Outcries shriller and shriller are heard, in some way wonderful, confused, as if not triumph but terror rings through them.
The fire at the gate stops in a moment, as if some one had cut it off with a knife. Groups of Sakovich’s cavalry are flying at break-neck speed from the left flank to the main road. On the right flank the infantry halt, and then, instead of advancing, begin to withdraw to the willows. “What is this?” cried Billevich.
Meanwhile the answer comes from that grove out of which Sakovich had issued; and now emerge from it men, horses, squadrons, horsetail standards, sabres, and march—no, they fly like a storm, and not like a storm,—like a tempest! In the bloody gleams of the fire they are as visible as a thing on the hand. They are hastening in thousands! The earth seems to flee from beneath them, and they speed on in dense column; one would say that some monster had issued from the oak-grove, and is sweeping across the fields to the village to swallow it. The air flies before them, driven by the impetus; with them go terror and ruin. They are almost there! Now the attack! Like a whirlwind they scatter Sakovich’s men.
“O God! O great God!” cries Billevich, in bewilderment; “these are ours! That must be Babinich!”
“Babinich!” roared every throat after him.
“Babinich! Babinich!” called terrified voices in Sakovich’s party.
And all the enemy’s cavalry wheel to the right, to escape toward the infantry. The fence is broken with a sharp crash, under the pressure of horses’ breasts. The pasture is filled with the fleeing; but the new-comers, on their shoulders already, cut, slash,—cut without resting, cut without pity. The whistling of sabres, cries, groans, are heard. Pursuers and pursued fall upon the infantry, overturn, break, and scatter them. At last the whole mass rolls on toward the river, disappears in the brush, clambers out on the opposite bank. Men are visible yet; the chasing continues, with cutting and cutting. They recede. Their sabres flash once again; then they vanish in bushes, in space, and in darkness.
Billevich’s infantry began to withdraw from the gate and the houses, which needed no further defence. The cavalry stood for a time in such wonder that deep silence reigned in the ranks; and only when the flaming house had fallen with a crash was some voice heard on a sudden,—
“In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, the storm has gone by!”
“Not a foot will come out alive from that hunt!” said another voice.