For to the Prussian guns the French gunners replied with a fire almost equally maintained and upon the whole of greater precision. They could not dominate the enemy’s fire; they were, indeed, inferior to it, but they did not allow themselves to be dominated by it. It was the remark of all those who watched that field upon either side that the French forces in this one respect of the guns had powerfully surprised the invaders by their unexpected efficiency. So the cannonade went on until men the least used to battle, the young recruits of Prussia, the young poet Goethe himself, looking (and noting curiously and a little sickly what “cannon fever” meant), were grown used to the roar and the blows of sound, and had come to make it a sort of background for their mind. It was at an hour that will never be precisely known,--so difficult is it to determine by evidence the phases even of a single action, but probably early in the afternoon, between one and two o’clock,--that all this tornado of sound was hugely overborne by a crash and a thunder like no other. A lucky shot from the Prussian batteries had fallen into the midst of the French limbers, and in a sudden explosion great masses of ammunition blew wheels, cases, horses, and men up in a sheaf of flame and in plumes of smoke close by Valmy Mill. There, in the very centre of the French line, the commanders, now watching eagerly through their glasses from the Prussian ridge, saw the beginning of a breakdown: a whole brigade was stampeding. It was, by a curious irony, a brigade of German mercenaries still retained in the French service. But as they broke, others also wavered; the line was in desperate confusion, and might at any moment lose such formation as it had. This was the opportunity for the charge, and Brunswick sent forward one--slightly advanced, in front of and to the right of its neighbour, in the formation called “echelon”--the companies of the famous Prussian line. They began their descent into the shallow valley--a slow descent, [Illustration: A REPUBLICAN GENERAL A COLONEL OF INFANTRY In the French Army _To face p. 186_ ]