But behind the thunder of the guns there rose a sharper, shriller noise, whirring and rattling, the wildest, jauntiest, most stirring kind of sound.
"It's the _pas-de-charge!_" cried an officer.

"They mean business this time!" And as he spoke we saw a strange thing.

A Frenchman, dressed as an officer of hussars, came galloping towards us on a little bay horse.
He was screeching "_Vive le roi! Vive le roi!_" at the pitch of his lungs, which was as much as to say that he was a deserter, since we were for the king and they for the emperor.

As he passed us he roared out in English, "The Guard is coming! The Guard is coming!" and so vanished away to the rear like a leaf blown before a storm.

At the same instant up there rode an aide-de-camp, with the reddest face that ever I saw upon mortal man.
"You must stop 'em, or we are done!" he cried to General Adams, so that all our company could hear him.
"How is it going ?" asked the general.
"Two weak squadrons left out of six regiments of heavies," said he, and began to laugh like a man whose nerves are overstrung.
"Perhaps you would care to join in our advance?
Pray consider yourself quite one of us," said the general, bowing and smiling as if he were asking him to a dish of tea.
"I shall have much pleasure," said the other, taking off his hat; and a moment afterwards our three regiments closed up, and the brigade advanced in four lines over the hollow where we had lain in square, and out beyond to the point whence we had seen the French army.
There was little of it to be seen now, only the red belching of the guns flashing quickly out of the cloudbank, and the black figures--stooping, straining, mopping, sponging--working like devils, and at devilish work.
But through the cloud that rattle and whirr rose ever louder and louder, with a deep-mouthed shouting and the stamping of thousands of feet.
Then there came a broad black blurr through the haze, which darkened and hardened until we could see that it was a hundred men abreast, marching swiftly towards us, with high fur hats upon their heads and a gleam of brasswork over their brows.