Two other battalions, the nineteenth and thirty-seventh, with the volunteers who had joined them, pressed forward with their scaling-ladders. A hot fire was opened upon them, but in vain; they planted their ladders against the wall and ran up the rounds. To turn them back was impossible; the only thing remaining was to shoot them down as fast as they climbed the ladders.
Leading the way on one of the ladders was Ödön Baradlay, his drawn sword in his hand. A detachment of the Italian regiment was defending that part of the wall, and the defence was well maintained. It was a grim task climbing the ladders in the face of a deadly fire of sharpshooters, and the air was filled with the groans of those that fell. Theirs was a twofold death, shot down as they were by the enemy, and then falling, only to be caught on the bayonets of their own comrades behind them.
Ödön mounted his ladder as coolly as if he had been climbing an Egyptian pyramid on a wager to show himself proof against giddiness. Looking up, he could see a soldier standing at the head of the ladder, half concealed by the breastworks and holding his rifle ready to shoot. That soldier was his opponent in this fearful duel. Reaching the middle of the ladder, he suddenly heard himself hailed from below. The voice was a familiar one.
"Aha, patron, I'm here too!"
Ödön recognised Mausmann's call. The daring gymnast was climbing up the under side of the ladder and making every effort to overtake his leader, eager to gain the top before him. With the agility of a monkey, he passed Ödön and swung himself around on the front of the ladder over the other's head, shouting down to him triumphantly:
"Don't think you are going to get ahead of me, patron. I am captain here, and you are only a private."
Ödön was eager to recover his lead, but the gallant youth only pressed him back with one hand, saying, as he did so:
"Let me go first, patron; I have no one in the whole world to care if I am killed."
With that he sprang upward, two rounds at a time. The soldier above brought his rifle to his shoulder and aimed downward. Mausmann saw him, and shouted tauntingly:
"Take good aim, macaroni, or you might hit me."