White Bluffs spokesman. [volume] (White Bluffs, Wash.) 1907-1938, 1931-06-04
CHAPTER xIII-Continued

Tartans waved and bagpipes
screamed defiance as Montcalm waited
for reinforcements which never came,
and the bushes and knobs and corn
fields were taken by fifteen hundred
Canadians and Indians whose guns an
swered with roar. Back and forth
the battle ragged and France began to
Crumble.
Then came ten o'clock.
Something must have broken in
Montcalm's heart. His judgment wav-
cred, and he gave the fatal command
which raised England to the suprem-
acy of the world.
nets fixed in five short, thick lines,
four white and one blue; the English
stood with double-shotted guns in a
long, six-jointed thin red line. Level
ground lay between. Had England
advanced, history might have written
itself differently. But England waited
France advanced.
Jeems went with her. He was al
ready hit. "A shot had caught him in
the shoulder, and blood ran down his
arm and dripped from his fingers. He
felt no pain, but slumberous feeling
was creeping over him as he staggered
on with the lines. He saw Mont
calm ride along the front Of his men,
cheering them on to victory; he noted
the gold-embroidered green coat he
IL
breast, the white linen of his wrist
band, and he heard his voice as he
asked, Don't you want little rest
before you begin?' The answer,
"We're never tired before a battle!"
rose about him. Jeems' lips framed
the words which were repeated like
increasing blasts in a storm. But the
sun was growing less bright to his
eyes.
An advance of forty or fifty PAGES,
then pause another advance, another
pause, in the way regulars fought at
that time on flat and open battlefelds,
and Jeems measured the distance be-
tween himself and the red line of the
British. At each halt he fired with
his comrades, then loaded and adj
vanced. The red line had broken
precedent. 1t made no move to play
its part in the prescribed routine of
war, and continued to stand like a
WALL Openings came in it where
crimson blotches sank to the ground,
but those who remained were unmoved
OF or
their double-shotted guns. A tremor
ran through the French, thickening
of mems breaths, a quickening of their
heartbeats, crumbling under strain,
while the melody Of the bell stole
softly over the Plains of Abraham.
They halted again less than hun
dred PAGES away, and still England's
thinning line did not fire. A man
close to Jeems laughed as if nerves
had cracked inside his head Another
gasped as If he had been struck.
Jeems tried to hold himself erect.
The weird sensation came over him
that the armies were not going to
fight, after all.
Then he heard his name. It was
his mother calling him. He answered
with a cry and would have swayed
toward her If hands had not dragged
him back. "Mad!" he heard voice
say. He dropped his gun as he tried
to wipe the blindness from his eyes.
Things cleared. There were the red
line, the open space, sunlight-some-
thing passing. Those who lived did
not forget what they saw. England
took the story home with her, France
gave it little place in her history.
For a few seconds men were not look
ing at death but at a dog. An old,
decrepit dog who limped as he walked,
a dog with one foot missing.
Jeems made an effort to call.
"Odd-Odd-'
Then came Montcalm's command
"Forward!"
He marched with the others into the
Jaws of death, blind, cropping, strain
Ing to make the dog hear words which
never passed his lips. There was no
longer day. No sun. No red wall
before him. But his ears still caught
the tramp of feet and the melody Of
the bell. These died In roar, the
roar Of double-shotted guns. England
fred at forty PAGES, and France went
down in shapeless mass Of dead.
With the front line fell Jeems.