But the Captain adopted the wisest course.  He saw that retreat was necessary.  He had, behind him, more than a hundred human lives, and felt they must be saved for better and more useful sacrifices.  With a voice that rose above the noise of the firing, he shouted:  “Follow me, in open order!” And he spurred in an oblique direction towards the nearest depression in the ground.  But the movement was badly carried out.  The men, disheartened, instead of spreading out like a flight of sparrows, rushed off in so compact a body that some more horses were knocked over by the Prussian bullets.  How long those few seconds seemed to us!  I wondered by what sort of miracle it was that we did not lose more men.  But what an uncanny tune the innumerable bullets made in our ears as they pursued us like angry bees!

At last we got under cover.  Following a gully, the squadron reached a little wood, behind which it was able to re-form.  The sweating horses snorted loudly.  The men, sullen-mouthed and dejected, fell in without a word and dressed the line.

In the fading light the roll was called by a non-commissioned officer in a subdued voice, whilst I looked on distressfully at the sad results of the useless charge.  And yet our losses were not great—­three troopers only, slightly wounded, who, far from grumbling at their mishap, seemed proud of the blood that stained their tunics and their hands.  The men whose horses had fallen had already come up jogging heavily over the field of lucerne that stretched out before us.  One man alone was absent; Paquin, a good little fellow, energetic and well disciplined, whose good humour I found especially attractive both under fire and in camp.  But he would come in, no doubt.  Cahard, his bed-fellow, told me that his horse had stumbled and thrown him.  He thought he had even seen him get up again directly the charge had passed.

“Mon Lieutenant, ... mon Lieutenant, your horse is wounded.”

I had dismounted in a moment, and tears came to my eyes.  I had forgotten the anger and impatience that “Tourne-Toujours’” savage temper had so often caused me.  What had they done to my brave and noble companion-in-arms?  A bullet had struck him inside the left thigh and, penetrating it, had made a horrible wound, as large as my hand, from which the blood was streaming all down his leg.  Two other bullets had hit him, one in the flank, the other in the loins, leaving two small red holes.  The noble animal had brought me back safely, and then, as he stood still on his four trembling legs, his neck raised, his nostrils dilated, his ears pricked, he fixed his eyes on the distance and seemed to look approaching death in the face.  Poor ‘Tourne-Toujours,’ you could not divine the pain I felt as I patted you, as gently as I should touch a little suffering child!

But I had to shake off the sadness that wrung my heart.  The day was gradually sinking, and Paquin had not come in.  Two of the men quickly put my saddle on the horse of one of the wounded troopers.  Whilst Surgeon-Major P., in the growing dusk, attended to the seriously wounded men stretched on the grass, I made up my mind to go out and see whether my little Chasseur was not still lying out on the scene of the charge.