The Keepers of the People

1385When they came out on the top of it the din of the fight in the plain, echoing redoubled from the mountain gorges and walls above them, smote on their ears with a splitting clamour. The roaring crash of the guns, the shrieking whistle of shells in the air, the crash of their bursting, the rasping, snapping rattle of the Maxims, and the continuous crackle of rifle-fire racked their ears. They looked down to see the Russian camp lighted dimly by its fires which gave the attacking Varandals the exact goal of their advance, and made the camp a dim target. The Varandals themselves fought in a darkness, out of which there only leapt for a breath the guns when they flashed, and the long lines of men from end to end of which the rifle-fire was running with the regularity of the parade-ground. They seemed to have rushed the Russian outposts with the bayonet, and advanced at a double, the guns and Maxims with them, and when Althea and Ruth reached the top of the tower, they were a quarter of a mile from the Russian camp, and advancing steadily. In their centre ten Maxims kept up an unceasing vicious rattle, and the guns of the two batteries on their right and left crashed out as quickly as they could be loaded, and fired. The dimly-lit Russian camp seemed in utter confusion; and indeed, in the suddenness with which the full strength of the attack had burst upon them, men could not find their companies, officers their commands. Along the front of it a shapeless line of men four or five deep, lying or kneeling, fired wildly into the darkness; behind them a witless crowd ran this way and that, while the pitiless, unceasing hail of bullets dropped them by scores. Only in the rear of it was any semblance of order: there a body of cavalry, a thousand strong, was mounting and forming, only hindered by the shells which the gunners of the Varandal right battery were dropping among them with nice accuracy. When the first line of the Varandals advancing swiftly were already within two hundred yards of the camp, they came riding out of it, and, galloping down between the camp and the palace, dashed upon the Varandal right. The Varandals, as their rifle-flashes showed the watchers on the tower, had formed into ugly, spiky skirmishers’ squares, round which the flood of horsemen surged, a rushing tide round scattered boulders; five or six were swept away; the rest stood, each in its ring of dead horses and men, firing steadily, point blank, with mortal effect. The watchers saw dimly the wave of horsemen pour on towards the battery, and brought up short by a great square formed round the guns. A blaze and crash of rifles seemed their only warning; the front files went down headlong; and the rest dashed on to an impenetrable wall of bayonets. They fell back for a moment, to make another dash; the square fired volley after volley into them from their magazine rifles. Human nature could not endure it; they saw them turn and ride for the camp; each little square firing into them as they passed.