[CHAPTER XIV]
THE LAST BULLETIN
Meanwhile Roland and his men, and those who had gone into the town to join him, having cherished for a time the hope that they were to be supported, were at last forced to the conviction that they had been abandoned. The shouts of victory which had answered their own became fainter and fainter, and then died away. Then the volleys of musketry and cannon gradually grew fainter, until they had ceased entirely in the course of an hour. Amid the other sounds which encompassed him, Roland even thought that he heard the sound of the drums and trumpets sounding and beating the retreat.
Then, as we have said, all these sounds ceased.
Then, like a tide rising upon all sides at once, from all points of the compass, the little troop was assailed by English, Turks, Mamelukes, Arnauts, Albanians—the entire garrison, in short, of some eight thousand men.
Roland formed his little troop into a square, one side of which he backed against a mosque, thus converting it into a fortress, and there, after making them swear to defend themselves to the death against these enemies from whom they knew they could expect no quarter, they waited with levelled bayonets.
The Turks, full of overweening confidence in their cavalry as usual, dashed upon the little troop with such violence that, although the double volley of the French laid low over sixty men and horses, those who came up behind rode over their bodies and dashed upon the bayonets of the still smoking guns.
But there they were forced to stop. The second rank had time to reload and fire at close quarters. They had no choice but to fall back, and as they could not again cross the heap of corpses, they sought to flee to the right and left. Two terrible volleys accompanied their flight and cut them down in swaths. But they returned with all the greater desperation.
Then a frightful struggle ensued, a regular hand-to-hand encounter, in which the Turkish horsemen, defying the murderous volleys, rushed up to the very points of the French bayonets, to discharge their pistols at their adversaries.