CHAPTER XL. CAPTIVITY.
“Three hosts combine to offer sacrifice;
Their tongues prefer strange orisons on high;
Three gaudy standards flout the pale blue skies;
The shouts are France, Spain, Albion—Victory!”
Childe Harold.
Day broke through the stained windows of the church; and the cannonade, so fierce and incessant when I was being carried from the breach, died suddenly away and not a gun was heard. I inquired what might have caused this extraordinary silence, and learned from an hospital-assistant that an hour’s truce had been agreed on between the besiegers and besieged, to permit the wounded to be succoured, and allow helpless wretches who would otherwise have been drowned by the rising of the Urumea, to be carried beyond the influence of the tide, and taken either to the trenches or the town. On this work of mercy Cammaran was absent; and, as Mark Antony and myself were sufficiently recovered to converse, we began to make mutual inquiries touching our present position and future prospects.
“Upon my conscience,” observed the fosterer, “now that we have made the experiment, I can’t say that I can either discover the advantages your honoured father held out by letter, or the fun Mr. Crotty described by ‘word of mouth,’ as attendin’ these same sieges and assaults. To my mind Vittoria was the thing;—beautiful day-light;—your enemy decently before ye—if a man dropped, his comrades stepped over him as if they were treading upon eggs, and he was removed to the rear with every civility, to find a full flask on every body he turned over, if he only had the luck to be settled in a decent neighbourhood. Here—if this be fun, may the Lord deliver us from such fun in future! We are stuck down for two hours shivering in a ditch. Whiz! goes a mine—‘That’s our mine, and the signal,’ says one engineer—‘The divil welcome the news!’ says a second—and off we go blundering in the dark, the Lord knows where. Before we’re well in motion, bang goes another explosion! ‘That’s the enemy’s says another—and not a doubt about that, for up go the forlorn hope, body and bones. ‘Push on, lads,’ cry the officers;—one falls over a d——-d rock, another souses into a pool of water; on one side the French are firing like the divil—on the other, and I suppose, out of personal respect, our own batteries consider it a compliment to knock us over by the dozen. Well, we top the breach at last—and a beautiful prospect it is!—In front, a jump of twenty feet into a blazing house, or you’r shot down right and left, like crows in a wheatfield. “Arrah!” said Mark Antony, “if your father wrote every day in the week, not forgettin’ Sunday, the divil a such a night of pleasure will I put in if I can help it. But, Mister Hector, what do ye suppose they’ll do with us?”