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Updated: June 21, 2025
Down to the east we see the line of brighter green creeping out from the flanks of Mount Gilboa, marking the spring where Gideon sifted his band of warriors for the night-attack on the camp of Midian. On those dark ridges to the south the brave Jonathan was slain by the Philistines and the desperate Saul fell upon his own sword.
Edward was obliged to command a retreat; but at that juncture, just as the country was so nearly rescued by the wise dispositions of Wallace, two Scottish nobles, the Earls of Dunbar and Angus, were led by a mean jealousy to betray him to the English, disclosing the place where he was encamped in the forest of Falkirk, and his intention of making a night-attack upon the English.
He doubted how his raw troops would stand a night-attack from a foe to whom night and day were one: still more did he fear what might happen in the darkness during the confusion of a retreat down that awful pass. But he could not attack, and Dundee would not, till his moment came. The darkness the other feared would be all in his favour.
"How?" exclaimed the Templar; "deliver up our prisoners, and stand an object alike of ridicule and execration, as the doughty warriors who dared by a night-attack to possess themselves of the persons of a party of defenceless travellers, yet could not make good a strong castle against a vagabond troop of outlaws, led by swineherds, jesters, and the very refuse of mankind?
When Ithuel suggested the possibility of a night-attack in boats, he laughingly reminded the American that "the burnt child dreads the fire," and gave himself no great concern in the matter. Still no proper precaution was neglected.
The moor was then partly reclaimed and intersected by trenches, and Feversham's headquarters was at Weston Zoyland, where the royal cavalry were encamped, with the other troops at Middlezoy and Chedzoy beyond. Monmouth saw that their divisions were somewhat separated, and that his only hope was a night-attack.
From there we had intended to go back to Paris; but as we were starting there came an unexpected summons to another point of the front, where there had been a successful night-attack, and a lot of Germans taken in a blown-up trench.
At the council of war, which he summoned that evening, there were proposals of night-attack, and other fierce measures; but Bevern, rejecting the plan for a night attack on the Austrian camp as too dubious, did, in the dark hours, through the silent streets of Breslau, withdraw himself across the Oder, instead; leaving 80 cannon, and 5,000 killed and wounded; an evidently beaten man and Army.
At first some apprehensions were entertained that a night-attack would be made, but a heavy thunderstorm coming on, during which the flintlocks of the enemy would have been useless, rendered that improbable. By daybreak on the 4th, the bridge over the Ordah was completed, Major Home, of the Engineers, having worked at it all night throughout the whole of the tornado and drenching rain.
I have often stayed, for instance, at Tan-yr-allt in North Wales, where Shelley spent some months, and where the strange adventure of the night-attack by the assassin occurred a story never satisfactorily unravelled; it was a constant pleasure there to feel that one was looking at the fine crags which Shelley loved, so nobly weather-stained and ivy-hung, that one was threading the same woodland paths, and rambling on the open moorland where he so often paced.
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