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It stood back about a hundred yards from the levee, and its casemates just rose above the huge dike that keeps the Mississippi in its proper channel. When the river was high from the spring floods of the north, a steamer floating on its swift tide towered high above the bastions of the fort. In the casemates and on the parapets were mounted seventy-five guns of all calibres.
This grassy solitude was once the "Dunkirk of America;" the vaulted caverns where the sheep find shelter from the ram were casemates where terrified women sought refuge from storms of shot and shell, and the shapeless green mounds were citadel, bastion, rampart, and glacis.
Fire and wreckage parties stood in little groups along the main-deck, and first-aid parties were gathered at the hatchways; two Midshipmen, pale and bright-eyed with excitement, talked in low voices by the foremost gun: gradually a tense hush closed down upon the main deck; the crews stood silent round their guns, waiting in their steel-walled casemates for the signal that would galvanise them into death-dealing activity against the invisible foe.
Disgraceful as was the prompt surrender of the fort, it may be doubted if, even with the best defence, it could have held out many days; for it had no casemates, and its occupants were defenceless against the explosion of shells. Chubb was arrested for cowardice on his return, and remained some months in prison.
He endeavoured to point out places where mines had been exploded, where ravelins had been stormed, where the assailants had been successful, and where they had been bloodily repulsed. But it was all loathsome, hideous rubbish. There were no human habitations, no hovels, no casemates. The inhabitants had burrowed at last in the earth, like the dumb creatures of the swamps and forests.
In actual practice, the conditions are almost always complicated, either by necessities of mounting in particular places, such as turrets and casemates; or by the advantages attending the interchangeability of stores, or other circumstances; and it requires great watchfulness to keep abreast of the ever-growing improvements of the day.
It refused to budge, and while the men were still struggling with it, the cruiser slid clear of the last ridge of rock into the sea in a terrific swirl of foaming water, rolled sluggishly once or twice, with the water up to the level of her gun casemates, and then slowly capsized and sank, throwing all the men who were fortunate enough to have been above-deck into the water, where a terrible scene of struggling among the drowning at once ensued.
Pennant had been able to see that there were no guns in the casemates of the fort, and this was really all he wanted to know. "All your guns seem to be mounted outside," said the naval officer as he halted on the parade. "Yes, sir; most of the guns have been removed to points where they can be used to greater advantage than here.
Unlike the French battery, however, all the casemates were open, with the exception of four, two of which were converted into the officers' quarters, while the other two constituted the magazine; and in the shelter of these open casemates the artillerymen were slumbering soundly in hammocks, despite the storm, with their muskets piled under the shelter of a verandah that ran all along the front of the casemates.
Half a mile away, at the foot of the ridge, a long irregular black line of thorn bushes enclosed the Dervish defences. Behind this zeriba low palisades and entrenchments bent back to the scrub by the river. Odd shapeless mounds indicated the positions of the gun-emplacements, and various casemates could be seen in the middle of the enclosure.
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