The French army raised a shout that rent the sky, and their cannon began to play on the Prussian lines and between the bastion and the nearest fort, to prevent a recapture.

Sudden there shot from the bastion a cubic acre of fire:  it carried up a heavy mountain of red and black smoke that looked solid as marble.  There was a heavy, sullen, tremendous explosion that snuffed out the sound of the cannon, and paralyzed the French and Prussian gunners’ hands, and checked the very beating of their hearts.  Thirty thousand pounds of gunpowder were in that awful explosion.  War itself held its breath, and both armies, like peaceable spectators, gazed wonder-struck, terror-struck.  Great hell seemed to burst through the earth’s crust, and to be rushing at heaven.  Huge stones, cannons, corpses, and limbs of soldiers, were seen driven or falling through the smoke.  Some of these last came quite clear of the ruins, ay, into the French and Prussian lines, that even the veterans put their hands to their eyes.  Raynal felt something patter on him from the sky—­it was blood—­a comrade’s perhaps.

The smoke cleared.  Where, a moment before, the great bastion stood and fought, was a monstrous pile of blackened, bloody stones and timbers, with dismounted cannon sticking up here and there.

And, rent and crushed to atoms beneath the smoking mass, lay the relics of the gallant brigade, and their victorious colors.

CHAPTER XXII.

A few wounded soldiers of the brigade lay still till dusk.  Then they crept back to the trenches.  These had all been struck down or disabled short of the bastion.  Of those that had taken the place no one came home.

Raynal, after the first stupefaction, pressed hard and even angrily for an immediate assault on the whole Prussian line.  Not they.  It was on paper that the assault should be at daybreak to-morrow.  Such leaders as they were cannot improvise.

Rage and grief in his heart, Raynal waited chafing in the trenches till five minutes past midnight.  He then became commander of the brigade, gave his orders, and took thirty men out to creep up to the wreck of the bastion, and find the late colonel’s body.

Going for so pious a purpose, he was rewarded by an important discovery.  The whole Prussian lines had been abandoned since sunset, and, mounting cautiously on the ramparts, Raynal saw the town too was evacuated, and lights and other indications on a rising ground behind it convinced him that the Prussians were in full retreat, probably to effect that junction with other forces which the assault he had recommended would have rendered impossible.

They now lighted lanterns, and searched all over and round the bastion for the poor colonel, in the rear of the bastion they found many French soldiers, most of whom had died by the bayonet.  The Prussian dead had all been carried off.