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Should such an alarm be given, all their labors would be lost. If, when they entered the river-bed, they found the river-walls manned and the river-gates fast-locked, they would be indeed "caught in a trap." Enfiladed on both sides by an enemy whom they could neither see nor reach, they would be overwhelmed and destroyed by his missiles before they could succeed in making their escape.
"At the juncture when, in my mind's eye, I saw my gallant fellows enfiladed with a terrible fire, caught in a trap, and I, despairing, spurring on to die at their headhave I your attention? just at that moment there appeared between the ravine and the road ahead a man.
They all had their bayonets fixed. Through a glass every move, every signal, could be seen. From where we were our guns exactly enfiladed them. Again they rose and at a heavy sling trot came on with their rifles at the slope; their bayonets glittering and their Officer ten yards ahead of them waving his sword. Some one said they were cheering.
The fortifications were in bad repair, many parts of them crumbling down the covered way, and several bastions exposed in such a manner as to be enfiladed by the besiegers, and no part of the town secure from the effects of cannonading and bombardment.
On the night of the 18th, the enemy crossed the mountains which separate the branches of the Shenandoah, forded the North Fork, and early on the morning of the 19th, under cover of the darkness and the fog, surprised and turned our left flank, and captured the batteries which enfiladed our whole line.
The Royal Irish Rifles swept over the German parapet, and, assisted by the Inniskillings, cleared the trenches and destroyed the machine gunners. Through the enemy lines they swept, enfiladed on three sides, and losing so heavily that only a few escaped from the desperate venture.
So they had laid out a large square, raised embankments on all four sides, with an outer defence of palisades, and a ditch between. At each corner was a bastion, from which an attacking force could be enfiladed. Lacking artillery to batter down these works the three commanders decided to invest the fort and starve out the defenders.
The strength of the position was, however, even more surprising than the state of filth; every trench was enfiladed by another, great boulders were connected by walls of massive construction, this being specially the case where guns had been placed in position.
Instead the remnants of the line had collected themselves in the series of independent redoubts which had seemingly been prepared for just such an emergency. They were so situated that it was well-nigh impossible to destroy them at long range; but it was impossible to make any forward movement which would not be enfiladed by them.
But the East Yorks had been unable to advance owing to the wire not having all been cut and the machine-gun fire that enfiladed them from their flanks.
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