“What are you doing there?”

“Do you see that bit of a blue cloak down that hole?  The colonel is underneath that stone, and the bayonets sticking out of the rubbish belong to the men he was leading.  The explosion buried them all alive!”

A terrible trial that explosion was for assaulting columns scattered through a labyrinth of ruins, and barricaded lanes, and fired at from all sides by an invisible foe.

But nothing dismayed our brave fellows for an instant.  I was told that at the moment of the catastrophe, when the staff, which was following the progress of the fight with anxious ears, for there was no seeing anything, saw the cloud caused by the explosion shrouding the neighbourhood of the breach, and hundreds of wounded and burnt and maimed men coming down it, they thought the assault had been repulsed and that the game was up.

Lamoriciere, commanding the first attacking column, was carried back blinded, and to everybody’s astonishment the commanding officer of the 2nd column, Colonel Combes, was seen returning also.  He advanced, sword in hand, to the General commanding, over whose face an expression first of wonder and then of anger spread, at the sight of a commanding officer quitting his post.  Nothing daunted, the colonel informed him, in a few curt sentences, of the state of the fight, and of his own confidence in its success, ending with these words:  “It will be another glorious day for France and for those who live to see the end of it.”  He saluted, tottered—­he was dead!  No sign of his had betrayed that he was mortally wounded.

As I listened to the tale I asked General Vallee,—­“But what would you have done, General, if the assault had been repulsed?”

“We should have begun again.”  As he said it he pressed his lips together with that fearfully stern expression which, with his short stature, had earned him the nickname in the army of “Little Louis XI.,” and an officer behind me who wad heard my question and the answer, added in an undertone, “And he had taken all his precautions.”

“What do you mean?”

“When he was told, the night before the assault, that the ammunition was giving out, he ordered one round to be kept in reserve for the battery that played upon the breach—­”

“Well?”

“Don’t you understand?  He meant to fire on the attacking column if it gave any sign of wavering.  He did it once in Spain at the siege of Tarragona.”

There was another scene of war at the opposite end of the town from the breach at the Kasbah.  During the assault all the non-combatant Mussulman population had taken refuge there, crowding and cramming it up to the very edge of the ramparts that crowned the precipices of the Rummel, and either from sheer terror or by dint of the pressure of the crowd, a cascade of human beings fell from the ramparts on to the rocks and terraces of the precipice.  Heaps of corpses, men, women and children, but especially women, were caught here and there, and on one of the heaps an old white-bearded Arab was turning over the dead, one by one, seeking doubtless for some one who was dear to him.