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Updated: June 13, 2025
It was a long abattis, and behind the abattis long, well-builded breastworks. Behind the breastworks, overlooked by the little hill, and occupying an old clearing in the Wilderness, was a large encampment the encampment, in short, of the 11th Army Corps, Howard commanding, twenty regiments, and six batteries.
Just here the tribesmen had constructed a formidable abattis of prickly brushwood, which stretched athwart the road, and dammed back the fugitives in the shallow oval basin between the termination of the ravine and the summit of the ridge. In this trap were caught our hapless people and the swarm of their native followers, and now the end was very near.
When he blew his horn, the front rank were to run back, and the reserve to come forward to meet them; and then they were to rush down again upon their assailants who had passed the abattis, and to hurl them into the stream. The peasants all recognized the advantages of these arrangements.
He saw then the abattis of splintered old trunks, of lopped limbs, and entangled branches, piled up like jackstraws to the height of even six or eight feet from the ground; the unsightly mat of sodden old masses of pine needles and cedar fans; the hundreds of young saplings bent double by the weight of débris, broken square off, or twisted out of all chance of becoming straight trees in their age; the long, deep, ruthless furrows where the logs had been dragged through everything that could stand in their way; the few trees left standing, weak specimens, undesirable species, the culls of the forest, further scarred where the cruel steel cables had rasped or bitten them.
The remote series consisted of six forts of massive size and height, fronted by swamps and flooded meadows, with frequent creeks and ravines interposing; sharp fraise and abattis planted against scarp and slope, pointed cruelly eastward.
At intervals around and inside the outer abattis are built the Gurgi or wigwams hemispheric huts like old bee-hives about five feet high by six in diameter: they are even smaller in the warm regions, but they increase in size as the elevation of the country renders climate less genial.
Westward, less bold and jagged, but still a mighty barrier in almost any other companionship, are the sister heights of Bolivar, scarred and seamed with earth-work and rifle-pit, and bristling with abattis and battery.
During the night the mountain had been the scene of busy labors, and now, breastworks of earth and stones, and lines of troublesome abattis, rendered the position, so strong by nature, apparently too formidable for any army to attempt to force.
The midshipmen fired their guns alternately as fast as they could load, the Poles working as steadily and coolly as if they had been long-trained artillerymen. Several times the Russians advanced to within twenty yards of the defences, but each time, shattered by the fire of grape-shot and by the storm of bullets from the abattis, they recoiled.
Everywhere spotted leads, game trails, and runways had been hacked, trimmed, and widened into more open wood-walks; foot-paths enlarged to permit the passage of mounted men; cattle-roads cleared, levelled, made smoother for wagons and artillery; log bridges built across the rapid streams that darkled westward, swamps and swales paved with logs, and windfalls hewn in twain and the huge abattis dragged wide apart or burnt to ashes where it lay.
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