away, melting slowly as they
went. Jeremy suffered a spasm of panic and haste. The struggle was
beginning; and in a minute or two he must bring his guns into position
and fire them. He dreaded lest the battle should be suddenly over and
lost before he could let off a single round, lest he should never get
even the slender chance, which was all that he could hope for. In that
moment his faculties stopped dead, and he did not know what to do. But,
as rapidly, the seizure passed, and he halted the battery while he
rode out into the field on the right to find a position for the guns.
Presently he came upon a little shallow dip, which would, in case of
necessity, give cover from an attack by riflemen, while leaving to
the guns a clear field of fire. He went back to the road and gave his
orders.
Jabez and his companions began at once to behave like puppies
unchained. They turned the gun-teams and urged them recklessly off the
road with complete disregard of the ground they had to cover. “Steady,
Jabez, steady!” Jeremy shouted. “Look out for that----” But before
he could finish, the first gun had negotiated a most alarming slope,
and the second was hard upon it. At the end of ten minutes’ confused
sweating and bawling, the two guns were standing side by side, twenty
yards apart, in the hollow he had chosen; and the crews, panting loudly
with their mouths wide open, stood there also, looking at him and
eagerly expecting the order to load and fire.
He had early abandoned all hope of using indirect fire from any kind
of shelter: for the technical equipment of his men was plainly not
equal to it. He had therefore been obliged to decide upon the use
of open sights; and from the lip of this hollow he could see, he
imagined, a reasonably large area of the battlefield. It stretched, so
far as he could make out, from the woods on his right, which, where
the front line ran, were closer to the road than here, to a vague and
indiscernible point that lay a somewhat greater distance on the other
side of the road. The Speaker’s men were some three-quarters of a mile
in front of him, the enemy nearly half a mile beyond that. It appeared
to Jeremy that the exchange of shots up to now had been no more than a
symbolic expression of ill-will, since at that range it was obviously
impossible for the antagonists to hit one another.
A feverish and exhaustive search during the week of preparation had
not obtained for Jeremy the field-glasses which he had hoped might
be lying in some corner, uninjured and forgotten; but it had at last
brought forth a reasonably good pair of opera-glasses. With these at
his eyes, he stood on the edge of his hollow, shifting uneasily from
one foot to the other, and vainly searched the landscape for a target.
His only chance, he told himself, was to catch a mass of the enemy
somewhere in the open and to scatter them with a direct hit. If he
could do this, he thought, the moral effect might be to dismay them,
and to put heart into the Speaker’s troops. But he did not suppose
that he could rout the whole army of the north with fifty rounds of a
very feeble and uncertain kind of high explosive, which was all the
ammunition he had been able to get together for the two guns. “If only
we had shrapnel----” he was murmuring to himself; but then Jabez’s
attempt at a time-fuse had been altogether too fantastic. “If only we
had quick-firers ... seventy-fives....” But things were as they were,
and he must make the best of them.
But still no target presented itself. Neither line seemed to move; and,
in fact, any considerable movement must have been instantly visible
on that smooth, hardly broken stretch of pasture-land. This state of
immobility continued for half-an-hour or so, during which Jeremy’s
anxiety increased, relaxed, and increased again, until the alternation
of moods became almost unbearable. Once, quite suddenly, the firing,
which had grown slacker, broke out again violently on the right. It
began with an attempt at volleys, but after a moment or two fell into
irregularity and raggedness. Jeremy, scanning the ground with his
opera-glasses, could find no cause for it. He attributed it to panic
and was beginning to believe that the formidableness of the Yorkshire
army had been much over-rated. He had just let fall the glasses when
he was disturbed by a touch at his elbow. He turned and saw Jabez, a
stooped, shriveled figure that looked up at him with shining youthful
eyes in a face absurdly old.
“_Aren’t_ we going to let them off?” pleaded Jabez in wistful tones.
“Aren’t we _ever_ going to let them off? Just once--anywhere....” He
swept a claw-like hand round the horizon, as though it was immaterial
to him where the shot fell, so long as it was discharged. “It would
frighten those fellers,” he added with cunning.
Jeremy reluctantly smiled. “We must wait till we can frighten them
properly,” he answered, “and just at present I can’t see anything to
fire at.”
“We sha’n’t ever get a chance,” wailed Jabez; and he lolloped
mournfully back to the guns so as to be ready for the first order.
Intense quiet descended again upon the battlefield. Both sides seemed
to be lying down in their lines, each waiting for the other to make a
move. Jeremy uttered a short, involuntary laugh. This, he supposed, was
what might be expected from a people so incredibly unused to warfare,
but it was nevertheless a trifle ludicrous. He determined to ride
forward again and consult with the Speaker.
He had mounted and ridden a hundred yards from the battery, when a
second burst of firing broke out, this time apparently upon the left.
The road, which ran along the crest of a slight ridge, would give him
a better view, and thither he hastened. When he gained it he saw that
on the extreme left the battle had indeed begun and, to all appearance,
disastrously. A great body of Yorkshiremen was advancing in close
formation, and already the Speaker’s troops were giving way, some
throwing down their weapons, some firing wildly as they ran. Jeremy
paused rigid for a second. It was as though what he saw touched only
the surface of the brain and by that paralyzed all power of thought.
Those scuffling, running, dark figures over there were fighting and
being killed. They were fighting and being killed in the great contest
between civilization and barbarism for the body of England; and
barbarism, it seemed, was winning. But there was nothing impressive
in their convulsed and ungainly actions. They were merely dark figures
running about and scuffling and sometimes falling. Jeremy knew very
well what it was that he saw, but he did not realize it. It did not
seem real enough to make the intimate contact between perception and
thought which produces a deed. Then suddenly his paralysis, which felt
to him as though it had lasted a million years, was dissolved, and
before he knew what he was doing he had turned and was galloping back
to the battery at a speed which considerably astonished his horse.
“Get those guns out!” he yelled, with distorted face and starting eyes.
“Get those guns----” His voice cracked, but already the old men were
in a frenzy of haste, limbering up and putting in the teams. In a few
moments, it seemed, they were all scurrying together over the field,
Jabez clinging to Jeremy’s stirrup, flung grotesquely up and down by
the horse’s lumbering stride, the guns tossed wildly to and fro on the
uneven ground. They breasted the slight ridge of the road like a pack
of hounds taking a low wall and plunged down together on the further
side, men, guns, horses, wagons, all confused in a flying mass.
“My God!” Jeremy gasped to himself. “Any one would think we were
horse-gunners. I wouldn’t have believed that it could be done.”
His own reflection sobered him, and, lifting himself in the saddle, he
shouted to the insane mob around him: “Steady! Steady! Steady!” The
pace slackened a little, and a swift glance round showed him that, by
some miracle, no damage had been done. How these heavy guns and wagons,
even with their double teams of horses, had been driven at such a speed
over ground so broken and over the bank of the road was, he supposed,
something he would never be able to explain; and this was least of all
the moment for troubling about it. But the divine madness, which must
have inspired men and animals alike, had now evaporated, and it was
time to think what he must do. In another hundred yards he had made his
way to the front of the battery and had halted it by an uplifted hand.
Then first he was able to see how the situation had developed.
It had gone even worse than he had feared, and he had halted only just
in time. So far as he could make out, the whole of the Speaker’s left
flank had been driven back in confusion and was fighting, such of it as
yet stood, in little groups. Some of these were not more than three or
four hundred yards in front of him. Complete ruin had failed to follow
only because the Yorkshire troops had attacked in small force and were
for the moment exhausted. But over where their first line had been he
could see new bodies approaching to the attack. When he looked round
for help he found that the Speaker’s army was engaged all along its
length and that only a meager company of reserves was coming up, slowly
and from a great distance.
His decision was rapidly made. Now, if ever, he had his chance of
using his guns to demoralize the enemy, and if he could thus break up
the attack, the position might yet be restored. It was true that here
in the open he ran a mighty risk of losing the guns. The remnants of
the enemy’s wave were not far off; and hardly anything in the way of
defenders lay between him and them. But this only spurred him to take a
further risk. He led the battery forward again to a convenient hollow,
a few yards behind one of the still resisting groups, which was lodged
in a little patch of gorse. And, just as the battery came up, a party
of the enemy made a rush, driving the Speaker’s men back among the
horses and wagons. There was a whirlwind moment, in which Jeremy was
nearly thrown from his plunging horse. He had no weapon, but struck
furiously with his fist into a face which was thrust up for a second
by his bridle. Around him everything was in commotion, men shouting
in deep or piping voices, arms whirling, steel flashing. And then
miraculously all was quiet again and he calmed his horse. A few bodies
lay here and there, some in brown, some in uniforms of an unfamiliar
dark blue. They were like the line of foam deposited by the receding
wave. Not far away, Jabez, surprised and bewildered, but unhurt, lay
on his back, where he had been pushed over, waving his arms and legs
in the air. Another of the old men had collapsed across the barrel
of one of the guns and blood was spouting from his side. Beyond the
battery a few of the infantrymen were standing, wild-eyed and panting,
in attitudes of flight, unable to believe that their opponents had been
destroyed. Further off still the company which had been attached to the
guns, and which they had left behind in their wild rush, was coming up
and had halted irresolutely to see what turn events would take.
Jeremy recovered his self-possession, and, with the help of the shaken
but indomitable Jabez, got the guns into place and gave the order to
load. Then himself he trained the first gun on a body of Yorkshire
troops which was advancing in column over half a mile away. There
followed a tense moment.
“Fire!” He cried the word in a trembling voice. Jabez, with an air
of ineffable pride, pulled the lanyard and all the old men at once
leapt absurdly at the report. Over, far over! And yet the shell had
at least burst, and through his glasses he could see the enemy waver
and halt, obviously astonished by the new weapon. He ran to the other
gun, trained it, and again gave the order to fire. It was short this
time, and the smoke and dust of the explosion hid the mark. But when
the air was clear again, Jeremy saw that the column had broken and
was dispersing in all directions. Apparently the flying fragments of
the shell had swept its leading ranks. The old men raised a quavering
cheer, and Jabez, leaping with senile agility to an insecure perch on
the gun-carriage, flourished his hat madly in the air.
Jeremy’s first feeling was one of relief that neither of the guns
had blown up. He examined them carefully and was satisfied. When he
resumed his survey of the field there was no target in sight. But the
firing on the right was growing louder and, he thought, nearer. It was
not possible to drag these guns from point to point to strengthen any
part of the line that might happen to be in danger; and his despair
overwhelmingly returned. He swept the ground before him in the faint
hope of finding another column in the open. As he did so he suddenly
became aware that he could just see round the left of the ridge on
which the northern army had established itself; and, searching this
tract, he observed something about a mile away, under the shade of
a long plantation, that seemed significant. He lowered his glasses,
wiped the lenses carefully, and looked again. He had not been mistaken.
There, within easy range, lay a great park of wagons, which was
perhaps the whole of the enemy’s transport.
Now, if it were possible, he exultantly reflected, fortune offered
him a chance of working the miracle which the Speaker had demanded of
him. He beckoned Jabez to his side, pointed out the mark and explained
his intention. The ancient executed a brief, brisk caper of delighted
comprehension, and together they aimed the two guns very carefully,
making such allowances as were suggested on the spur of the moment by
the results of the first shots. They were just ready when the noise of
battle again clamorously increased on the right and urged them forward.
“It’s now or never, Jabez,” muttered Jeremy, feeling an unusual
constriction of the throat that hindered his words. But Jabez only
replied with an alert and bird-like nod of confidence.
“Fire!” Jeremy cried in a strangled voice. The lanyards were jerked,
and Jeremy, his glasses fixed on the target, saw two great clouds
spring up to heaven not far apart. Were they short? But when the smoke
drifted away, he saw that they had not been short. Feverishly he made
a slight adjustment in the aim, and the guns were fired again. Now one
burst showed well in the middle of the enemy’s wagons, but the second
did not explode. Jeremy was trembling in every muscle when he gave the
order to load and fire for the third time. Was it that he only imagined
a slackening, as if caused by hesitation, in the noise of the attack on
the right? He could hardly endure the waiting; but when the third round
burst he could hardly endure his joy. For immediately there leapt into
the air from the parked wagons an enormous column of vapor that seemed
to overshadow the entire battlefield, and hard after this vision came
a deafening and reverberating explosion, which shook the ground where
he stood.
“Got their ammunition!” he screamed, the tears pouring down his face.
“There must have been a lot!” He reached out blindly for Jabez; and
the old men of the battery observed their commander and his lieutenant
clasping one another by the hands and leaping madly round and round in
an improvised and frenzied dance of jubilation.
When the echoes of that devastating report died away, complete silence
stole over the battlefield, as though heaven by a thundered reproof
had hushed the shrill quarrels of mankind. It was broken by a thin
cheering, which grew louder and increased in volume till the sky rang
with it; and Jeremy, rushing forward to see, realized that everywhere
within sight the Speaker’s men had taken heart and were falling boldly
on their panic-stricken enemies.