TWO:The first charge, however, was not so encouraging. The French made an impetuous onset, and threw the advanced guard of the English into confusion; but the king and his son, the Duke of Cumberland, who commanded on the left, and, like his father, took his stand in the front line, displayed the highest pluck, and inspired their troops with wonderful courage. The tide of battle was quickly turned, and Noailles, from the other side, saw with astonishment and alarm his troops in action contrary to his plans. He returned in all haste to give fresh support to his soldiers, but it was too late. Gallantly as the French fought, the presence of the king and prince on the other side made the English and Hanoverians irresistible. King, and prince, and army all showed an enthusiastic courage and steadiness which bore down everything before them. The dense column of infantry, led on by the king, broke the French ranks, and cut through them with terrible slaughter. Noailles, seeing the havoc, gave a command which completed the disaster. To shield his men, he ordered them to repass the Main; but a word of retreat, in all such cases, is a word of defeat. The retrograde movement produced dismay and disorder; the whole became a precipitate rout. The French were driven in confused masses against the bridges, the bridges were choked up with the struggling throng, and numbers were forced into the river, or jumped in for escape, and were drowned.He believed that he had no ties now, that friendships, the love of woman, and the kiss of children all had missed him, and that his, thenceforth, must be but vain regret. So far as he knew, Felipa had gone away without ever having received his letter. The man he had intrusted it to had been killed in the Aravaypa Ca?on: that he was certain of; and it never entered his head that his papers might have fallen into other hands, and the note have finally been delivered to her. She was leading the sort of life that would most quickly put him entirely out of her mind. He was taking the Washington papers, and he knew. She had gone away, not even sure that he had given her a thought since the night in the Sierra Blanca when Black River had roared through the stillness, and they had been alone in all the wild world. What a weird, mysterious, unearthly scene it had been, quite outside the probabilities of anything he had imagined or contemplated for a single minute. He had never regretted it, though. He believed in impulses, particularly his own.
TWO:
