The Austrians, reinforced by the emigrant army which had been left at Brussels and in which Calvert knew d’Azay held a captain’s commission, advanced during the early afternoon of June 11th and attacked the vanguard of Lafayette’s army, encamped two miles from Maubeuge, farther up the Sambre, and commanded by Gouvion.  Although the French occupied a formidable position, being securely intrenched on rising ground fortified by a dozen redoubts and batteries arranged in tiers, the enemy advanced with such fierceness and intrepidity that Gouvion had all he could do to keep his gunners from deserting their posts.  The infantry, too, behaved ill, and when ordered to advance, wavered and were driven back at the very first charge from the Austrians.  Their cavalry pursued the advantage thus gained and pressed forward, advancing in three lines and driving the disordered French troops before them up the hill.  At this juncture, Lafayette, with six thousand men and two thousand horse, arrived, having been sent for in hot haste by Gouvion when the action first began, and, attacking the Austrian and emigres from the flank, after a sharp and bloody struggle, succeeded by nightfall in putting them to flight.  Although the forces engaged in this action were small, the slaughter was terrible and the little battle-field by the Sambre presented a ghastly sight in the moonlight of that June night.  Gouvion himself was killed leading the last attack, and the Austrian and emigrant forces suffered severely.  The regiment which Calvert commanded was in the thick of the engagement the whole time, once it arrived on the scene of action, and no officer of either side more exposed or distinguished himself than did the young American.  Indeed, it was not from reckless bravery that he offered himself a target for the bullets of the enemy, but from a feeling that he would not be sorry to end there, to close forever the book of his life.  And, as usual with those who seek, rather than avoid, death in battle, from this action, which was the only one he was destined to engage in, he came out unscathed, while many another poor fellow who longed to live, lay quiet and cold on the bloody ground.

So close was the fighting during the late afternoon that Calvert once thought he caught a glimpse of d’Azay and, with a strange presentiment of evil, he determined to look for him among the slain.  Accompanied by an orderly bearing a lantern—­though the moonlight was so bright that one could easily recognize the pallid, upturned faces—­he began his search an hour after the firing had ceased, with many others engaged in the same ghastly work of finding dead comrades.  He had looked but a short while, or so it seemed to him, when he came upon d’Azay lying prone upon a little hillock of Austrian slain.  As Calvert looked down upon him, grief for this dead friend and an awful sense of the futility of the sacrifice which had been made for him, came upon him.  He knelt beside him for a few minutes and looked into