At last the Russians brought up an overwhelming mass of artillery, which opened on the defenders and so played on the slopes behind them that it would have been impossible to bring up reinforcements, even were there any to bring; but all were engaged. Under cover of this fire, six thousand fresh troops were hurled against the remnants of the Guards, less than eight hundred strong at the beginning of the fight; and, the fog again lifting, the colonel of the Grenadiers saw the columns upon columns of flat-capped, white-faced soldiery, with their close-cropped bullet-heads, and their high cheek-bones, throwing up their right shoulders to outflank him. He knew the Sandbag Battery was useless to him, and he moved his men so as to form his line to meet the Russians.
Just then over the crest came a long line of bearskins. Jack saw them as quickly as any one.
‘Hallo, Will,’ he cried, ‘what troops are those?’
A sergeant of Grenadiers answered that question. ‘They’re the Coldstreams, sonny’ he said; ‘now we’ll show these long-gowned putty-faces’—alluding to the Russians’ greatcoats, which reached to their feet—‘what stuff the Guards are made of.’
The ‘long gowns,’ finding the Sandbag Battery deserted, had already rushed in with wild yells of delight. This sight made the Grenadiers chafe.
‘Boys,’ said the sergeant who had just spoken to Jack and Will, ‘are we going to let the Coldstreams get back the battery? Who’ll follow me? The Grenadiers have held it and they’ll keep it.’
With a wild cheer a hundred of them dashed down, bayoneting the Russians; and, before the Coldstreams came up, for the seventh time the Sandbag Battery was retaken. Neither Jack nor Will had followed the impetuous sergeant; but they took part in the forward movement which presently set the Okhotsk and Selinghinsk battalions reeling down the hill. And so the fight went on; but slowly the force of thousands against hundreds began to tell, and though every man in the British force was a hero, he could not maintain for ever a struggle against odds ten to one. Russians seemed to spring up on all sides; and, though the earth was cumbered with their dead and wounded, in countless hordes they still came on.
It presently became imperative that the Guards and the remnants of the 49th and 41st should receive reinforcements. The Duke of Cambridge himself had gone some time before to find men to come to the assistance of his beloved Guards; but not a man had arrived.
A desperate attack had just been beaten off, in which Will had received a blow on the head from the butt-end of a rifle which had laid him senseless for a few minutes.
Jack was kneeling beside his injured comrade when a mounted officer tapped his shoulder with his blood-stained sword.