Meantime, pick me your detachment.Give me a good spice of veterans.I shall get one word with you before we go out.God bless you!""God bless you, Raynal!"
The moment Raynal was gone, Camille beckoned a lieutenant to him, and ordered half the brigade to form in a strong column on both sides Death's Alley.
His eye fell upon private Dard, as luck would have it."Come here,"said he.Dard came and saluted.
"Have you anybody at Beaurepaire that would be sorry if you were killed?""Yes, colonel! Jacintha, that used to make your broth, colonel.""Take this line to Colonel Raynal.You will find him with the 12th brigade."He wrote a few lines in pencil, folded them, and Dard went off with them, little dreaming that the colonel of his brigade was taking the trouble to save his life, because he came from Beaurepaire.Colonel Dujardin then went into his tent, and closed the aperture, and took the good book the priest had given him, and prayed humbly, and forgave all the world.
Then he sat down, his head in his hands, and thought of his child, and how hard it was he must die and never see him.Then he lighted a candle, and sealed up his orders of valor, and wrote a line, begging that they might be sent to his sister.He also sealed up his purse, and left a memorandum that the contents should be given to disabled soldiers of his brigade upon their being invalided.
Then he took out Josephine's letter."Poor coward," he said, "let me not be unkind.See, I burn your letter, lest it should be found, and disturb the peace you prize so highly.I, too, shall soon be at peace." He lighted the letter, and dropped it on the ground: it burned slowly away.He eyed it, despairingly."Ay," said he, "you perish, last record of an unhappy love: and even so pass away my life; my hopes of glory, and my dreams of love; it all ends to-day:
at nine and twenty."
He put his white handkerchief to his eyes.Josephine had given it him.He cried a little.
When he had done crying, he put his white handkerchief in his bosom, and the whole man was transformed beyond language to express.
Powder does not change more when it catches fire.He rose that moment and went like a flash of lightning out of the tent.The next, he came down between the lines of the strong column that stood awaiting orders in Death's Alley.
"Attention!" cried the sergeants; "the colonel!"There was a dead silence, for the bare sight of that erect and inspired figure made the men's bosoms thrill with the certainty of great deeds to come: the light of battle was in his eye.No longer the moody colonel, but a thunderbolt of war, red-hot, and waiting to be launched.
"Officers, sergeants, soldiers, a word with you!"La Croix.Attention!
"Do you know what passed here five minutes ago?""The attack of the bastion was settled!" cried a captain.
"It was; and who was to lead the assault? do you know that?""No."
"A colonel FROM EGYPT."
At that there was a groan from the men.
"With detachments from the other brigades.""AH!" an angry roar.
Colonel Dujardin walked quickly down between the two lines, looking with his fiery eye into the men's eyes on his right.Then he came back on the other side, and, as he went, he lighted those men's eyes with his own.It was a torch passing along a line of ready gas-lights.
"The work to us!" he cried in a voice like a clarion (it fired the hearts as his eye had fired the eyes)--"The triumph to strangers!
Our fatigues and our losses have not gained the brigade the honor of going out at those fellows that have killed so many of our comrades."A fierce groan broke from the men.
"What! shall the colors of another brigade and not ours fly from that bastion this afternoon?""No! no!" in a roar like thunder.
