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The sea was as smooth as oil, the moon shone brilliantly, and the Dog-Fish was sleeping so profoundly that even a cannonade would have failed to wake him. Whilst Pinocchio was swimming quickly towards the shore he discovered that his father, who was on his shoulders with his legs in the water, was trembling as violently as if the poor man had an attack of ague fever.
But even then there was an abundance of the sound of battle, for on the second evening a furious cannonade burst out to the south-east, which signalled the recapture by the enemy of Souchez Cemetery: the last scene in that terrific fight which had endured almost incessantly since May 9th.
Old men, feeble women, tender children, united with the able-bodied to accomplish this work, by which they hoped still to maintain themselves after the ravelin had fallen: On the 31st of January, after two or three days' cannonade against the gates of the Cross and of Saint John, and the intervening curtains, Don Frederic ordered a midnight assault.
Men who were daily butchering their fellow-beings, and hanging their prisoners in cold blood, affected to shudder at the enormity of the offence thus exercised against graven images. After three days' cannonade, the assault was ordered, Don Frederic only intending a rapid massacre, to crown his achievements at Zutphen and Naarden.
They would have been glad enough to cast loose from the Adamant, and leave the spiteful ship to roll to her heart's content, broadside to the sea. They did not fear to run their vessel, with its thick roofplates protected by spring armour, through the heaviest cannonade.
"'Yesterday evening about 6, in the valley in which our reserves stood, there was such a terrible cannonade that we saw nothing of the sky but a cloud of smoke. We had few casualties. "Espionage is carried on by the enemy to a considerable extent. Recently the suspicions of some of the French troops were aroused by coming across a farm from which the horses had been removed.
Ere they approached the city the partial cannonade had wholly ceased. Balmawhapple, however, having in his recollection the unfriendly greeting which his troop had received from the battery at Stirling, had apparently no wish to tempt the forbearance of the artillery of the Castle.
Notwithstanding this disaster to the commander of the town, the assailants were repulsed, losing two hundred-and twenty-five in killed and wounded Colonel Meetkerke and his brother, two most valuable Dutch officers, among them. During the whole of the assault, a vigorous cannonade had been kept up upon other parts of the town, and houses and church-towers were toppling down in all directions.
For hours the deadly cannonade continues, but amid it all, the dead General, buried in a disused bastion, sleeps calmly on: "He has fought his last fight, he has waged his last battle, No sound shall awake him to glory again."
To this bombardment, which lasted upwards of an hour, Longstreet's artillery could make no reply. Yet though the effect on the buildings was appalling, and flames broke out in many places, the defenders not only suffered little loss, but at the very height of the cannonade repelled another attempt to complete the bridge.
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