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Updated: May 11, 2025
Old muskets, old swords, old shoes and old coats, trumpets, drums, gun-carriages, wheels, helmets, cannon balls, grape-shot, and all the murderous rubbish which battles come to at last, with proclamations, autographs, caricatures and likenesses of Napoleon, and effigies of all the other generals engaged, and miniatures and jewels of their womenkind, filled room after room, through which their owner vaunted his way, with a loud pounding voice and a bad breath.
Nor was it fair to say, as the gallant member opposite had declared, that the guns were all antiquated and the gun-carriages rotten. It was true that many of the guns were old, but newer ordnance had been supplied; there were abundant stores of shot, shell, and rockets, and a considerable number of Armstrong guns had been received at the citadel very recently.
The dead were buried by night in a corner of the little plateau, borne to their last bivouac on the old gun-carriages which they had stood by so often which the men said would "sort of ease their minds." The next day the fight was renewed, and with the same result. The old battery in its position was unconquerable.
He walked up and down between the gun-carriages until a functionary came to ask what he was doing. He was hard put to it to find an answer: a man is hardly likely to be wandering about in an artillery park at ten o'clock at night for the mere pleasure of the thing. He asked to see the commanding officer.
The only stragglers were those who fell out to give up to the frost their exhausted souls. They plodded on doggedly, stumbling over the corpses of men, the carcasses of horses, the fragments of gun-carriages, covered by the white winding-sheet of the great disaster. Their passage did not disturb the mortal silence of the plains, shining with a livid light under a sky the colour of ashes.
McDunn, superbly mounted, scarcely raised his clear, penetrating voice: "Cannoneers mount gun-carriages; caissons follow; drivers, put spur and whip to horses forward march!" he said.
When all on a sudden they had set fire to the great gun-carriages just by the house, and while they were in flames your petitioner saw smoke arise out of the Town House higher than the ridge of the house. Then your petitioner did put her life, as it were, in her hand, and ventured to beg of the officers to send some of their men to put out the fire; but they took no notice, only sneered.
And the place where the Russians first turned loose on the retreat is a place to remember. "Dead horses, bits of men, blue uniforms, shattered transport, overturned gun-carriages, bones, broken skulls, and grisly bits of humanity strew every acre of the ground.
Here's our vessel a wreck we'll have one of theirs in place. So, comrades all, who's for Carthagena along with me; who's for a Spanish ship and Old England?" "Why, then," cried I, amazed, "my dream was true. They have marched across country on Carthagena " "Yes, Martin, but what dream ?" "With four guns, mounted on wheels?" "Yes, Martin; they built four gun-carriages to Adam's design.
Bettina makes a desperate effort, abandons her umbrella, finds her little sabot, fastens it on as well as she can, and starts off running, with a deluge descending on her head. At last, she is in the wood, the trees protect her a little. Another blast, nearer this time. Bettina fancies she hears the rolling of the gun-carriages.
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