Colonel du Plessis refused to surrender, and, after a severe single combat, was disarmed and made prisoner by Jack Haystone, the lieutenant of our company. Just as he was leaning breathlessly on the sword of the French commandant, a ball shivered the blade in his hand. Haystone fell flat on his face, and at that moment a French grenadier, despite the entreaties of Du Plessis, was about to bayonet him, when Jack exclaimed in French, which he spoke fluently,—
"Hold! I have a favour to ask."
"Say it," said the soldier, raising his threatening weapon.
"If you will stab me, let it be in the breast, that I may die at once, and lest my body be found with a dishonourable wound."
"Rise, mon capitaine—I am one of the old Régiment de Turenne!" said the grenadier proudly and sullenly, as he flung down his musket.
The scene about the shattered gate as day dawned was revolting. The dead and wounded lay there in literal heaps, and among the former was my poor friend Jack Joyce, the marine, who had been shot through the lungs. In one place where a large shell had exploded I counted about twenty dead men all huddled together.
Elsewhere, I saw that many of the wounded retained the attitudes they had assumed when death-shots struck them. Here lay a man reclined against a bastion, with a handless arm upraised; there lay another whose head and breast had been torn to pieces by a shower of canister. Close by was an officer with his handkerchief stuffed into his breast, and drenched with the blood of a wound from which the last life-drops were oozing, as his eyelids drooped and his eyes glazed mournfully over. Across a heap of bodies, a mustachoed grenadier of the old 37th, or King Louis's, lay on his back; the left hand yet grasped the musket, and in his clenched teeth was the half-bitten cartridge, the black powder of which was mingled with the blood and foam that left his pallid lips together, matting about his black beard and mustachoes.
Our Scots Fusiliers suffered severely, and lost there many a poor lad who had first heard the drum beaten and the fife blown "for glory" at the village fair, or in the pastoral glen where his father's cottage stood; but now, all gashed and dead, they would hear that fife and drum no more! Amid all this horrible débris, I remember perceiving a French officer, standing a little apart from the prisoners, with his epaulettes in his hands. Lord Kildonan inquired the reason of this.
"To avoid the indignity of having them torn from my shoulders," he replied, haughtily.
"Torn!—by whom?"