FRENCH HEROES.

Otago Witness, Issue 987, 29 October 1870, Page 17

FRENCH HEROES.

(La Patrie.)

We were told yesterday, that Marshal M'Mahon — at the end of that noble struggle made by 35,000 soldiers against the 140,000 of the Crown Prince of Prussia — seeing that he wasnotreinforced, seeing that his ammunition had run short, and seeing that he must inevitably abandon the field of battle, so covered with our dead and with the corpses of the •nemy that the survivors shot at each other behind ramparts of mangled bodies — we are told, we say, that the brave and illustrious conqueror of the Malakoff, of Magenta, and of Solf erino, in despair summoned before him the five colonels of his cavalry regiments — Girard, of the Second Lancers ; Tripard, of the Sixth of the same arm ; a colonel, whose name we do not know, of the Tenth Dragoons ; De la Rochere, of the Eighth Cuirassiers ; and Watermann, of the Ninth — and throwing himself into their arms, besought them to sacrifice themselves that they might save the shattered remains of his army. God knows whether these modern Leonidases knew how to fulfil the " mandate of honour" which was then confided to them.

Elae-where, on the day before, at Weis«enburg, another colonel of ca airy, the Marquis d'Espenilles, recently promoted to the command of the Third Regiment of Hussars, left a place in the Prince's household to take command on active service. This Colonel d'Espenilles, scarcely forty years of age, in order to give breathing time to the beleaguered Douay division, charged the Prussian columns teventeen times successively,

without stopping. At the seventeenth time the regiment was reduced to fifty horsemen, and the heroic colonel, covered with wounds, still rode forward, sword in hand, in front of his men.