All were fighting almost without hope, holding out in sheer despair as long as they had cartridges left, when, as that dreadful November afternoon was drawing to its close, suddenly, from beyond the far end of the pass was heard the booming of a distant cannonade. The soldiers heard it and hope revived. It could only be Dupont! Help, then, was coming! The despairing rank and file took heart again--but the hour of rescue was not yet. They had four long hours more to go through; every hour making their terrible situation worse. At nightfall “our cavalry gave way, our firing slackened, our bayonets, from incessant use, became bent and blunted. The confusion became terrible. Things, indeed, could hardly have got worse.” So an officer describes. The enemy, in places, had got right in among them, but “our soldiers, being the handier and more agile, had an advantage over the great clumsy Russians.” Here and there “the men were so close, that they seized each other by the throat.” In the midst of the fiercest of the fighting the tall figure of the marshal was conspicuous. He was seen amid the flashes from the muskets “at the head of a party of grenadiers, sword in hand, laying about him like any trooper.” [Sidenote: “YOUR DUTY IS TO SAVE THE EAGLES!”] The Battalion-Eagles of the 100th, with their Porte-Aigles and a handful of soldiers, got cut off together, amid a surging _mêlée_ of Russians. The major of the regiment, Henriot by name, the senior surviving officer--the colonel of the 100th, as also the colonel of the 103rd, had fallen earlier in the fight--saw what was happening and the extreme peril of the Eagles. Calling for volunteers, he got together some of his men, cut his way through to the Eagles, and rescued them. Major Henriot, after that, having saved the Eagles for the moment, determined as a last resource to attempt a forlorn-hope charge; to get beyond the enemy and reach Dupont with them. It might be possible to save them under the cover of darkness. One of the Porte-Aigles of the 6th Light Infantry with his Eagle, near by at the moment, joined the devoted band of men that the intrepid major now managed to rally round the Eagles of the 100th. With half a dozen stirring words Henriot called on them to follow him. “Comrades, we must break through! They are more than we, but you are Frenchmen: you don’t count numbers! Remember, your duty is to save the Eagles of France!” (“Souvenez vous qu’il s’agit de sauver les Aigles Françaises!”) There was a hoarse shout in reply: “We are all Grenadiers! Pas de charge!” They dashed at the Russians, Henriot leading, and, after fighting their way through the pass and nearly to Dürrenstein, fell to a man. Yet the three Eagles did not fall into Russian hands, thanks to the darkness. They were found next morning by French search-parties under a heap of dead, where the last survivors, fighting back to back, had fallen while making their final stand.