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Updated: June 23, 2025
This was commenced on the 28th August; thus my men had been four months engaged in the work, owing to the extreme hardness of the subsoil, which was a compact gravel resembling concrete. The three faces of the fort measured 455 yards of fosse and earthen rampart. The fosse was eight feet wide, eight feet deep, and the face of the rampart was protected by chevaux-de-frise of sharpened stakes.
As the reader already knows, it is of a green colour, and covered with short stout spines, very sharp-pointed, whose bases touch each other, and are consequently somewhat hexagonal in shape. With this chevaux-de-frise it is so completely armed, that when the stalk is broken close off it is impossible to take up the fruit without having one's fingers badly pricked.
This was always the case when we reached a place in the river where the spring freshets had undermined the banks, and where numbers of trees, stumps, and underbrush littered the shore, forming chevaux-de-frise of the most formidable character. The long daylight of midsummer in this subarctic region was a point in our favor, enabling us to work to the limit of our strength.
Four deep was this human chain, and along its line nearly 3,000 men passed an unending stream of wooden billets, sandbags, chevaux-de-frise, steel shelters, and light mitrailleuses in a word, all the material for defensive fortifications passed from hand to hand, like buckets at a country fire.
Captain Tewksberry, commanding the local militia company, the Rivermouth Tigers, was convinced that no one who had not carefully studied Scott's Tactics could have brought away that gun under the circumstances. "Here, you will observe, was the exposed flank of the heights; there, behind the chevaux-de-frise, lay the enemy," etc., etc.
The side of the islet opposite the shore on which the Indians had shown themselves was sufficiently defended by enormous roots, bristling like chevaux-de-frise; but the side where the attack was probably about to recommence was defended only by a thick row of reeds and osier-shoots.
Every effort was made to prevent the fire from catching the ship; the engine playing, completely wetted the poop, while spars were used to heave off the fire-ship, and axes to cut the lashings of her grapnels fastened to the end of her yards; but the chevaux-de-frise on her sides held her firm.
Leaving our drivers to get the reindeer and sledges across as best they could, the Major, Dodd, and I started on foot, picking our way between huge irregular blocks of clear green ice, climbing on hands and knees over enormous bergs, falling into wide, deep crevices, and stumbling painfully across the chevaux-de-frise of sharp splintered fragments into which the ice had been broken by a heavy sea.
The obstructions sunk in the Delaware had in some degree changed its channel, in consequence of which the Augusta and the Merlin grounded, a considerable distance below the second line of chevaux-de-frise and a strong wind from the north so checked the rising of the tide, that these vessels could not be floated by the flood.
They are instructed in trench-digging, in the construction of wire entanglements, "knife-rests," chevaux-de-frise, and every other form of obstruction, in revetting, in the making of fascines and gabions, in sapping and mining, in the most approved methods of dugout construction, in trench sanitation, in the location of listening-posts and how to conceal them; they are shown how to cut wire, they are drilled in trench raiding and in the most effective methods of "trench cleaning."
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