“It is an assault,” said the officer, pale with emotion, handing his glass to the sailor.
Cossacks and officers on horseback went along the road, preceding the commander-in-chief in his carriage, accompanied by his suite. Their faces expressed the painful emotion of expectation.
“It is impossible that it is taken!” said the officer on horseback.
“God in heaven!—the flag! Look now!” cried the other, choked by emotion, turning away from the glass. “The French flag is in the Malakoff mamelon!”
“Impossible!”
XXIV.
Koseltzoff the elder, who had had the time during the night to win and lose again all his winnings, including even the gold-pieces sewn in the seams of his uniform, was sleeping, towards morning, in the barracks of the fifth bastion, a heavy but deep sleep, when the sinister cry rang out, repeated by different voices, “The alarm!”
“Wake up, Mikhaïl Semenovitch! It is an assault!” a voice cried in his ear.
“A school-boy trick,” he replied, opening his eyes without believing the news; but when he perceived an officer, pale, agitated, running wildly from one corner to another, he understood all, and the thought that he might perhaps be taken for a coward refusing to join his company in a critical moment, gave him such a violent start that he rushed out and ran straight to find his soldiers. The cannon were dumb, but the musket-firing was at its height, and the bullets were whistling, not singly but in swarms, just as the flights of little birds pass over our heads in autumn. The whole of the place occupied by the battalion the evening before was filled with smoke, with cries, and with curses. On his way he met a crowd of soldiers and wounded, and thirty paces farther on he saw his company brought to a stand against a wall.
“The Swartz redoubt is occupied,” said a young officer. “All is lost!”