Chapter 86 Fourteen last square

Several phalanxes of the Habayashi Army, like rocks in the water, stood in the turbulent flow of the defeated army and persisted until night.When night came, death came at the same time, and they waited for the double shadow, indomitable, and let the enemy surround them.Each regiment, each isolated, has completely lost contact with the defeated army on all sides. They calmly died and took responsibility for themselves.Some guarded the heights around Luosong, and some guarded the fields of Mount Saint-John, preparing for the last fight.Those helpless and hopeless phalanxes full of courage and fear of death moaned vigorously in that area, waiting to die.Ulm, Wagram, Jena, Friedland are dying with them.

The night was hazy, and around nine o'clock, there was still a phalanx left on the slope of Mount St. John's plateau.In that gloomy valley, under the hillside where the cuirassiers once galloped up and are now covered with the blood and corpses of the British soldiers, under the concentrated bombardment of the victorious enemy artillery, the phalanx is still fighting .Their commander was an unknown officer named Cambronne.Every time it was bombarded, the phalanx shrank, but it was still fighting back.They fought the cannons with rifles, and the walls of men kept shortening on all sides.Some deserters stopped when they were out of breath, listening to the bleak gunshots gradually diminishing from a distance in the darkness.

There were only a few men left in that team of warriors, their banner was a rag, their bullets had been fired, and their rifles were bare. The people who died with honor could not help but feel a kind of holy terror as if they were seeing gods. The British artillery team fell silent for a moment and stopped firing.It was a respite.The soldiers felt that there were countless ghosts around them, the figures of knights, the shadows of the gun barrels, and the sky glimpsed from the wheels and carriages. Incomparable, approaching them and watching them.In the twilight they could hear the sound of the enemy's shells being loaded, and the burning cords, like the eyes of a tiger in the dark, formed a circle above their heads, and the rods of the British artillery came close to the guns. At that time, an English general, some say Cowell, some said Maitland, had a feeling, seized the last second hanging over their heads, and shouted to them: "Brave Surrender, Frenchman!" Cambronne replied, "Shit!"