While this furious cannonade was going on, columns of Prussian infantry were moved down towards the Bistritz, with intent to storm the line of villages--Sadowa, Dohalitz, and Dohalicka--on the further side. Shortly before their preparations were complete, the village of Benatek, on the Austrian right, caught fire, and the 7th Prussian Division made a dash to secure it; yet the Austrians were not driven out by the flames, and here, for the first time in the battle, it came to desperate hand-to-hand fighting. But the bloody _mêlée_ here was nothing to what was now mixing up the combatants in the wood of Sadowa, and converting it into a perfect slaughter-house and hell upon earth. Boldly the Prussians advanced upon this village and its wood, plying the rapid needle-gun with awful effect upon the wood’s defenders. But nothing could have exceeded the splendid courage with which the Austrian battalions clung to their cover, and their volleys, supplemented as they were by a truly infernal fire from the batteries behind and above, seemed to mow down whole ranks of their assailants. But neither bullets nor shells could decide the fierce struggle; the bayonet had to be called in to do this. And now ensued most horrible scenes of carnage, which ended, however, before eleven o’clock, in the capture by the Prussians of the aforesaid villages. And no wonder that the Austrians chose to call the tremendous battle after the village and wood where they had made so glorious but ineffectual a stand. [Illustration: “THE PRUSSIANS PUSHED BATTERY AFTER BATTERY INTO ACTION” (_p._ 79)] Moltke himself afterwards related that, while he was watching the progress of events in front of Sadowa wood some roe-deer, startled from their leafy glades by the infernal pother around them, came bounding out and past him; and also how, when he and his suite rode forward a little way along the Lissa road to reconnoitre the Austrian position, he encountered an ownerless ox plodding along, serenely indifferent to the shells that were bursting all around it. Opposite the Sadowa wood on the Lissa heights, the Austrians had planted a most formidable entrenched line of guns, and Moltke afterwards told how he succeeded in getting the King to counter-order a command to storm these entrenched batteries from the front, which could only have ended in the bloodiest of disasters to their assailants. About this time Bismarck, seeing how little headway the Prussians were making, began to be rather apprehensive as to the general result, fearing even that, if the Crown Prince came not up soon, they might, after all, be beaten. But one little incident gave him fresh hope. Taking out his cigar-case he offered a weed to Moltke, who deliberately chose the best of the lot. “Oh,” thought Bismarck to himself, “if Moltke is calm enough to do that, we need have no fear after all.”