"Heard about Grant?" asked Canning, who was standing next to him.
"No: which Grant?" replied the Colonel absently.
"Oh, not General Grant! Colonel Grant. He did send the information of the French massing on Charleroi on the 15th - the very fullest information, down to the last detail. It's just come to hand!"
"Just come to hand?" repeated Audley. "How the devil did it take three days to reach us?"
"Ask General Dornberg," said Canning. "It was sent to him, at Mons, and he, if you please, coolly sent it back to Grant, saying that it didn't convince him that the French really intended anything serious! Grant then despatched the information direct to the Duke, but of course, by that time, we were on the march. Good story, ain't it?"
"Dornberg ought to be shot! Who the devil is he to question Grant's Intelligence?"
"My very words," remarked Gordon, who had come up to them. He glanced towards the French lines, and said, with a yawn: "Don't seem to be in a hurry to come to grips with us, do they?"
The words had scarcely been uttered when the flash of cannonfire flickered all along the ridge, and the silence that had lain over the field for over an hour was rent by the boom of scores of great guns trained on the Allied position. The scream of a horse, hit by roundshot, sounded from a troop of artillery close at hand; a cannonball buried itself in the soft ground not three paces from where Colonel Audley was standing; and sent up a shower of mud. His horse reared, snorting; he gentled it, shouting to Gordon above the thunder of the guns: "What do you call this?"
"Damned noisy!" retorted Gordon.
The flashes and the puffs of smoke continued all along the ridge; suddenly a deafening crash, reverberating down the Allied line, answered the challenge of the French cannons, and a cheer went up: the English batteries had come into action.