In their later charges the French brought up some light batteries to the crest of the British ridge, and opened fire at point-blank distance on the solid squares. The front of the 1st Life Guards was broken by a fire of this sort, and Gronow relates how the cuirassiers made a dash at the opening. Captain Adair leaped into the gap, and killed with one blow of his sword a French officer who had actually entered the square! The British gunners always ran swiftly out when the French cavalry recoiled down the slope, remanned their guns, and opened a murderous fire on the broken French. Noting this, an officer of cuirassiers drew up his horse by a British battery, and while his men drew off, stood on guard with his single sword, and kept the gunners from remanning it till he was shot by a British infantryman. Directly the broken cavalry was clear of the ridge, the French guns opened furiously on the British lines, and men dropped thick and fast. The cavalry charges, as a matter of fact, were welcomed as affording relief from the intolerable artillery fire. For two hours 15,000 French horsemen rode round the British squares, and again and again the ridge and rear slope of the British position was covered with lancers, cuirassiers, light and heavy dragoons, and hussars, with the British guns in their actual possession; and yet not a square was broken! A gaily dressed regiment of the Duke of Cumberland's (Hanoverian) Hussars watched the Homeric contest from the British rear, and Lord Uxbridge, as the British cavalry were completely exhausted by their dashes at the French horsemen as they broke through the chequer of the squares, rode up to them and called on them to follow him in a charge. The colonel declined, explaining that his men owned their own horses, and could not expose them to any risk of damage! These remarkable warriors, in fact, moved in a body, and with much expedition, off the field, Seymour (Lord Uxbridge's aide) taking their colonel by the collar and shaking him as a dog shakes a rat, by way of expressing his view of the performance. VI. THE FIGHT OF THE GUNNERS "Three hundred cannon-mouths roar'd loud; And from their throats with flash and cloud Their showers of iron threw." --SCOTT.