CHAPTER XVII.

A COSTLY VICTORY.

Now followed one of the fiercest and bloodiest episodes of the day.

Wilders had made the best show with his little band and clung tenaciously to the battery yet.  The Russians came on and on, with stubborn insistence, and all along the line a hand-to-hand fight ensued.  Numbers told at length, and the small garrison was slowly forced back, after enduring serious loss.

It was in this retreat that General Wilders received a dangerous wound:  a fragment of a shell tore away the left leg below the knee.

“Will some one kindly lift me from my horse?” he said quietly, schooling his face to continue calm, in spite of the agony he endured.

McKay was on the ground in an instant and by his general’s side.

“Don’t mind me, my boy” said the general.  “Leave me with the doctors.”

“On no account, sir; I should not think of it.”  “Yes, yes.  They want every man.  Attach yourself to Blythe; he will command the brigade now.  Do not stay with me:  I insist.”

McKay yielded to the general’s entreaties, but first saw the wounded man bestowed in a litter and carried to the rear.

Then he joined Colonel Blythe.

But now fortune smiled again.  Our artillery had stayed the Russian advance; and the Grenadier Guards, followed by the Fusiliers, once more regained the coveted but worthless stronghold.

They could not hold it permanently, however:  the tide of battle ebbed and flowed across it, and the victory leant alternately to either side.  The Guards fought like giants, outnumbered but never outmatched, wielding their weapons with murderous prowess, and, when iron missiles failed them, hurling rocks—­Titan-like—­at their foes.

Even when won this Sandbag Battery was a perilous prize:  tempting the English leaders to adventure too far to the front and to leave a great gap in the general line of defence unoccupied and undefended.

Lord Raglan saw the error and would have skilfully averted the impending evil.

“That opening leaves the left of the Guards exposed,” he said to Airey.  “Tell Cathcart to fill it.”

“You are to move to the left and support the Guards,” was the message conveyed to Cathcart, “but not to descend or leave the plateau.  Those are Lord Raglan’s orders.”

But Sir George chose to interpret them his own way, and already—­with Torrens’s brigade and a weak body at best—­he had gone down the hill to join the Guards.  In the sharp but misdirected encounter which followed, the general lost his life, and his force, with the Guards, were for a time cut off from their friends.

A Russian column had wedged in at the gap and for a time forbade retreat, but it was at length sheered off by the first of the French reinforcements; and the intercepted British, in greatly diminished numbers, by degrees won their way home.