But the chasseur’s sabre did not cut home. With a speed that was astonishing, the Rifleman managed to recover his blade into the parry. The sabres met with a clash that jarred both men’s arms. The Lieutenant’s four-guinea blade shattered, but not before it had taken the force from the Frenchman’s slashing cut.

The momentum of the chasseur’s horse took him past the Englishman. The Frenchman turned back, astonished by the parry, and saw him turning to run uphill. For a second he was tempted to follow, but there were other, easier, targets down the hill. He spurred away.

The Lieutenant threw away his broken sabre and scrambled towards the low cloud. “Rifles! Rifles!” Men heard and closed on him. They scrambled uphill together and made a large enough group to deter the enemy. The Dragoons went for individuals, the men most easily killed, and they took pleasure in thus avenging all the horsemen who had been put down by rifle bullets, all the Frenchmen who had jerked and bled their lives away on the long pursuit, and all the jeers that the Riflemen had sent through the biting air in the last bitter weeks.

Captain Murray joined the new Lieutenant. “Outfoxed us, by God!” He sounded surprised.

The small group of Riflemen reached safety short of the clouds, up where the litter of rocks made the ground too uneven for the Dragoons to follow. There Murray stopped his men and stared, appalled, at the carnage beneath.

The Dragoons rode among the dead and the defeated. Riflemen with slashed faces reeled among them, others lay motionless until grasping hands turned the dead bodies and began ripping at pouches and pockets. The Quartermaster watched as Major Dunnett was pulled to his feet and his uniform searched for plunder. Dunnett was lucky. He was alive and a prisoner. One Rifleman ran downhill, still trying to escape, and the man in the black coat and white boots rode after him and, with a chilling skill, chopped down once.