I looked at the captain, as much as to say, "Am I to proceed?"
He motioned with his hand to go on, and I then began digging a hole by
the side of a dead body, and the enemy, seeing my intention, desisted
from firing. I had buried several, when the captain came out and
joined me, with a view of reconnoitring the position of the enemy.
He was seen from the fort, and recognized; and his intention pretty
accurately guessed at.
We were near the body of the colonel, which we were going to inter;
when the captain, observing a diamond ring on the finger of the
corpse, said to one of the sailors, "You may just as well take that
off: it can be of no use to him now." The man tried to get it off, but
the rigidity of the muscle after death prevented his moving it. "He
won't feel your knife, poor fellow," said the captain; "and a finger
more or less is no great matter to him now: off with it."
The sailor began to saw the finger-joint with his knife, when down
came a twenty-four pound shot, and with such a good direction that it
took the shoe off the man's foot, and the shovel out of the hand of
another man. "In with him, and cover him up!" said the captain.
We did so; when another shot not quite so well directed as the first,
threw the dirt in our faces, and ploughed the ground at our feet.
The captain then ordered his men to run into the castle, which they
instantly obeyed; while he himself walked leisurely along through
a shower of musket-balls from those cursed Swiss dogs, whom I most
fervently wished at the devil, because, as an aide-de-camp, I felt
bound in honour as well as duty to walk by the side of my captain,
fully expecting every moment that a rifle-ball would have hit me where
I should have been ashamed to show the scar.
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