several times.  But in these gallant and fruitless combats much time was lost, and a battalion presently came up, and surrounded the brave thirty; when the fate of the poor fellows was decided.  They fought with the fury of despair:  not one of them asked for quarter.  When their ammunition failed, they fought with the steel, and were shot down or bayoneted where they stood.  The Frenchman was the very last man who was hit.  He received a bullet in the thigh, and fell, and in this state was overpowered, killing the officer who first advanced to seize him.

He and the very few of his comrades who survived were carried back to Neiss, and immediately, as the ringleader, he was brought before a council of war.  He refused all interrogations which were made as to his real name and family.  ‘What matters who I am?’ said he; ’you have me and will shoot me.  My name would not save me were it ever so famous.’  In the same way he declined to make a single discovery regarding the plot.  ‘It was all my doing,’ he said; ’each man engaged in it only knew me, and is ignorant of every one of his comrades.  The secret is mine alone, and the secret shall die with me.’  When the officers asked him what was the reason which induced him to meditate a crime so horrible?—­’It was your infernal brutality and tyranny,’ he said.  ’You are all butchers, ruffians, tigers, and you owe it to the cowardice of your men that you were not murdered long ago.’

At this his captain burst into the most furious exclamations against the wounded man, and rushing up to him, struck him a blow with his fist.  But Le Blondin, wounded as he was, as quick as thought seized the bayonet of one of the soldiers who supported him, and plunged it into the officer’s breast.  ‘Scoundrel and monster,’ said he, ’I shall have the consolation of sending you out of the world before I die.’  He was shot that day.  He offered to write to the King, if the officers would agree to let his letter go sealed into the hands of the postmaster; but they feared, no doubt, that something might be said to inculpate themselves, and refused him the permission.  At the next review Frederick treated them, it is said, with great severity, and rebuked them for not having granted the Frenchman his request.  However, it was the King’s interest to conceal the matter, and so it was, as I have said before, hushed up—­so well hushed up, that a hundred thousand soldiers in the army knew it; and many’s the one of us that has drunk to the Frenchman’s memory over our wine, as a martyr for the cause of the soldier.  I shall have, doubtless, some readers who will cry out at this, that I am encouraging insubordination and advocating murder.  If these men had served as privates in the Prussian army from 1760 to 1765, they would not be so apt to take objection.  This man destroyed two sentinels to get his liberty; how many hundreds of thousands of his own and the Austrian people did King Frederick kill because he took a fancy to Silesia?  It was the accursed tyranny of the system that sharpened the axe which brained the two sentinels of Neiss:  and so let officers take warning, and think twice ere they visit poor fellows with the cane.