“En avant, mes freres!  France!  France!  France!”

His voice—­well known, well loved—­thrilled the hearts of his comrades, and brought them together like a trumpet-call.  They had gone with him many a time into the hell of battle, into the jaws of death.  They surged about him now; striking, thrusting, forcing, with blows of their sabers or their lances and blows of their beasts’ fore-feet, a passage one to another, until they were reunited once more as one troop, while their shrill shouts, like an oath of vengeance, echoed after him in the defiance that has pealed victorious over so many fields from the soldiery of France.  They loved him; he had called them his brethren.  They were like lambs for him to lead, like tigers for him to incite.

They could scarcely see his face in that great red mist of combat, in that horrible, stifling pressure on every side that jammed them as if they were in a press of iron, and gave them no power to pause, though their animals’ hoofs struck the lingering life out of some half-dead comrade, or trampled over the writhing limbs of the brother-in-arms they loved dearest and best.  But his voice reached them, clear and ringing in its appeal for sake of the country they never once forgot or once reviled, though in her name they were starved and beaten like rebellious hounds; though in her cause they were exiled all their manhood through under the sun of this cruel, ravenous, burning Africa.  They could see him lift aloft the Eagle he had caught from the last hand that had borne it, the golden gleam of the young morning flashing like flame upon the brazen wings; and they shouted, as with one throat, “Mazagran!  Mazagran!” As the battalion of Mazagran had died keeping the ground through the whole of the scorching day while the fresh hordes poured down on them like ceaseless torrents, snow-fed and exhaustless—­so they were ready to hold the ground here, until of all their numbers there should be left not one living man.

He glanced back on them, guarding his head the while from the lances that were rained on him; and he lifted the guidon higher and higher, till, out of the ruck and the throng, the brazen bird caught afresh the rays of the rising sun.

Then, like arrows launched at once from a hundred bows, they charged; he still slightly in advance of them, the bridle flung upon his horse’s neck, his head and breast bare, one hand striking aside with his blade the steel shafts as they poured on him, the other holding high above the press the Eagle of the Bonapartes.

The effort was superb.

Dense bodies of Arabs parted them in the front from the camp where the battle raged, harassed them in the rear with flying shots and hurled lances, and forced down on them on either side like the closing jaws of a trap.  The impetuosity of their onward movement was, for the moment, irresistible; it bore headlong all before it; the desert horses recoiled, and the desert riders themselves yielded—­crushed,