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"Surely, colonel!" returned Moriarty, warming, "the ball could not have killed the macaw without injuring the house?" "My dear sir," said Tom, "I did not say the ball killed the macaw, I said the macaw was killed; but that was in consequence of a splinter from an epaulement of the south-east angle of the fort which the shot struck and glanced off harmlessly except for the casualty of the macaw."
I soon lost both him and McElroy, my adjutant-general, for their three months' service was up, and they were made, the one colonel, and the other major of the Twentieth Ohio Regiment, of which my friend General Force was the lieutenant-colonel. We fortified the post by an epaulement or two for cannon, high up on the hillside covering the ferry and the road up New River.
Caesar, Pompey, and Alexander the Great, are continually in his mouth; and, as he reads a good deal without any judgment to digest it, his ideas are confused, and his harangues as unintelligible as infinite; for, if once he begin, there is no chance of his leaving off speaking while one person remains to yield attention; therefore the only expedient I know, for putting a stop to his loquacity, is to lay hold of some incongruity he has uttered, and demand an explanation; or ask the meaning of some difficult term that he knows by name; this method will effectually put him to silence, if not to flight, as it happened when I inquired about an epaulement.
The French labored with energy under cover of night to repair the mischief; closed the shattered West Gate with a wall of stone and earth twenty feet thick, made an epaulement to protect what was left of the formidable Circular Battery, all but three of whose sixteen guns had been dismounted, stopped the throat of the Dauphin's Bastion with a barricade of stone, and built a cavalier, or raised battery, on the King's Bastion, where, however, the English fire soon ruined it.
The defenders behind their low epaulement do not pant; their marksmen only at first are allowed to fire; these make things unpleasant for the massed gunners out yonder, who share their attentions with the spraying-out infantry-men. The quick-firing cannon of the defence are getting in their work methodically.
"I'll tell you what an epaulement is," replied he, "I never saw an epaulement but once, and that was at the siege of Namur. In a council of war, Monsieur Cohorn, the famous engineer, affirmed that the place could not be taken." "Yes," said the Prince of Vandemont, "it may be taken by an epaulement."
We saw the shell explode just in front of "Long Tom's" epaulement, and heard a cheer from spectators, scores of the townspeople having gathered on a slope by Cove Hill to watch the scene, among them a crippled gentleman who has to be wheeled about in a Bath-chair.
In that cluster of mud huts its name is Aoong the gallant Renaud fell with a shattered thigh, as he led his "Lambs" up to the epaulement which covered its front. One fight a day is fair allowance anywhere, but those fellows whom Havelock led were gluttons for fighting.
"Damn!" sighs a peach-cheeked midshipman, who "Oh, good shot!" For the second has landed just over and behind the epaulement. "Has it hit the gun?" "No such luck," says the captain: he was down again five seconds after we fired. And the men had all gone to earth, of course. Ting-a-ling-a-ling! Down dives the sapper, and presently his face reappears, with "Headquarters to speak to you, sir."
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