Comrade, how still
you stepped, your bayonet thrust out before you, clearing the mists, your
eyes straining, your teeth set, ready to thrust. All at once a quick-
moving mass sprang out of the haze, and upon you, with hardly a sound of
warning; and an army of hussars launched themselves at your bayonets!
You bent that wall back like a piece of steel, and broke it. Comrade,
that was the beginning, in the mist of morning. Tell me how you fared in
the light of evening, at the end of that bloody day."
The old soldier was trembling. There was no sign, no movement, from the
crowd. Across the fields came the sharpening of a scythe, the cry of the
grasshoppers, and the sound of a mill-wheel arose near by. In the mill
itself, far up in a deep dormer window, sat Parpon with his black cat,
looking down upon the scene with a grim smiling.
The sergeant saw that mist fronting Sonnenberg rise up, and show ten
thousand splendid cavalry and fifty thousand infantry, with a king and a
prince to lead them down upon those malleable but unmoving squares of
French infantry. He saw himself drumming the Prussians back and his
Frenchmen on.
"Beautiful God!" he cried proudly, "that was a day! And every man of
the Third Corps that time lift up the lid of hell and drop a Prussian in.
I stand beside Davoust once, and ping! come a bullet, and take off his
chapeau. It fell upon my drum. I stoop and pick it up and hand it to
him, but I keep drumming with one hand all the time.
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