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In the rear and facing this opening, with his back to the door of the sentry-box, for fear of being flanked, had the corporal wisely taken his post: He held the ivory pipe, appertaining to the battery on the right, betwixt the finger and thumb of his right hand, and the ebony pipe tipp'd with silver, which appertained to the battery on the left, betwixt the finger and thumb of the other and with his right knee fixed firm upon the ground, as if in the front rank of his platoon, was the corporal, with his Montero-cap upon his head, furiously playing off his two cross batteries at the same time against the counter-guard, which faced the counterscarp, where the attack was to be made that morning.
We passed the demilune, we passed the culverin, bayoneting the artillerymen at their guns; we advanced across the two tremendous demilunes which flank the counterscarp, and prepared for the final spring upon the citadel. Soult I could see quite pale on the wall; and the scoundrel Cambaceres, who had been so nearly my prisoner that day, trembled as he cheered his men. "On, boys, on!"
Turenne was startled by the shout of stern exultation with which his English allies advanced to the combat, and expressed the delight of a true soldier, when he learned that it was ever the fashion of Cromwell's pikemen to rejoice greatly when they beheld the enemy; and the banished Cavaliers felt an emotion of national pride, when they saw a brigade of their countrymen, outnumbered by foes and abandoned by friends, drive before it in headlong rout the finest infantry of Spain, and force a passage into a counterscarp which had just been pronounced impregnable by the ablest of the Marshals of France.
Among the many serious and fictitious attacks now making he waited calmly for the one great assault, even allowing some of the enemy to scale the distant counterscarp of the external works towards the south, which he had by design left insufficiently guarded.
When the old pasha, however, recovered from the state of fury into which he had fallen, he complimented the three British officers highly on the quickness that they had shown, which had, as he rightly said, saved the town, for, had the French found themselves still unobserved, they would assuredly have managed to get down the counterscarp, and to establish themselves in the tower in force before any suspicion of what was going on took place.
On the second day of August, lord Cutts, with four hundred English and Dutch grenadiers, attacked the salient angle of a demi-bastion, and lodged himself on the second counterscarp.
It was a siege on a large scale to be carried on with thirteen thousand men, almost entirely destitute of artillery. It was necessary to open a new mine to blow up the entire counterscarp, and to commence another covered way. Bonaparte now ordered Kléber's division to oppose the passage of the Jordan by the army coming from Damascus.
These points, which have been already described, were most essential to the protection of the place, as without them the whole counterscarp was in danger. It was to save those exposed but vital positions that Sir Francis Vere had resorted to the slippery device of the last Christmas Eve but one. Dorp refused to believe the intelligence. The squares were well guarded, the garrison ever alert.
Not a Dutchman but would have bitten the dust beneath that dreadful fire, had not the protecting Minerva kindly taken care that the Swedes should, one and all, observe their usual custom of shutting their eyes and turning away their heads at the moment of discharge. "The Swedes followed up their fire by leaping the counterscarp, and falling tooth and nail upon the foe with curious outcries.
The Porcupine's small but vitally-important ravelin lying out in the counterscarp between the old town and the new, guarding the sluices by which the water for the town moats and canals was controlled, and preventing the pioneers of the enemy from undermining the western wall was so damaged by the sea as to be growing almost untenable.
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