It was the final effort; the remnant of the assailants hurried off, the regiments mobbed together, to seek shelter in the trenches; marking, unhappily and too plainly, the lines of the advance and retreat with the bodies of the dead and dying. The French fire ceased; and although the British batteries opened with redoubled violence on the enemy’s defences to cover the retirement of the shattered columns, several of the gallant defenders of the breach braved the storm, to remove the wounded within the town, and save them from the indiscriminating destruction which the British artillery poured alike on friend and foe.
For a minute I was unconscious of what was passing; and when memory returned, I was in the act of being turned over by a French soldier, who found, that from hwing fallen on my face, my present position was not exactly favourable for his intended operations. I looked wildly round; several men in blue uniforms were examining the fallen soldiers, who lay thickly on the summit of the breach as lewes in autumn. Different objects influenced the examination: some were seeking plunder—others, on a nobler errand, were separating the wounded from the dead, to remove the former out of fire, and obtain for them surgical assistance. As the grenadier rolled me over, an officer stepped forward and inquired if I were “living or dead?” The voice was perfectly familiar; with my cuff I wiped away the blood, which, trickling from my forehead, had partially prevented me from looking at the speaker before. “Is that Cammaran?” I muttered, as I caught a glance of his well-remembered features.
[Original]
“Ha!” exclaimed the Frenchman,—“‘my name! Sacre!—who have we here? Baise his head, Antoine. By heaven!—the very man on earth I would shed my heart’s blood to save!” Next moment he was kneeling at my side—and held me gently in his arms, until I was lifted by four soldiers from the ground, and removed carefully from the breach and out of the range of fire.
“Are you much hurt, my friend?” inquired the gallant Frenchman. “And where is your companion, my brave deliverer?”
“Alas!” I replied, “I fear that he is lost to me. He fell half way up the breach—and—”
‘Ere my reply was given, Cammaran, after directing the party to bear me to a neighbouring church which the French had converted into an hospital, rushed to the breach again. Calling on a soldier to follow, he descended the ruins of the broken wall, and, among a heap of dead and dying, commenced looking for the object of his search. It was a daring, an almost desperate attempt; for, irritated at the failure of the storming parties, every gun in battery was madly turned against the breach and curtain, and showers of round and grape-shot splintered against the unbroken masonry, or knocked the rubbish wildly about, occasioning double danger to all within its reach. Undismayed, the gallant Frenchman persevered; and to his unfeigned delight, in a man who had raised himself upon one elbow and was gazing despondingly around, he recognised the person he risked so much danger to discover—his former camarado—the fosterer.
With the assistance of the grenadier who accompanied him, Mark Antony was carried safely from the breach; and in a few minutes after my wounds had been carefully dressed, I had the happiness to find my foster brother placed on a mattress beside my own, and hear the French surgeon, on a hasty examination, announce to Captain Cammaran the gratifying intelligence, that Mark Antony was “not past praying for” yet, but, with moderate good luck, might still survive, to do “the state some service,” and figure in another breach.