“Stand your ground, my boys! don’t give way an inch!  Aha, see ’em run, the cowards! we’ll fix their flint for ’em!”

He was in high spirits and seemed to have recovered all his unbounded confidence, certain that victory was yet to crown their efforts.  There had been no defeat.  The handful of men before him stood in his eyes for the united armies of Germany, and he was going to destroy them at his leisure.  All his long, lean form, all his thin, bony face, where the huge nose curved down upon the self-willed, sensual mouth, exhaled a laughing, vain-glorious satisfaction, the joy of the conquering trooper who goes through the world with his sweetheart on his arm and a bottle of good wine in his hand.

“Parbleu, my children, what are we here for, I’d like to know, if not to lick ’em out of their boots? and that’s the way this affair is going to end, just mark my words.  We shouldn’t know ourselves any longer if we should let ourselves be beaten.  Beaten! come, come, that is too good!  When the neighbors tread on our toes, or when we feel we are beginning to grow rusty for want of something to do, we just turn to and give ’em a thrashing; that’s all there is to it.  Come, boys, let ’em have it once more, and you’ll see ’em run like so many jackrabbits!”

He bellowed and gesticulated like a lunatic, and was such a good fellow withal in the comforting illusion of his ignorance that the men were inoculated with his confidence.  He suddenly broke out again: 

“And we’ll kick ’em, we’ll kick ’em, we’ll kick ’em to the frontier!  Victory, victory!”

But at that juncture, just as the enemy across the valley seemed really to be falling back, a hot fire of musketry came pouring in on them from the left.  It was a repetition of the everlasting flanking movement that had done the Prussians such good service; a strong detachment of the Guards had crept around toward the French rear through the Fond de Givonne.  It was useless to think of holding the position longer; the little band of men who were defending the terraces were caught between two fires and menaced with being cut off from Sedan.  Men fell on every side, and for a moment the confusion was extreme; the Prussians were already scaling the wall of the park, and advancing along the pathways.  Some zouaves rushed forward to repel them, and there was a fierce hand-to-hand struggle with the bayonet.  There was one zouave, a big, handsome, brown-bearded man, bare-headed and with his jacket hanging in tatters from his shoulders, who did his work with appalling thoroughness, driving his reeking bayonet home through splintering bones and yielding tissues, cleansing it of the gore that it had contracted from one man by plunging it into the flesh of another; and when it broke he laid about him, smashing many a skull, with the butt of his musket; and when finally he made a misstep and lost his weapon he sprung, bare-handed, for the throat of a burly