The Spanish Bride Read Online Free PDF

struggling red-coats.
    He was thrust on to the foot of a ladder. Here, on the dead ground, a man lay crumpled up, with his hands pressed to his chest. The leaping flames in the ditch showed Harry a face he knew. It was livid, but the eyes were still intelligent.
    ‘Smith! Help me up the ladder! I’m done for!’
    ‘Colonel Macleod! Oh no, dear fellow!’ Harry cried flinging an arm round him. ‘I am, I tell you! Be quick!’
    Half-supporting, half-carrying him, Harry got him up the ladder. He was groaning, but managed to say: ‘The 4th are mingled with ours!’ ‘I know it! It’s that cursed inundation! There, my poor friend, God be with you! I must go back!’
    He left the wounded man, and swarmed once more down the ladder. The 4th division, finding the trench dug below the Trinidad bastion impassable, had instinctively swerved to the left, and were almost inextricably mixed with the men of the Light division. The most appalling confusion reigned; a lane of fire now separated the attackers from La Trinidad; little parties of troops, rallying round isolated officers, again and again charged up the slope of the breach, only to fall back before the ghastly chevaux-de-frise at the top. Mistaking an unfinished ravelin for the breach in the curtain wall, a heroic band charged up it, only to find a waste of earthworks lying still between them and the wall of the town.
    Harry fought his way to where Barnard, by superhuman endeavour, was separating his own division from the 4th. The Light fell back to the ladders, overwhelmed by a fire no troops could withstand. Harry, almost swept off his feet, saw the face of little Frere of the 43rd regiment, ghastly in the glare of the fire-balls. They were forced on together to the ladders. ‘Let’s throw them down! The fellows shan’t get out!’ shouted Harry.
    A wild-eyed, tattered private behind him heard, and roared: ‘Damn your eyes, if you do, we’ll bayonet you!’
    Harry’s sash was loose, and got caught in the ladder. An angry growl, and the gleam of the threatened bayonet set him insanely laughing. He tore his sash free, and went on up the ladder, thrust forward by the irresistible surge of men behind him.
    At the top, the surviving officers were re-forming their men, who, indeed, wished only for a breathing-space before plunging again into the ditch below. A brigade of Portuguese of the 4th division came up at the double, and went down into the ditch with an intrepidity that put renewed courage into the Light division.
    Again and again the troops struggled through the reeking ditch to the slope of the breach, and up it to the defences at the top. “Why don’t you come into Badajos?” mocked the French.
    More than two hours passed in this dreadful slaughter. The dead lay thick by the breach, and were trodden underfoot amongst the burning debris in the ditch. Between the attacks, which were launched now by dwindling bands of soldiers rallying round any officer who still survived, and could still lead his men, the troops stood immobile, enduring doggedly the fire from the ramparts. There was no thought of retreat; a sullen fury possessed the men; the horrors of the assault, which at first had shocked, now aroused only the most primitive instincts in even the mildest breasts. Humanity seemed to have deserted the eyes that glared up under the leathern peaks of shakos to the ramparts; the fire-balls and the rockets fitfully illumined faces that were rendered unrecognizable not so much by the smoke that had blackened them as by the rage that wiped out every other emotion, and transformed good-humoured countenances into strange masks of animal hatred. When the hail of missiles drove the besiegers to the ladders, they went up them only to re-form, and come on again. The main columns of the two divisions had been pouring reinforcements into the ditch for over an hour; Harry Smith, scorched, filthy with mud and blood, but untouched either by musketry or shell-fire, thought that