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Full text of "The Dynasts : Parts First And Second"

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THE DYNASTS                   ACT iv
MACK
The conference is ended, friends, I say, And orders will be issued here forthwith.
Guns heard
AN OFFICER Surely that's from the Michaelsberg above us ?
MACK
Never care.    Here we stay.    In five more days The Russians hail, and we regain our bays.
[Exeunt severally,
SCENE  IV
BEFORE  ULM.     THE  SAME  DAY
A high wind prevails, and rain falls in torrents. An elevated terrace near Elchingen forms the foreground.
DUMB SHOW
From the terrace BONAPARTE surveys and dictates operations against the entrenched heights of the Michaelsberg that rise in the middle distance on the right above the city. Through the gauze of descending waters the French soldiery can be discerned climbing to the attack under NEY.
They slowly advance, recede, re-advance, halt, A time of suspense follows. Then they are seen in a state of irregular movement, even confusion ; but in the end they carry the heights with the bayonet
Below the spot whereon NAPOLEON and his staff are gathered, glistening wet and plastered with mud, obtrudes on the left the village of Elchingen, now in the hands of the French. Its white-walled monastery, its bridge over the Danube, recently broken by the irresistible NEY, wear a desolated look, and the stream, which is swollen by the rainfall and rasped by the storm, seems wanly to sympathize.
Anon shells are dropped by the French from the summits they have gained into the city below. A bomb from an Austrian battery
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