Raising his head to a level with the terrace wall—the second terrace was low—he could see the piles of sand-bags on the first terrace only twenty feet away and an old house that belonged to the garden. The location appealed to him as his glance swept over plain and mountains glistening with dew. It must be glorious to come down from the veranda at daybreak or day's end to look at the flowers at your feet and the horizon in the distance.
"Could little White Liver sleep away from home and mamma? Did he long for mamma to tuck him among the goose feathers, with a sweet biscuit in his paddy?" inquired Pilzer awakening.
Hugo looked around at Pilzer in his quizzical fashion.
"Jake, you are unnecessarily uprooting an aster with the toe of your boot," he said.
Pilzer had a torrent of abuse ready to his tongue's end when Fracasse interrupted with a hoarse, whispered warning:
"Silence, Pilzer! You talk too much."
Now the irascible Pilzer had a further grudge against Hugo for having made him the object of a reprimand.
"You!" he whispered, when the captain's back was turned, calling Hugo a foul name.
This cut through even Hugo's philosophy and the blood went in a hot rush to his cheeks; but he slipped on his pack, as the others were doing, and readjusted his cartridge-box. Word was passed to make ready for another rush, and soon the men knew that yesterday was not part of the hideous nightmare which had kept their legs quivering mechanically, as in the charge, while they slept, but that the nightmare was a continuing reality and the peace of morning a dream.
Under cover of the rain of shell fire on Dellarme's position, already described, they mounted the wall of the second terrace and ran to the wall of the first terrace. They had expected to suffer terribly, but passed safely underneath a sheet of bullets that caught other sections of their regiment on the lower terraces. Over their heads were the muzzles of the Browns' rifles, blazing toward the road, while in the direction of the tower they saw the first charge of another regiment melting like snow under sprays of flame. They could not fire at Dellarme's men and Dellarme's men could not fire at them without leaning over the parapet. They could not go ahead. There was no room to their rear, for the reserves behind the third terrace had rushed up to the second terrace; those behind the fourth to the third; and still others across the road to the fourth, in successive waves.