It was not a battle; it was a frightful tangling of men and brutes.  No contest of modern warfare, such as commences and conquers by a duel of artillery, and, sometimes, gives the victory to whosoever has the superiority of ordnance, but a conflict, hand to hand, breast to breast, life for life; a Homeric combat of spear and of sword even while the first volleys of the answering musketry pealed over the plain.

For once the Desert avenged, in like, that terrible inexhaustibility of supply wherewith the Empire so long had crushed them beneath the overwhelming difference of numbers.  It was the Day of Mazagran once more, as the light of the morning broke—­gray, silvered, beautiful—­in the far, dim distance, beyond the tawny seas of reeds.  Smoke and sand soon densely rose above the struggle, white, hot, blinding; but out from it the lean, dark Bedouin faces, the snowy haicks, the red burnous, the gleam of the Tunisian muskets, the flash of the silver-hilted yataghans, were seen fused in a mass with the brawny, naked necks of the Zouaves, with the shine of the French bayonets; with the tossing manes and glowing nostrils of the Chasseurs’ horses; with the torn, stained silk of the raised Tricolor, through which the storm of balls flew thick and fast as hail, yet whose folds were never suffered to fall, though again and again the hand that held its staff was cut away or was unloosed in death, yet ever found another to take its charge before the Flag could once have trembled in the enemy’s sight.

The Chasseurs could not charge; they were hemmed in, packed between bodies of horsemen that pressed them together as between iron plates; now and then they could cut their way through, clear enough to reach their comrades of the demi-cavalry, but as often as they did so, so often the overwhelming numbers of the Arabs urged in on them afresh like a flood, and closed upon them, and drove them back.

Every soldier in the squadron that lived kept his life by sheer, breathless, ceaseless, hand-to-hand sword-play, hewing right and left, front and rear, without pause, as, in the great tangled forests of the west, men hew aside branch and brushwood ere they can force one step forward.

The gleam of the dawn spread in one golden glow of morning, and the day rose radiant over the world; they stayed not for its beauty or its peace; the carnage went on, hour upon hour; men began to grow drunk with slaughter as with raki.  It was sublimely grand; it was hideously hateful—­this wild-beast struggle, this heaving tumult of striving lives, that ever and anon stirred the vast war-cloud of smoke and broke from it as the lightning from the night.  The sun laughed in its warmth over a thousand hills and streams, over the blue seas lying northward, and over the yellow sands of the south; but the touch of its heat only made the flame in their blood burn fiercer; the fullness of its light only served to show them clearer where to strike and how to slay.