gray line he carried them, followed by the whole regiment. Firing, cutting and stabbing with their bayonets they broke straight through the Confederates and after a hand-to-hand fight, drove them out of their position. They carried the boy, still clinging to the colors, on their shoulders to their colonel and to the end of his life Benjamin remembered the moment when the colonel shook hands with him before the cheering regiment as the climax of the greatest day of his life. CHAPTER V THE CHARGE OF ZAGONYI In battle the charge is the climax. In other kinds of fighting men have a certain amount of shelter and respite and at long range it makes little difference whether the fighter is strong or weak. In a charge, however, the fighting is hand to hand. As in the days of old, men fight at close grips with their enemy and each one must depend upon his own strength and skill and bravery. There have been three charges in modern battles which have been celebrated over and over again. The first of these was the last desperate charge of the Old Guard at Waterloo. A thin red line of English held a hill which Napoleon, the greatest of modern generals, saw was the keystone of the battle. If that could be taken, the whole arch of the English and Belgium forces would crumble away into defeat. Again and again the French stormed at this hill and each time were driven back by the coolly-waiting deadly ranks of the English. Toward nightfall Napoleon made one last desperate effort. The Old Guard was to him what the great Tenth Legion had been to Julius Cæsar, the best and bravest veterans of his army who boasted that they had never yet been defeated. Calling them up with every last one of his reserves, he ordered a final desperate charge to break the battle center. To the grim drumming of what guns the little general had left, they rushed again up that blood-stained slope in desperate dark masses of unbeaten men. With a storm of cheers, the columns surged up in a vast blue battle-wave which seemed as if it must dash off by its weight the little group of silent, grim defenders. The Englishmen waited and waited and waited until the rushing ranks were almost on them. Then they poured in a volley at such close range that every bullet did the work of two and with a deep English cheer sprang on the broken ranks with their favorite weapon, the bayonet. That great battle-wave broke in a foam of shattered, dying and defeated men and the sunset of that day was the sunset of Napoleon's glory.