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Later in the day, it seeming probable that she might be retaken, she was set on fire and burned to the water's edge. Thus abandoned, she sank to the bottom, where her hull rests to this day. During the recent summer of 1901 some gun-carriages have been recovered from her, after lying for a century and a quarter beneath the surface of the lake.
The foes never came, however, and the roofs and walls of the block-houses have gradually tumbled in, and the gun-carriages for they managed to drag heavy ordnance up the steep hill-side have rotted away, whilst the old-fashioned cannon lie, grim and rusty, amid a tangled profusion of wild geranium, heath and lilies, I scrambled up to one of the nearest block-houses, and found the date on the dismounted gun to be more than a hundred years old.
This furnished a sort of respite. These combatants had around them something in the nature of a swarm of spectres, silhouettes of men on horseback, the black profiles of cannon, the white sky viewed through wheels and gun-carriages, the colossal death's-head, which the heroes saw constantly through the smoke, in the depths of the battle, advanced upon them and gazed at them.
We have abundant proof that literally every department of administration felt the impulse of his will, while to the organization of the army, to the arrangement of uniforms, to the designing of gun-carriages, to questions concerning straps, buckles, and commissary stores, to the temper of the common soldier, to the opinion of the nation, to each and all these matters he gave such attention as left nothing for others to do.
They growled, indeed, but good-humouredly, when, for the tenth time that day, they came to the edge of a gully into which the track plunged steeply to mount almost as steeply on the farther side: and their good humour did them the more credit since the General had forbidden them to lock the wheels, on the ground that locking shook and weakened the gun-carriages.
The cannons painted gray, the gun-carriages, the artillery equipment, all that Don Marcelo had seen clean and shining with the enthusiastic friction that man has given to arms from remote epochs even more persistent than that which woman gives to household utensils were now dirty, overlaid with the marks of endless use, with the wreckage of unavoidable neglect.
Radiating from this were five streets and passages like the spokes of a wheel, and from these now poured the defenders of the isle. A volley came from the Cohue Royale, then another, and another. The place was small: friend and foe were crowded upon each other. The fighting became at once a hand-to-hand encounter. Cannon were useless, gun-carriages overturned.
And as the Portuguese who tried to succour him were all killed, not one escaping, and he himself was wounded in many places, he was taken prisoner. The spoil was four thousand horses of Ormuz, and a hundred elephants, and four hundred heavy cannon, besides small ones; the number of gun-carriages for them was nine hundred, and there were many tents and pavilions.
It was only by the intense solitude and silence that one realized the presence of some dreadful visitation, only that and a faint odour of corruption stealing from a dark mass of unknown beastliness huddled under a stone wall, and the deep ruts and holes in the roadway, made by gun-carriages and wagons.
It was now night; a layer of straw and refuse was spread over the frozen foot-path; the wheels of the gun-carriages were encased in tow; at the break of day the passage had been safely cleared. The French army, descending like a torrent into the valley, seized upon Ivry, and repulsed the Austrians at the Chiusella on May 26th.
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