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.
A glance showed that the rest of the enemy--perhaps ten thousand strong--were between us and the encircling ditch, and pressing forward to the assault.

Consequently we had them _all!_ and had them past help.

Time for the last act of the tragedy.

I fired the three appointed revolver shots--which meant: "Turn on the water!" There was a sudden rush and roar, and in a minute the mountain brook was raging through the big ditch and creating a river a hundred feet wide and twenty-five deep.
"Stand to your guns, men! Open fire!" The thirteen gatlings began to vomit death into the fated ten thousand.