of brandy.

But the most curious thing about it was that though they told everyone
in the Legion that I had stood up and made them shoot at me, they
never let anyone find out that I had been so weak as to faint.

I do not know whether it was the brandy they gave me that later led me
to charge those guns, but I appreciate now that my conduct was
certainly silly and mad enough to be excused only in that way.
According to the doctrine of chances I should have lost nine lives,
and according to the rules governing an army in the field I should
have been court-martialled. Instead of which, the men caught me up on
their shoulders and carried me around the plaza, and Laguerre and
Garcia looked on from the steps of the Cathedral and laughed and waved
to us.

For five hours we had been lying in the blazing sun on the flat house-
tops, or hidden in the shops around the plaza, and the government
troops were still holding us off with one hand and spanking us with
the other. Their guns were so good that, when Heinze attempted to take
up a position against them with his old-style Gatlings, they swept him
out of the street, as a fire-hose flushes a gutter. For five hours
they had kept the plaza empty, and peppered the three sides of it so
warmly that no one of us should have shown his head.

But at every shot from the Cathedral our men grew more unmanageable,
and the longer the enemy held us back the more arrogant and defiant
they became. Ostensibly to obtain a better shot, but in reality from
pure deviltry, they would make individual sallies into the plaza, and,
facing the embrasure, would empty their Winchesters at one of its