The Chevalier met him as he plunged once more into the smoke, the thunder of the captains and the shouting. “The tide has turned!” the young man cried, “the Austrians and the Dutch have retired. It is only the English now. This way, Vicomte, this way!”
The Maréchal had grasped the fact. Dutch and Austrians had made a second effort on their right and centre and it had failed. The English were alone, and with consummate coolness he played his last card. Guns, horses, men, are feverishly brought up from Fontenoy, and while the Irish brigade, six battalions strong, men once British subjects but now fighting for France, Jacobites, Papists, loyal and disloyal alike, fugitives, and renegades, gentlemen, thieves, adventurers, and footpads—men fighting not for honour or victory but for their necks—are hurled at the red lines, the broken infantry are rallied, the cavalry re-formed. The gayest libertine in France, the Duc de Richelieu, gathers the scattered companies. The King and the Dauphin are rallying the Maison du Roi.
See! the English are falling back. With sullen reluctance the order has been given—with sullen reluctance it is obeyed. Retire they must or die here to the last man. Step by step, yard by yard, reduced to half its numbers, the red column with drums still beating just when victory was in its grasp slowly halts—fires—retires. As they had advanced, so do they retreat, those English dogs, shoulder to shoulder, files beautifully dressed, in all the cool majesty of the parade ground, firing those terrible volleys to the end.
Led by the King to the charge once again does the Maison du Roi spur furiously to break them; once again as the island rocks hurl back the invading waves do the English columns rend them asunder. Not all the cavalry and infantry of France can mar or shake that glorious red line. And we can do no more. Let them go. Into the smoke and down the blood-stained slopes they glide and vanish. It is enough—enough!
The battle is over. We have won—yes, we have won, for the camp and the entrenchments are once more ours and Tournay will fall. Fontenoy is and will remain a victory for France, but 6000 English dead and wounded and 10,000 French piled on the crest and on these awful ridges bear witness to what a victory it has been. And we French noblemen who have lived through the morning hours of May 11th may well take off our hats to the English and Hanoverian infantry who unsupported—nay, deserted by their allies—marched into a French camp across an open plain and all but wrested victory from twice their numbers. To-morrow the bells of Notre Dame and a hundred churches will ring for the success of Fontenoy, but to-night the British drums that beat on these slopes will beat in our ears and for ever through the centuries their deathless challenge to the homage of chivalry in the hearts of all who call themselves soldiers. No; we do not grudge them their triumph, for there are things finer than victory, and that honour is theirs.
André, marvellously untouched, found St. Benôit lying by his dead horse half under the wheel of a dismounted gun on the top of the slope. This was where the English Guards had turned to bay for the last time, when the final furious charge that had failed had been made by the Maison du Roi. St. Benôit had a bullet through one arm and a bayonet thrust in his thigh, but thank God he still lived, and André carried him to his coach with the help of the Chevalier, who with a tender care strange to his pert insouciance was doing what he could for the fallen.
“He will live!” said the Chevalier as they returned to the spot to seek for others, and plenty there were heaped amongst the Swiss Guards and the Gardes Françaises, nobles, his friends and comrades, in all the gay bravery of their blood-stained ruffles and haughty uniforms, and mostly dead. The strippers of the camp were already at work on their ghastly trade.
“What is it?” asked the Chevalier suddenly, for André had uttered a cry of pain. Only an English officer of the 1st Foot Guards, fresh-coloured, smiling, handsome, lying at his feet amidst a score of common English rank and file. His sword was not drawn, but in his hand was a small cane. He had been re-dressing the line of his company as they had halted to receive and repulse that last charge.
“It is Captain Statham,” André explained. “I knew him in England, and—” he checked himself to stoop. “Yes, he is dead. It is strange.”