Land, what a sight! We were enclosed in three
walls of dead men! All the other fences were
pretty nearly filled with the living, who were stealthily
working their way forward through the wires.
The sudden glare paralyzed this host, petrified them,
you may say, with astonishment; there was just one
instant for me to utilize their immobility in, and
I didn’t lose the chance. You see, in
another instant they would have recovered their faculties,
then they’d have burst into a cheer and made
a rush, and my wires would have gone down before it;
but that lost instant lost them their opportunity
forever; while even that slight fragment of time was
still unspent, I shot the current through all the fences
and struck the whole host dead in their tracks! There
was a groan you could hear! It voiced
the death-pang of eleven thousand men. It swelled
out on the night with awful pathos.
A glance showed that the rest of the enemy—perhaps
ten thousand strong—were between us and
the encircling ditch, and pressing forward to the
assault. Consequently we had them all!
and had them past help. Time for the last act
of the tragedy. I fired the three appointed
revolver shots—which meant:
“Turn on the water!”
There was a sudden rush and roar, and in a minute
the mountain brook was raging through the big ditch
and creating a river a hundred feet wide and twenty-five
deep.
“Stand to your guns, men! Open fire!”
The thirteen gatlings began to vomit death into the
fated ten thousand. They halted, they stood
their ground a moment against that withering deluge
of fire, then they broke, faced about and swept toward
the ditch like chaff before a gale. A full fourth
part of their force never reached the top of the lofty
embankment; the three-fourths reached it and plunged
over—to death by drowning.
Within ten short minutes after we had opened fire,
armed resistance was totally annihilated, the campaign
was ended, we fifty-four were masters of England.
Twenty-five thousand men lay dead around us.
But how treacherous is fortune! In a little
while—say an hour —happened
a thing, by my own fault, which—but I have
no heart to write that. Let the record end here.
CHAPTER XLIV
A POSTSCRIPT BY CLARENCE
I, Clarence, must write it for him. He proposed
that we two go out and see if any help could be accorded
the wounded. I was strenuous against the project.
I said that if there were many, we could do but little
for them; and it would not be wise for us to trust
ourselves among them, anyway. But he could seldom
be turned from a purpose once formed; so we shut off
the electric current from the fences, took an escort
along, climbed over the enclosing ramparts of dead
knights, and moved out upon the field. The first
wounded mall who appealed for help was sitting with
his back against a dead comrade. When The Boss
bent over him and spoke to him, the man recognized
him and stabbed him. That knight was Sir Meliagraunce,
as I found out by tearing off his helmet. He
will not ask for help any more.
