their boots clogged by pounds of the field mud; a perilous advance, with their own guns firing over their heads across the valley, but an advance which, when it should be complete, the half-mile crossed, and the opposing slope taken at the charge, would decide the main business of the invasion, and would end the resistance of the Revolutionary armies. Against them as they went forward was now directed some part of the French artillery fire, such part as could be spared from the Prussian guns above. The Prussian companies halted often, they were often realigned, but their slow progress was still working, ordered, and exactly maintained under that dramatic discipline which made in those days, as it does now, the apparatus, perhaps, of Prussian excellence and certainly of Prussian prestige. They reached the level between the two lines; they touched the first rise of the opposing slope. Meanwhile Kellermann, upon his horse, when the French line had wavered upon the great explosion, rode suddenly along it, and with his feathered general’s hat high upon the point of his sword, waving it, called loudly for cheers--cheers for the nation, which was the Revolutionary cry. The young men, emboldened, recovered some sort of formation, and loudly responded with the cheers he had demanded; the brigade that had broken was drawn up, put in reserve. The French guns during that critical five minutes had behaved as though they had been veterans, nor had their fire diminished, nor had a gunner moved save just in that central point where the destruction of so much ammunition for a moment checked the rapidity of fire. The French guns, then, continually alive, turned more and more from the distant Prussian batteries to the nearer infantry advancing against them up the slope. The Prussian guns, as their men came nearer to the French, had nearly to cease their fire or at least to diverge it to the left and to the right. You could see along the French line the handling of the muskets and the preparing to meet by infantry fire the Prussian charge when it should come within its fifty or eighty yards.