Rosbach!--its name to me can still create a tremor. We fought it in November month in a storm of driving snow. Our corps lay out upon the right of Frederick among fields that were new-ploughed for wheat and broken up by ditches. The d'Auvergnes charged with all the fire of veterans; they were smashed by horse, but rose and fell and rose again though death swept across them like breath from a furnace, scorching and shrivelling all before it. The Prussian and the Austrian guns went rat-a-pat like some gigantic drum upon the braes, and nearer the musketry volleys mingled with the plunge of horse and shouting of commanders so that each sound individually was indistinguishable, but all was blended in one unceasing melancholy hum. That drumming on the braes and that long melancholy hum are what most vividly remains to me of Rosbach, for I fell early in the engagement, struck in the charge by the sabre of a Prussian horseman that cleft me to the skull in a slanting stroke and left me incapable, but not unconscious, on the field. I lay for hours with other wounded in the snow The battle changed ground; the noises came from the distance: we seemed to be forgotten. I pitied myself exceedingly. Finally I swounded. When I came to myself it was night and men with lanterns were moving about the fields gathering us in like blackcock where we lay. Two Frenchmen came up and spoke to me, but what they said was all beyond me for I had clean forgotten every word of their language though that morning I had known it scarcely less fully than my own. I tried to speak in French, it seems, and thought I did so, but in spite of me the words were the broadest lallands Scots such as I had not used since I had run, a bare-legged boy, about the braes of, home. And otherwise my faculties were singularly acute, for I remember how keenly I noticed the pitying eye of the younger of the two men. What they did was to stanch my wound and go away. I feared I was deserted, but by-and-by they returned with another man who held the lantern close to my face as he knelt beside me. “By the black stones of Baillinish!” said he in an unmistakable Hielan' accent, “and what have I here the night but the boy that harmed the bylie? You were not in your mother's bosom when you got that stroke!” I saw his smile in the light of his lanthom, 'twas no other than MacKellar of Kilbride! He was a surgeon in one of the corps; had been busy at his trade in another part of the field when the two Frenchmen who had recognised me for a Scot had called him away to look to a compatriot. Under charge of Kilbride (as, in our country fashion, I called him) I was taken in a waggon with several other wounded soldiers over the frontier into Holland, that was, perhaps, the one unvexed part of all the Continent of Europe in these stirring days.