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Updated: May 2, 2025
A retreating army is always half whipped, and we can choose our ground. Why, lad, 'tis reported Clinton's line stretches out full twelve miles, with train of baggage-wagons and battery horses, and camp-followers enough for a division. 'Twill be easy work attending to them, and most of his troops are Dutch and Tories."
On the 14th of June, 1683, their mighty army appeared before the walls, and a city of tents was built that covered a space of six leagues in extent. Their camp was arranged in the form of a crescent, enclosing within its boundaries a promiscuous mass of soldiers and camp-followers, camels, and baggage-wagons, which seemed to extend as far as the eye could reach.
We made all haste to substitute artillery for baggage-wagons, and boxes of ammunition for boxes of hard bread. This transfer was not accomplished before the battle began, and as our troops were pressed steadily back on our new front, Elkhorn Tavern fell into the hands of the Rebels.
The tramp of the horses and the rumble of the guns and baggage-wagons passed unheard, and they reached the head of the causeway without waking a sleeping Aztec warrior. Here was the first break in the causeway, and they had brought with them a bridge to lay across it. But here also were some Indian sentinels, who fled in haste on seeing them, rousing the sleeping city with their cries.
Cromwell commanded the right wing of Fairfax's line, while Ireton led the left, which was opposed by Rupert's cavalry. The advance was made by Fairfax, and the sequel proved that the Parliamentary forces had improved their tactics. Rupert's troopers, as usual, broke down the wing opposing them, and then went to plundering the baggage-wagons in the rear.
The artillery, the baggage-wagons, in a word, all the army material, had been in the front on the first bridge when, it was broken; and when, from the sudden panic which seized on those in the rear of this multitude, the dreadful catastrophe was learned, the last there found themselves first in gaining the other bridge.
Not to return to our old classical friends, what modern nation has ever known how to fight that had not learned how to be beaten and how to run? The English ran ninety miles from Bannockburn, seared by the "gillies" and the baggage-wagons. They paid back their debt at Culloden. The Prussian armies were routed at Jena and Auerstädt. They had their revenge in the "sauve qui peut" of Waterloo.
There seemed to be an effort making to clear the square; some men were roughly crowding back the throng of idlers and gazers, and looking more closely he was surprised to see, parked like the guns of a battery, a collection of vans, baggage-wagons, and carriages open and closed; a miscellaneous assortment of traps that he had certainly set eyes on before.
Every one in the living mass was terrified, and each was fighting for his own life. Those who fell were quickly trampled to death by the hurrying mob, or crushed beneath the wheels of baggage-wagons and artillery.
It is all in weather-worn stucco, and the handsome square is planted with trees. The turf was now cut and carved by the heavy wheels of the Austrian baggage-wagons constantly passing through the court to carry munitions to the fortress outside, whose black guns grimly overlook the dead lagoon.
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