For a moment Harry felt that all was lost. But only for a moment, for in that instant he saw that with his handful of men in line he had the advantage of the troopers debouching two by two from the balustraded drive. Turning to the dragoons at his side he shouted "Charge!" and dashed straight at the enemy. It was in the nick of time. A few seconds later they would have been ready; at this precise moment they were awkwardly placed. Half a dozen men of the nearer file were leading their horses towards the palings; beyond them the armed and mounted men were approaching from the drive, and eight files presented their flank to Harry’s little force of ten. As he charged, the dismounted men scattered like hares before him, and the sixteen armed troopers had barely time to wheel round to meet the onslaught before Harry and his Dutchmen were upon them. All the advantage of impetus and direct attack was with the Dutch. Harry, grasping his sword, came full tilt upon a burly Alsatian. Almost before he had realized it he had passed over the dragoon and his horse, and, parrying a swinging cut from the man behind, had shortened his arm and thrust him through the shoulder. The man dropped his sabre and fell from his horse, which wheeled round and plunged madly through the dismounted men on the farther side. In a trice Harry was through the mellay, and bringing his horse up on its haunches, wrenched it round so that he might take stock of the new situation. He found that the majority of his Dutch troopers had stuck close to him, and with the readiness of old campaigners were already wheeling round to face the discomfited enemy. A dozen men were on the ground, including the portly colonel; several horses were careering wildly through the small open space, impeding the movements of the dismounted men who had made a dash for the piles of arms in front of the porch. The French troopers were still filing up the drive, but the sudden uproar had startled the horses. The riders were too much occupied with their steeds and too closely packed to make effective use of their pistols; the one or two who fired aimed erratically, and no one was hurt. But Harry saw that the only course open to him was to charge again and again until the peasants, summoned by the noise of the fray, could come to his assistance. It was fortunate that the remainder of the enemy’s troop could only debouch two by two from the drive; the stone balustrade on each side of it prevented them from deploying until they entered the open space in front of the house. Two horses that had been rolled over near the entrance to the drive were plunging and kicking, hindering the advance of the leading troopers, who were now being pressed by the men behind. Once more the little band of Dutchmen hurled themselves at the head of the enemy’s force, and with the same result, though Harry was instinctively aware, when he again emerged from the mellay, that his followers were fewer in number.