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"Long Tom" and four or five smaller guns from Bulwan, and a nearer battery to the north-west, began hurling percussion shell and shrapnel upon the Naval batteries at half-past seven. Our "Lady Anne" answered, but after flinging shells into the immense earthworks for an hour or two without much effect, both sides got tired of that game.
"It's a big thing we have done, lad," Sergeant Corney said, as he drew himself up by my side while both of us hugged the earthworks as limpets do a rock. "It stands to reason we'll be in danger many a time before we go out from this world, unless it so chances that we come to grief here; but I dare venture to say we'll never be nearer death than we have been since leaving the thicket."
It had old-fashioned defences of stones which, during the recent occupation by the States, had been much improved, and had been strengthened with earthworks. Before it was besieged, Maurice sent his brother Frederic Henry, with some picked companies, into the place, so that the garrison amounted to three thousand effective men.
These oscillations enable the geologist to note the marks which a glacier leaves behind it as it retrogrades; and among these the most prominent, as before stated, are the terminal moraines, or mounds of unstratified earth and stones, often divided by subsequent floods into hillocks, which cross the valley like ancient earthworks, or embankments made to dam up a river.
Of course, it came at last; he who ignores the law of probabilities challenges an adversary that is seldom beaten. It was at Resaca, in Georgia, during the movement that resulted in the taking of Atlanta. In front of our brigade the enemy's line of earthworks ran through open fields along a slight crest.
Casey's shattered division was in the rear, guarding Bottom's Bridge and the road to the White House. The line stretched from Mechanicsville across the river to Golden's Farm, and thence to Fair Oaks. The whole of this extensive line was protected by earthworks of marvelous magnitude, and whole forests of timber slashed in front of some parts of the line formed almost impenetrable abattis.
But the night was dark, and Charlie knew every passage of the earthworks better than any big cadet there. Although there were many big boys as hounds and only two little boys as hares, the Gordons easily escaped from the angry cadets. For some time afterwards they carefully kept away from the Arsenal, for they knew that if the "Pussies" should catch them they need expect no mercy.
Then we ran out, bidding the captain of the guard to stand to arms as we passed through the great door of the palace, and so we went round to the place whence the arrows had come. A score of men from the gate were already clustered there on the earthworks, talking fast as Welshmen will, but heedful to challenge us as we came. I saw that they had somewhat on the ground in the midst of them.
Village played against village. The people would sit on the earthworks and clap and shout when the game pleased them, and gambled everything they had on their home-town players. "I suppose," he added, looking around on the green tumuli, "I remember it like this, because when I lived here I was so full of what was going on that I had no time for noticing how it looked to me."
Fearful as their glittering and bristling points appeared when levelled in front of a charging line, bayonets were rarely reddened with the blood of an enemy in the Civil War, and the soldiers of that desperate conflict found them more useful as tools in the rapid throwing up of light earthworks than as weapons for use against their foes.
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