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Updated: September 10, 2025
His hind legs were only shreds of torn flesh. He neighed a long, quivering, soul-piercing shriek of agony and a merciful officer drew his revolver and killed him. A cannoneer lay by this horse's side with both his legs hopelessly crushed so high in the thick flesh of the thighs there was no hope. He was moaning horribly.
"The brave cannoneer is saved!" murmured Gotzkowsky in a low voice to himself, and he too folded his hands in prayer. Was it a prayer of gratitude, or did it proceed from the despairing heart of a father? His countenance had a bright and elevated expression; but as he turned his eyes down on his daughter, still on her knees, they darkened, and his features twitched convulsively and painfully.
"M. Docteur, begin with my neighbor; he is suffering more than I. I can wait." A cannoneer had both legs carried away by a ball; two of his comrades picked him up and made a litter with branches of trees, on which they placed him in order to convey him to the island. The poor mutilated fellow did not utter a single groan, but murmured, "I am very thirsty," from time to time, to those who bore him.
It was a piquant adventure offered him by Gotzkowsky's hate and cunning, and he did not feel inclined to throw away such an original and interesting chance of excitement. He, the Russian colonel, and Count von Brenda, the favorite of the empress, degraded to a Prussian cannoneer, whose life was in danger!
"No, Sire, I can also tell you that I, I alone, have dismounted four pieces of the Austrian cannon; and it is the pleasure of seeing them silenced which makes me forget that I must soon close my eyes forever." The Emperor, moved by such fortitude, gave his cross to the cannoneer, noted the names of his parents, and said to him, "If you recover, the Hotel des Invalides is at your service."
Commander Farragut then decided to use more direct methods. "Bah!" he said. "So that animal is faster than the Abraham Lincoln. All right, we'll see if it can outrun our conical shells! Mate, man the gun in the bow!" Our forecastle cannon was immediately loaded and leveled. The cannoneer fired a shot, but his shell passed some feet above the cetacean, which stayed half a mile off.
On the 4th August Maurice broke up his camp in Flanders, and leaving five thousand men under Colonel Van der Noot, to guard the positions there, advanced rapidly to Deventer, with the intention of saving Lingen. It was too late. That very important place had been culpably neglected. The garrison consisted of but one cannoneer, and he had but one arm.
In one of his frequent tours of inspection, the Emperor, stopping one day near the end of the camp on the left, spoke to a cannoneer from a guard ship, and while conversing with him, asked him several questions, among others, the following, "What is thought here of the Emperor?" "That 'sacre tondu' puts us out of breath as soon as he arrives.
A solid shot struck No. 5 gun on the hub, killing Cannoneer No. 2, who was thumbing the vent, and filling No. 1 gunner with splinters of iron, whirling him into eternity amid a fountain of dirt and flying hub-tires.
While speaking thus the Emperor had drawn a Napoleon from his pocket, which he presented to the cannoneer, whereupon the latter uttered a shout loud enough to be heard by the sentinel at the west post some distance off; and even threw himself on the Emperor, whom he took for a spy, and was about to seize him by the throat when the Emperor suddenly opened his gray overcoat and revealed his identity.
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