Again Cecil led on his troopers, who had been straining like greyhounds in the leash--on over the ground an acre and more of which was covered by men mutilated in every way--corpses struck by four, five, six bullets--yea, in some instances by a whole charge of canister--and where every blade of grass was dyed red--on to the charge once more, and, as there was no time to take prisoners, a terrible havoc was made--a havoc at which his heart, even in the thrill of what he thought was victory, began to sicken; but he had received his orders to support the guns, and nobly had he done so. At that point the strife was nearly over, when a cry of agony escaped the lips of Cecil, as a bullet--the last shot of some wounded man--pierced his chest like a red-hot sword-blade, and he fell forward on the neck of his horse, clutching wildly at the reins the while; at the same moment another Turk who lay wounded--an officer apparently--by one slash of his sharp Damascus sabre, all but disembowelled the animal, which uttered a snorting cry, and wheeling round, quitted the field at a mad and infuriated gallop, with his helpless rider clinging to the pommel of the saddle. No one could stop or intercept its headlong career, and in less than a minute the luckless commander vanished from the eyes of his squadron! Was Palenka's prediction about to come true after all? Cecil had thought the field was won, yet it was not entirely so. Had the winning thereof depended on the fiery valour of one man, Dochtouroff had been victor. At the head of two hundred Russians he charged with the bayonet right into the centre of the Turkish main attack, with such fury that ere the rifles crossed the enemy wheeled about and fled, and he saved the principal position--that of Djunis; 'but Krupp guns, Snider rifles, and better trained troops, in far superior numbers, had done their work, and Servia was beaten!' During the three days' fighting, the latter lost not less than nine thousand soldiers, in killed, wounded, and missing; and of three thousand Russians who were in the field, only seven hundred remained untouched at sunset on the third day. The losses of the Turks were never precisely known, but they must have been terrible, as they were the attacking force, and had assailed well-chosen positions that were deemed impregnable. In Russia and abroad, bluff old Tchernaieff was blamed for recklessness in his tactics, and doubtless he made mistakes which ended in failures. 'And then,' says Captain Salusbury, in his work on those wars, 'it must not be forgotten that he always expected reinforcements which never came. And again it is to be noted that he had to operate with eighty thousand of not the very best troops in a country that required, to command success, two hundred thousand well-trained and thoroughly disciplined soldiers. There is no doubt that the men I saw under fire were a far inferior lot to those who fought in the early part of the war.'