United States or Philippines ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
All ranks worked hard, especially at engineering, in which there was such a dearth of officers that Grant ordered every West Pointer to do his turn with the sappers and miners as well as his other duty. The real sap-rollers came to grief when an ingenious Confederate stuffed port-fires with turpentined cotton and shot them into rollers only a few yards off.
Twenty of them were to carry the port-fires, &c., &c. Those who had hand-grenades had short ladders to enable them to reach the port-holes, the exact height of which Colonel Burr had ascertained.
The parachute port-fire consists of a cardboard tube of from quarter to half an inch in diameter, and from four to five inches in length, closed at one extremity and filled with star paste. This is connected by a brass wire with a cotton parachute eight inches in diameter. A rocket pot is capable of holding twenty of these port-fires.
Word Of The Day