To the credit of Prussian intelligence be it recorded, that this pantomimic hint was at once taken and both sides went to dinner.
The fighting colonel, however, remained in the battery, and kept a detachment of his gunners employed cooling the guns and repairing the touch-holes. He ordered his two cutlets and his glass of water into the battery.
Meantime, the enemy fired a single gun at long intervals, as much as to say, “We had the last word.”
Let trenches be cut ever so artfully, there will be a little space exposed here and there at the angles. These spaces the men are ordered to avoid, or whip quickly across them into cover.
Now the enemy had just got the range of one of these places with their solitary gun, and had already dropped a couple of shot right on to it. A camp follower with a tray, two cutlets, and a glass of water, came to this open space just as a puff of white smoke burst from the bastion. Instead of instantly seeking shelter till the shot had struck, he, in his inexperience, thought the shot must have struck, and all danger be over. He stayed there mooning instead of pelting under cover: the shot (eighteen-pound) struck him right on the breast, knocked him into spilikins, and sent the mutton cutlets flying.
The human fragments lay quiet, ten yards off. But a soldier that was eating his dinner kicked it over, and jumped up at the side of “Death’s Alley” (as it was christened next minute), and danced and yelled with pain.
“Haw! haw! haw!” roared a soldier from the other side of the alley.
“What is that?” cried Sergeant La Croix. “What do you laugh at, Private Cadel?” said he sternly, for, though he was too far in the trench to see, he had heard that horrible sound a soldier knows from every other, the “thud” of a round shot striking man or horse.
“Sergeant,” said Cadel, respectfully, “I laugh to see Private Dard, that got the wind of the shot, dance and sing, when the man that got the shot itself does not say a word.”
“The wind of the shot, you rascal!” roared Private Dard: “look here!” and he showed the blood running down his face.