All seemed still—horribly so—all save the beating of his heart and the rustling of the regimental colours, which the night wind stirred, and which, in virtue of his rank, were always lodged in his apartment.
"Was that a warning?—bah! And the cup of wine!" he exclaimed. "By this time to-morrow night," he reflected, "I may have been again in battle. I may be safe and scatheless, or dreadfully mutilated and beggared for life, or by this hour—dreadful thought, I may be in eternity! I may have learned the secret of life and death, of existence and extinction, and this body may be lying stark, stripped, and bloody, with its glazed eyes fixed on the stars of heaven! Bah! another glass of wine, then!"
Cosmo slept but little that night, and it was with a stern and gloomy foreboding of evil that he saw the day dawn stealing over the dark grey sea and the lofty citadel of Corunna.
CHAPTER XIX.
THE BATTLE OF CORUNNA.
"Marked you yon moving mass, the dark array
Of yon deep column wind its sullen way?
Low o'er its barded brow, the plumed boast,
Glittering and gay, of France's wayward host,
With gallant bearing wings its venturous flight,
Cowers o'er its kindred bands, and waves them to the fight."
LORD GRENVILLE.
The army was now rid of every incumbrance, and all was prepared for the withdrawal of the fighting men as soon as darkness should again set in, and four o'clock in the afternoon of the 16th was the time fixed by Moore for doing so; but lo! at two o'clock on that anxious day a messenger came from Sir John Hope to state that the whole French army, then in position on the heights above Corunna, was getting under arms—that a general movement was taking place along the entire line, twenty thousand strong!
"Stand to your arms—unpile, unpile!" was the cry from right to left.
Long ere this, the whole British army had been in position.
Sir David Baird held the right with his division, while Sir John Hope's was formed across the main road, with its left towards the Mero river; but the whole of this combined line was exposed to, and almost enfiladed by, a brigade of French guns posted on the rocks above the little village of Elvina.