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Updated: May 20, 2025
The American batteries now opened with a heavy cross-fire, which enfiladed several of the works. They also pushed forward a sap against the Star fort and erected a battery, composed of gabions, thirty-six yards only from the abattis and raised forty feet high so as to overlook the works of the garrison.
The gabions burning fiercely, the officers became alarmed lest the fire should be communicated to some of the surrounding magazines, and an attempt was made to extinguish the blazing fragments. As this was difficult, sappers were set to work to dig a trench and throw the excavated earth on the fire. While the men were digging, four wires, communicating with mines, were found and cut.
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.
Gabions, fasces, abattis, and other appliances for assault or defence were quickly made, and all this practical schooling in the work of war went on, under the watchful cooperation of the very officers who afterward became conspicuous in the field, from Long Island to Yorktown.
Demeré was with him still, not in the guise of that white, stark face, upturned now to the stars on the plains of Taliquo, but in his serene, staid presence as he lived; together they were at Fort Loudon, consulting, planning, as in its happier days; now it was the capacity of the spring which they wished to enlarge, and this they had done with blasting-powder; now it was the device to add to the comfort of the garrison by framing the little porches that stood before the doors of the barracks; now it was the erection of an out-work on the side exposed to assault by the river, and they were marking off the ravelin, Corporal O'Flynn and a squad, with the tapes, and directing the fashioning of the gabions, the Indians peacefully sitting by the while like some big, unintelligent, woodland animals, while the great, basket-like frames were woven of white oak splints and then filled with the solid earth.
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.
The parapets of the works, dried in the heats of summer and split in huge fragments by the shot, were crumbling into the ditches. The interior space was honeycombed with holes made by the shells. Gabions and sandbags could not be procured to repair the embrasures, which remained in ruins.
On inquiring into the cause, he discovered that the corporal had ordered a man to stand on the parapet, where he was exposed to the enemy's fire, while the corporal, under cover, was going to hand him some gabions for repairing the parapet. Gordon at once jumped on to the parapet himself and called the corporal to join him, letting the sapper hand up the gabions from a place of safety.
A few mortars stood in position by the river side, and there were Parrott, Griffin, and Dahlgren pieces in the shore batteries. However numerous and powerful were the Federal fortifications, they bore no comparison, in either respect, to those relinquished by the revolutionists. Miniature mountain ranges they seemed, deeply ditched, and revetted with sods, fascines, hurdles, gabions or sand bags.
They stood at a dangerous angle to the batteries at Meudon. On one of them was chalked "fermée pour cause du bombardement." Between the last of the houses and the ramparts, and at a distance of not more than 100 yards from the latter, were the newly-cut trenches which the troops had constructed. Good gabions protected them in front, and there was a plentiful supply of fascines lying all about.
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