Many shots missed him, as the men fired with fixed bayonets, when suddenly he turned his vengeance on me, and checking his horse for a second, cut at my head with his sword. Stooping, I avoided his attack, but shot his horse in the head. Heavily the animal tumbled forward, with its nose between its knees; and as the rider fell from the saddle and his cap flew off, I recognised Volhonski. A dozen of Fusileers had their bayonets at his throat, when I struck them up with my sword, and interceding, took him prisoner.
"Allow me, if taken, to preserve my sword," said he, in somewhat broken English.
"No, no; by ----, no! disarm him, Captain Hardinge," cried several of our men, who had already shot more than one Russian officer when in the act of killing the wounded.
He smiled with proud disdain, and snapping the blade across his knee, threw the fragments from him.
"Though it is a disgrace alike for Russian to retreat or yield, I yield myself to you, Captain Hardinge," said he in French, and presenting his hand; but ere I could take it, I felt a shot strike me on the back part of the head. Luckily it was a partially spent one, though I knew it not then.
A sickness, a faintness, came over me, and I had a wild and clamorous fear that all was up with me then; but I strove to ignore the emotion, to brandish my sword, to shout to my company, "Come on, men, come on!" to carry my head erect, soldierlike and proudly. Alas for human nerves and poor human nature! My voice failed me; I reeled. "Spare me, blessed God!" I prayed, then fell forward on my face, and felt the rush of our own men, as they swept forward in the charge to the front; and then darkness seemed to steal over my sight, and unconsciousness over every other sense, and I remembered no more.
So while I lay senseless there, the tide of battle turned in the valley, and re-turned again. But not till General Canrobert, with three regiments of fiery little Zouaves, five of other infantry, and a strong force of artillery, made a furious attack on the Russian flank, with all his drums beating the pas de charge. The issue of the battle was then no longer doubtful.
The Russians wavered and broke, and with a strange wail of despair, such as that they gave at Alma, when they feared that the angel of light had left them, they fled towards Sebastopol, trodden down like sheep by the French and British soldiers, all mingled pell-mell, in fierce and vengeful pursuit. By three in the afternoon all was over, and we had won another victory.
But our losses were terrible. Seven of our generals were killed or wounded; we had two thousand five hundred and nine officers and men killed, wounded, or missing; but more than fourteen thousand Russians lay on the ground which had been by both armies so nobly contested, and of these five thousand were killed.