"I dismounted and put my shoulder to the waggons; but the general, finding that the bridge could not be cleared quickly enough, leapt from his horse, and he too came to help us. In an instant he did more single-handed with his herculean strength than the twenty-five of us together. When I say twenty-five I exaggerate; the Austrian bullets had made their gaps, and five or six of our men were disabled. Fortunately about sixty foot-soldiers now came up to our assistance at a run. They distributed themselves on both sides of the bridge, and opened hot fire, which soon began to distress the Austrians, and to prevent them from aiming straight. It ended in our overturning the carts into the torrent--an easy matter, as the bridge had no parapet. "Scarcely was the passage free than the general leapt to his horse and, without waiting to see if he were being followed or not, he dashed down the village street leading from the bridge. "In vain did I shout after him, 'But, General, there are only the two of us!' "He did not hear, or rather, he would not hear. Suddenly we found ourselves face to face with a platoon of cavalry, upon which the general fell; and, as the men were all in line, with one single back-handed blow of his sabre he killed the quartermaster, gashed the soldier horribly who was next to him, and with the point of the weapon wounded a third. The Austrians not conceiving it possible that two men would have the audacity to charge them thus, wheeled to the right-about; but the horses stumbled, and horses and riders fell pell-mell. Our dragoons came up at this moment with the foot-soldiers astride behind them, and the whole of the Austrian platoon was captured. "I paid the general a compliment upon his sabre blow, telling him I had never seen its equal. "'That is because you are a greenhorn,' he replied, 'but do your best not to get killed, and before the finish of the campaign you will have seen plenty like it.' "We had taken a hundred prisoners. But he soon descried a considerable body of cavalry climbing a mountain at the other side of the village. No sooner did the general see this body than he pointed them out to his dragoons, and, leaving the prisoners to the care of the infantry, he set off with his fifty men to pursue the Austrians. "The general and I were so splendidly mounted that we gained rapidly on our soldiers. The Austrians believing that they were being pursued by the whole of our army, fled at top speed. And again it came about that the general and I found ourselves alone. "At length, when we had reached an inn, at a point where the road curved, I pulled up, and said to him: