bullet comes along and lays him on his back.  That ended it; no one left to command us!  No matter, though, we kept on fighting all the same; but they were too many for us, we had to fall back at last.  We held the railway station for a long time, and then we fought behind a wall, and the uproar was enough to wake the dead.  And then, when the city was taken, I don’t exactly remember how it came about, but we were upon a mountain, the Geissberg, I think they call it, and there we intrenched ourselves in a sort of castle, and how we did give it to the pigs! they jumped about the rocks like kids, and it was fun to pick ’em off and see ’em tumble on their nose.  But what would you have? they kept coming, coming, all the time, ten men to our one, and all the artillery they could wish for.  Courage is a very good thing in its place, but sometimes it gets a man into difficulties, and so, at last, when it got too hot to stand it any longer, we cut and run.  But regarded as nincompoops, our officers were a decided success; don’t you think so, Picot?”

[*] This was Abel Douay—­not to be confounded with his brother,
    Felix, who commanded the 7th corps.-TR.

There was a brief interval of silence.  Picot tossed off a glass of the white wine and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Of course,” said he.  “It was just the same at Froeschwiller; the general who would give battle under such circumstances is a fit subject for a lunatic asylum.  That’s what my captain said, and he’s a little man who knows what he is talking about.  The truth of the matter is that no one knew anything; we were only forty thousand strong, and we were surprised by a whole army of those pigs.  And no one was expecting to fight that day; battle was joined by degrees, one portion after another of our troops became engaged, against the wishes of our commanders, as it seems.  Of course, I didn’t see the whole of the affair, but what I do know is that the dance lasted by fits and starts all day long; a body would think it was ended; not a bit of it! away would go the music more furiously than ever.  The commencement was at Woerth, a pretty little village with a funny clock-tower that looks like a big stove, owing to the earthenware tiles they have stuck all over it.  I’ll be hanged if I know why we let go our hold of it that morning, for we broke all our teeth and nails trying to get it back again in the afternoon, without succeeding.  Oh, my children, if I were to tell you of the slaughter there, the throats that were cut and the brains knocked out, you would refuse to believe me!  The next place where we had trouble was around a village with the jaw-breaking name of Elsasshausen.  We got a peppering from a lot of guns that banged away at us at their ease from the top of a blasted hill that we had also abandoned that morning, why, no one has ever been able to tell.  And there it was that with these very eyes of mine I saw the famous charge of the cuirassiers.  Ah, how gallantly they rode