only his point but his pennon too came out between the second and third
buttons of the lad's tunic. "Helen! Helen!" he shouted, and fell dead
on his face, while the lancer, blown half to pieces with musket balls,
toppled over beside him, still holding on to his weapon, so that they
lay together with that dreadful bond still connecting them.

But when the battery opened there was no time for us to think of
anything else. A square is a very good way of meeting a horseman, but
there is no worse one of taking a cannon ball, as we soon learned when
they began to cut red seams through us, until our ears were weary of the
slosh and splash when hard iron met living flesh and blood. After ten
minutes of it we moved our square a hundred paces to the right; but we
left another square behind us, for a hundred and twenty men and seven
officers showed where we had been standing. Then the guns found us out
again, and we tried to open out into line; but in an instant the
horsemen--lancers they were this time--were upon us from over the brae.

I tell you we were glad to hear the thud of their hoofs, for we knew
that that must stop the cannon for a minute and give us a chance of
hitting back. And we hit back pretty hard too that time, for we were
cold and vicious and savage, and I for one felt that I cared no more for
the horsemen than if they had been so many sheep on Corriemuir. One
gets past being afraid or thinking of one's own skin after a while, and
you just feel that you want to make some one pay for all you have gone
through. We took our change out of the lancers that time; for they had
no breastplates to shield them, and we cleared seventy of them out of
their saddles at a volley. Maybe, if we could have seen seventy mothers
weeping for their lads, we should not have felt so pleased over it; but
then, men are just brutes when they are fighting, and have as much
thought as two bull pups when they've got one another by the throttle.