“The dance is about to commence,” cried out my captain. “Good-night!”
These were the last words that I heard him utter.
A roll of drums resounded within the redoubt. I saw every musket
lowered. I closed my eyes, and I heard an appalling crash, followed
by cries and groans. I opened my eyes, surprised to find myself still
living. The redoubt was anew enveloped in smoke. I was surrounded with
the bleeding and the dead. My captain was stretched out at my feet: his
head had been crushed by a bullet, and I was covered with his brains
and his blood. Of all my company none remained but six men and me.
To this carnage succeeded a moment of stupor. The colonel, putting his
hat on the point of his sword, was the first to scale the parapet,
crying: “_Vive l’Empereur!_” He was followed instantly by all the
survivors. I do not remember clearly just what followed. We entered
within the redoubt, how I do not know. We fought body to body amid
a smoke so dense that we could not see one another. I believe that
I smote, for I found my sabre was all bloody. At last I heard the
cry, “Victory!” and, the smoke diminishing, I saw blood and dead
bodies completely covering the earthworks of the redoubt. The cannons
especially were buried beneath piles of corpses. About two hundred men,
in the French uniform, were grouped without order, some loading their
muskets, others wiping their bayonets. Eleven hundred Russian prisoners
were with them.
The colonel was lying all covered with blood upon a broken caisson
near the entrance. Several soldiers bestirred themselves around him: I
approached.
“Where is the senior captain?” he inquired of a sergeant.
The sergeant shrugged his shoulders in a manner most expressive.
“And the senior lieutenant?”
“This gentleman here, who arrived yesterday,” said the sergeant, in a
perfectly calm tone.
The colonel smiled bitterly.
“Come, sir,” he said to me, “you are now in chief command; promptly
fortify the entrance of the redoubt with these wagons, for the enemy is
in force; but General C---- will see that you are sustained.”
“Colonel,” I said to him, “you are severely wounded?”
“Pish, my dear fellow, but the redoubt is taken!”