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Updated: May 19, 2025
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.
On the seventeenth the first counterscarp of the town was attacked. The English and Dutch were thrice repulsed with great slaughter, and returned thrice to the charge. At length, in spite of the exertions of the French officers, who fought valiantly sword in hand on the glacis, the assailants remained in possession of the disputed works.
And as the foremost still pressed nearer and nearer, striving to clamber up the shattered counterscarp and through every practicable breach, the English, Hollanders, and Zeelanders, met them in the gap, not only at push of pike, but with their long daggers and with flaming pitchhoops, and hurled them down to instant death.
The foe had now worked his way with galleries and ditches along the whole length of the counterscarp till he was nearly up with the Porcupine, and it was obvious that in a few days he would be master of the counterscarp itself.
It protected the counterscarp, and was itself protected by an exterior aeries of works, while behind the counterscarp was still another ditch, not so broad nor deep as the canal, but a formidable obstacle even after the counterscarp should be gained.
On the seventh day of September, the besiegers took by assault the counterscarp of Lisle, after an obstinate action, in which they lost a thousand men.
The defenses consisted of a rampart of clay, eight feet high, surmounted by a strong stockade, forming a square with a bastion at each angle; four small cannon were mounted on each bastion, and a deep ditch surrounded the whole; there was a natural glacis where the ground fell away on two sides of the quadrangle and on the others a strong abatis had been constructed at a short distance from the crest of the counterscarp.
"I dare say thou wouldst, Trim," quoth my uncle. "I would throw out the earth," continued the corporal, "upon this hand towards the town for the scarp, and on the right hand towards the campaign for the counterscarp." "Very right, Trim," quoth my Uncle Toby.
At the shoulder of this island was Fort Moultrie, an irregular fort, without ditch or counterscarp, with a brick scarp wall about twelve feet high, which could be scaled anywhere, and this was surmounted by an earth parapet capable of mounting about forty twenty-four and thirty-two pounder smooth-bore iron guns.
MacLeod's exit from the fort one day, and the next, for a whim, or for revenge toward her husband, who had incurred their special enmity for outwitting them on his journey hither, shoot her through the heart as she stood on the crest of the counterscarp. And of what avail then the shotted cannon, the firelocks in the loop-holes! "You know they are for our own protection," he argued.
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