and another tall Royal dropped at the same moment.

'Hi, sergeant!' spoke up the young Engineer officer very sharply and
clearly, at the same time stepping a couple of paces down from the
ridge over which a frontal fire of bullets now flew whistling from
the loopholed houses in the town. 'For God's sake, shout and hurry
up your men, or our chance this night is gone.'

'I know it, sir--I know it,' groaned Wilkes.

'Then shout, man! Fifty men might do it yet, but every moment is odds
against. See the swarm on the rampart there, to the right!'

They shouted together, but in vain. Four or five ladder-bearers
mounted the slope, but only to be shot down almost at their feet.
The Engineer officer, reaching forward to seize one of the
ladder-lengths and drag it behind a pile of masonry under which he
had taken cover, and thus for an instant exposing himself, dropped
suddenly upon his face. And now but Sergeant Wilkes and Corporal Sam
were left clinging, waiting for the help that still tarried.

What had happened was this. The supporting columns, disordered by
the scramble along the foreshore, arrived at the foot of the breach
in straggling twos and threes; and here, while their officers tried
to form them up, the young soldiers behind, left for the moment
without commanders and exasperated by the fire from the flanking
tower, halted to exchange useless shots with its defenders and with
the enemy on the rampart. Such fighting was worse than idle: it
delayed them full in the path of the 38th, which now overtook them on
its way to the lesser breach, and in five minutes the two columns