At five o'clock the general returned; and Colonel Tempe and the chief of his staff were occupied with him, for two hours, in drawing up the specific orders for each corps. Colonel Tempe had not been out, all day; and he therefore offered his horse to Ralph, in order that Ralph's own might be fresh for the next day.
Four staff officers set off in various directions with the dispatches; and Ralph congratulated himself upon having been upon the ground he was now traversing once before that day as, even with that previous acquaintance, it was hard work to find the way through the darkness, from the snow altering the general appearance and apparent distance of each object. Thanks, however, to his ride of the morning, he reached the various corps to which he was dispatched without any serious mistakes in his way; and got back to headquarters by eleven o'clock.
Tim was waiting up for him.
"Sure, your honor, and it's a mighty cold night. I've got a pot of coffee on the boil in the stables."
"Thank you, Tim. I will just go in and make my report to the general, and then go off to bed. Bring the coffee into my room. We shall be up early, for we fight tomorrow."
"Do we, now?" Tim said, admiringly. "And it's about time; for we should be all frozen into skeletons, if we were to wait here doing nothing much longer. Bad luck to the weather, says I."
At ten o'clock the next morning the French troops were in motion, the objects of their attack being the villages of Guillonville, Terminiers, and Conier. The country was extremely flat and, for an hour, they saw no bodies of the enemy. A few videttes, only, were seen. These galloped off hastily, the moment they caught sight of the heavy masses of the French debouching from the wood. Ralph was riding, with the rest of the staff, behind the general.
"That is Terminiers," Colonel Tempe said, pointing to a house or two at a distance, on the plain.
As he spoke, a puff of smoke came from the houses.
"There is the first shell," was the general exclamation.