Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 20, 2025
Each of the thirty-two boats on which the central portion of the structure reposed, was a small fortress provided with two heavy pieces of artillery, pointing, the one up, the other down the stream, and manned by thirty-two soldiers and four sailors, defended by a breastwork formed of gabions of great thickness. The forts of Saint Philip and St.
Field and breaching batteries were mounted on a new principle lately adopted; gabions, earth-bags, chevaux-de-frise, and projectiles were made in the greatest abundance maps, notes, and all the information that could be procured respecting Barbary were transmitted to the war office, where their contents were compared and digested, and a plan of operations was drawn out.
Wolfe came over to the camp on the next day, went with an escort to the heights opposite Quebec, examined it with a spy-glass, and chose a position from which to bombard it. Cannon and mortars were brought ashore, fascines and gabions made, intrenchments thrown up, and batteries planted. Knox came over from the main camp, and says that he had "a most agreeable view of the city of Quebec.
They required one million sand-bags and fifty thousand gabions. Of engineer materials, fourteen thousand tons were sent. The engineers executed fifty miles of trenches, using eighty thousand gabions, sixty thousand fascines, and one million sand-bags. Of subsistence, fuel, and forage, five hundred thousand tons were sent. Of clothing, camp-equipage, and harness, twelve thousand tons.
Here I saw a complete stack of bushel baskets being regularly built up from the unloading of a wagon, to know by the scent they were early peas; a little farther on, some men seemed to be making a bastion for the defence of the market by means of gabions, which, to add to the fancy, were not filled with sand, but with large round gravel of a pale whitish-yellow, only a closer inspection showed that the contents were new potatoes.
Among the men and women who voluntarily flocked to the work by thousands, were Adam, the smith, his apprentices, and Ruth. The former, with his journeymen, wielded the spade under the direction of a skilful engineer, the girl, with other women, braided gabions from willow-rods. She had lived through sorrowful days.
My ears, like his own, were already ringing with the roar of the guns from the gabions I could not resist a last appeal. "Come," I insisted "both of you no seriously listen to me. There is plenty of dry wood in the garret; you shall have the chambre d'amis, dear friend, and this brute of a composer shall bunk in my room we'll live, and shoot and be happy. Suzette will be overjoyed at your coming.
We never found the Spaniards sally out of the town after this to engage us, as I expect they did not much like the warm reception they had received. We set to work building up batteries and breastworks, some three hundred of us being sent to cut down a copse of peach-trees that was near to make gabions and fascines to form them with.
The pasha at once assented, a gate was opened, and the Turks rushed out. Their orders were to carry the enemy's nearest trench, and to shift the gabions and fascines to the outward side, and to maintain themselves there.
The Gullet, or new eastern entrance, was a whirlpool at high tide, deep, broad, and swift as a millrace. Yet along its outer verge he too laid his sausages, protecting his men at their work as well as he could with gabions, and essayed to build a dyke of wicker-work upon which he might place a platform for artillery to prevent the ingress of the republican ships.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking