them and pointed them at me, ready cocked, glittered in a fitful
gleam of sunlight with the same burnished metal. There was an
instant's stillness and hush while the men took aim; then I saw
the officer raise his bared sabre as the signal to fire. It flashed
in the air; then, with a suddenness impossible to convey, the
whole quadrangle blazed with an awful light,--a light so vivid,
so intense, so blinding, so indescribable that everything was blotted
out and devoured by it. It crossed my brain with instantaneous
conviction that this amazing glare was the physical effect of being
shot, and that the bullets had pierced my brain or heart, and caused
this frightful sense of all-pervading flame. Vaguely I remembered
having read or having been told that such was the result produced
on the nervous system of a victim to death from firearms. "It is
over," I said, "that was the bullets." But presently there forced
itself on my dazed senses a sound--a confusion of sounds--darkness
succeeding the white flash--then steadying itself into gloomy daylight;
a tumult; a heap of stricken, tumbled men lying stone-still before me;
a fearful horror upon every living face; and then . . . it all
burst on me with distinct conviction. The storm which had been
gathering all the morning had culminated in its blackest and most
electric point immediately overhead. The file of soldiers appointed
to shoot us stood exactly under it. Sparkling with bright steel
on head and breast and carbines, they stood shoulder to shoulder,
a complete lightning conductor, and at the end of the chain they
formed, their officer, at the critical moment, raised his shining,
naked blade towards the sky. Instantaneously heaven opened, and
the lightning fell, attracted by the burnished steel. From blade
to carbine, from helmet to breastplate it ran, smiting every man
dead as he stood.