"Twelve!" sings out the steeple of Glogau; and in grim whisper the word is, "VORWARTS!" and the three-winged avalanche is in motion.
They reach their glacises, their ditches, covered ways, correct as mathematics; tear out chevaux-de-frise, hew down palisades, in the given number of minutes: Swift, ye Regiment's-carpenters; smite your best! Four cannon-shot do now boom out upon them; which go high over their heads, little dreaming how close at hand they are.

The glacis is thirty feet high, of stiff slope, and slippery with frost: no matter, the avalanche, led on by Leopold in person, by Margraf Karl the King's Cousin, by Adjutant Goltz and the chief personages, rushes up with strange impetus; hews down a second palisade; surges in;--Wallis's sentries extinct, or driven to their main guards.

There is a singular fire in the besieging party.

For example, Four Grenadiers,--I think of this First Column, which succeeded sooner, certainly of the Regiment Glasenapp,--four grenadiers, owing to slippery or other accidents, in climbing the glacis, had fallen a few steps behind the general body; and on getting to the top, took the wrong course, and rushed along rightward instead of leftward.

Rightward, the first thing they come upon is a mass of Austrians still ranked in arms; fifty-two men, as it turned out, with their Captain over them.