Twain - The Battle Continues - part 2

Hey Folks,

I’ve been re-reading Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court and sharing pieces of Twain’s political commentary with you here (this is the 35th entry) .

Chapter 43 – We last saw the Yankee and Clarence investigating, under the cover of darkness, the effect of their electrified defences.

“Our camp was enclosed with a solid wall of the dead – a bulwark, a breastwork, of corpses, you may say. . .

I sent a current through the third fence, now; and almost immediately through the fourth and fifth, so quickly were the gaps filled up. I believed the time was come, now, for my climax; I believed that that whole army was in our trap. Anyway it was high time to find out. So I touched a button and set fifty electric suns aflame on the top of our precipice.

Land, what a sight! We were enclosed in three walls of dead men! All the other fences were pretty nearly filled with the living, who were stealthily working their way forward through the wires. The sudden glare paralyzed this host, petrified them, you may say, with astonishment; there was just one instant for me to utilize their immobility in, and I didn’t lose the chance. You see, in another instant they would have recovered their faculties; then they’d have burst into a cheer and made a rush, and my wires would have gone down before it; but that lost instant lost them their opportunity forever; while even that slight fragment of time was still unspent, I shot the current through all the fences and struck the whole host dead in their tracks. There was a groan you could hear! It voiced the death-pang of eleven thousand men. It swelled out on the night with awful pathos.”