At the same time, a cyclone was sweeping the length of the wall, tearing up groves, overturning cannon and carrying away people in a whirlwind as though they were dry leaves.  He inferred that Death was now blowing from another direction.  Until then, it had come from the front on the river side, battling with the enemy’s line ensconced behind the walls.  Now, with the swiftness of an atmospheric change, it was blustering from the depths of the park.  A skillful manoeuver of the aggressors, the use of a distant road, a chance bend in the German line had enabled the French to collect their cannon in a new position, attacking the occupants of the castle with a flank movement.

It was a lucky thing for Don Marcelo that he had lingered a few moments on the bank of the fosse, sheltered by the bulk of the edifice.  The fire of the hidden battery passed the length of the avenue, carrying off the living, destroying for a second time the dead, killing horses, breaking the wheels of vehicles and making the gun carriages fly through the air with the flames of a volcano in whose red and bluish depths black bodies were leaping.  He saw hundreds of fallen men; he saw disembowelled horses trampling on their entrails.  The death harvest was not being reaped in sheaves; the entire field was being mowed down with a single flash of the sickle.  And as though the batteries opposite divined the catastrophe, they redoubled their fire, sending down a torrent of shells.  They fell on all sides.  Beyond the castle, at the end of the park, craters were opening in the woods, vomiting forth the entire trunks of trees.  The projectiles were hurling from their pits the bodies interred the night before.

Those still alive were firing through the gaps in the walls.  Then they sprang up with the greatest haste.  Some grasped their bayonets, pale, with clamped lips and a mad glare in their eyes; others turned their backs, running toward the exit from the park, regardless of the shouts of their officers and the revolver shots sent after the fugitives.

All this occurred with dizzying rapidity, like a nightmare.  On the other side of the wall came a murmur, swelling in volume, like that of the sea.  Desnoyers heard shouts, and it seemed to him that some hoarse, discordant voices were singing the Marseillaise.  The machine-guns were working with the swift steadiness of sewing machines.  The attack was going to be opposed with furious resistance.  The Germans, crazed with fury, shot and shot.  In one of the breaches appeared a red kepis followed by legs of the same color trying to clamber over the ruins.  But this vision was instantly blotted out by the sprinkling from the machine guns, making the invaders fall in great heaps on the other side of the wall.  Don Marcelo never knew exactly how the change took place.  Suddenly he saw the red trousers within the park.  With irresistible bounds they were springing over the wall, slipping through the yawning gaps, and darting out from the depths of the woods by invisible paths.  They were little soldiers, husky, panting, perspiring, with torn cloaks; and mingled with them, in the disorder of the charge, African marksmen with devilish eyes and foaming mouths, Zouaves in wide breeches and chasseurs in blue uniforms.