Corporal Sam | Page 7

line. His first impulse was to turn and escape, for he shunned all
companionship just now. But a second glance told him what was
happening; and, prompt on the understanding, he plunged straight
down the sandy bank, walked up to a young artillery officer and took
the pistol out of his hand. That was all, and it all happened in less than
three minutes. The would-be duellist--and challenges had been
common since the late assault--knew the man and his story. For that
matter, every one in the army knew his story.
As a ghost he awed them. For a moment he stood looking from one to
the other, and so, drawing the charge, tossed the pistol back at its
owner's feet and resumed his way.
Corporal Sam, who had merely seen the slight figure pass beyond the
edge of the dunes, went back and flung himself again on the warm
bank.
'If a man did that wrong to me--' he repeated.
CHAPTER IV.
Certainly, just or unjust, the Marquis could make himself infernally
unpleasant. Having ridden over from head-quarters and settled the
plans for the new assault, he returned to his main army and there
demanded fifty volunteers from each of the fifteen regiments
composing the First, Fourth, and Light Divisions--men (as he put it)
who could show other troops how to mount a breach. It may be guessed
with what stomach the Fifth Division digested this; and among them
not a man was angrier than their old general, Leith, who now, after a
luckless absence, resumed command. The Fifth Division, he swore,
could hold their own with any soldiers in the Peninsula. He was furious
with the seven hundred and fifty volunteers, and, evading the Marquis's

order, which was implicit rather than direct, he added an oath that these
interlopers should never lead his men to the breaches.
Rage begets rage. During the misty morning hours of August 31st, the
day fixed for the assault, these volunteers, held back and chafing with
the reserves, could scarcely be restrained from breaking out of the
trenches. 'Why,' they demanded, 'had they been fetched here if not to
show the way?'--a question for which their officers were in no mood to
provide a soft answer.
Yet their turn came. Sergeant Wilkes, that amateur in siege-operations,
had rightly prophesied from the first that the waste of life at the
breaches would be wicked and useless until the hornwork had been
silenced and some lodgment made there. So as the morning wore on,
and the sea-mists gave place to burning sunshine, and this again to
heavy thunder-clouds collected by the unceasing cannonade, still more
and more of the reserves of the Fifth Division were pushed up, until
none but the volunteers and a handful of the 9th Regiment remained in
the trenches. Them, too, at length Leith was forced to unleash, and they
swept forward on the breaches yelling like a pack of hounds; but on the
crest-line they fared at first no better than the regiments they had
taunted. Thrice and four times they reached it only to topple back. The
general, watching the fight from the batteries across the Urumea, now
directed the gunners to fire over the stormers' heads; and again a cry
went up that our men were being slaughtered by their own artillery.
Undismayed by this, with no recollections of the first assault to daunt
them, a company of the Light Division took advantage of the fire to
force their way over the rampart on the right of the great breach and
seize a lodgment in some ruined houses actually within the town. There
for an hour or so these brave men were cut off, for the assault in
general made no headway.
It must have failed, even after five hours' fighting, but for an accident.
A line of powder-barrels collected behind the traverses by the great
breach took fire and blew up, driving back all the French grenadiers but
the nearest, whom it scattered in mangled heaps. As explosion followed
explosion, the bright flame spread and ran along the high curtain. The

British leapt after it, breaking through the traverse and swarming up to
the curtain's summit. Almost at the same moment the Thirteenth and
Twenty-fourth Portuguese, who had crossed the river by a lower ford,
hurled themselves over the lesser breach to the right; and as the swollen
heavens burst in a storm of rain and thunder, from this point and that
the besiegers, as over the lip of a dam, swept down into the streets.
'Treat men like dogs, and they'll behave like dogs,' grumbled Sergeant
Wilkes, as he followed to prevent what mischief he might. But this, he
well knew, would be little enough.
CHAPTER V.
Corporal Sam Vicary, coming up to the edge of the camp-fire's