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Updated: May 13, 2025
Now strange voices whispered always in his ears, saying that she was dead, and urging him to follow by the same dark road over which her trembling feet had stumbled. He heard those voices as he wrought and sweated with the gun-team at the levers, and the ponderous muzzle-loader rolled back upon the grooves of her improvised mounting.
To add to the complication and confusion, more wounded arrived from the firing line above and beyond to the westward; horses began to fall where they stood harnessed to the caissons; a fine, powerful gun-team galloping back to refill its chests suddenly reared straight up into annihilation, enveloped in the volcanic horror of a shell, so near that Ailsa, standing below in a clump of willows, saw the flash and smoke of the cataclysm and the flying disintegration of dark objects scattering through the smoke.
There was a false alarm of glanders the other day. One of the gun-team had a swollen throat, but it turns out to be something else. I was told off to help foment him with hot water the night it was discovered. He kicked us all, and completely floored me with a kick in the chest, which didn't hurt happily.
Then a shell blew a gun-team into fragments, plastering the men's faces with bloody shreds of flesh; and the boyish lieutenant, spitting out filth, coolly ordered up the limbers, and brought his section around into the road with a beautiful display of driving and horsemanship that drew raucous cheers from the Zouaves, where they lay, half stifled, firing at the gray line of battle gathering along the edges of the woods.
Only one horse of that gun-team remained alive, and the gunners had lashed the prolonge to the trail of the overturned cannon and to the poor horse's collar, and were trying to drag the piece away with the hope of righting it.
The boy beside us tapped his foot fretfully as he eyed his companions melting among the hillocks, but the gun-team adjusted their bets without once looking up. The ground rose a little to a furze-crowned ridge in the centre so that I could not see the full length of it, but I heard a faint bubble of blank in the distance. "The Saturday allowance," murmured Bayley.
The hero is killed by an accident with a gun-team soon after the Battle of Valmy. That is the unfamiliar aspect of the hackneyed French Revolution with which Mr. Belloc here chooses to deal: an aspect, we might even say, not merely unfamiliar, but practically unknown to the English reader.
The rear square stood fast, and the officers by great exertion succeeded in rallying the fugitives under the cover it afforded. The news that a principal chief, Abdoolah Khan, had been severely wounded in the plain gave pause to the offensive vigour of the Afghans, and the assailants fell back, abandoning the gun, but carrying off the limber and gun-team.
Captain Resmith cantered ahead to a bend in the track, and anxiously watched a gun-team take the sharp curve, which was also a sharp slope. The impression of superb, dangerous physical power was tremendous.
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