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Updated: May 29, 2025
Dumouriez, at the battle of Jemmapes, threw out whole battalions as skirmishers, and supporting them by light cavalry, did wonders with them. They surrounded the Austrian redoubts and rained on the cannoneers a hail of bullets so violent that they abandoned their pieces. The Austrians, astounded by this novel combat method, vainly reinforced their light troops by detachments of heavy infantry.
What he had won was by sheer audacity the enemy had been surprised, and seemed laboring under a species of stupor; if not supported, and supported at once, he was gone! An hour afterward, Gordon was returning, shattered and bleeding at every pore. The enemy had suddenly come to their senses after the stunning blow. From the forts and redoubts crowning every surrounding hill issued the thunder.
A part of the place, cut into an island by the Erpt, was strengthened by two redoubts. This island was abandoned, as being too weak to hold, and the Spaniards took possession of it immediately. There were various preliminary and sanguinary sorties and skirmishes, during which the Spaniards after having been once driven from the island, again occupied that position.
Running back several hundred yards at the base of this line was a dip full of thorn trees. This deep winds round the rear of the hill, and here there was a large Boer Camp. A little farther to the rear was another steep hill, on which the enemy's Creusot guns were now mounted. Several trenches were cut alongside the hillsides, and on the crest were some strong redoubts.
To master such a plexus of canals, estuaries, and dykes, of passages through swamps, of fords at low water which were obliterated by flood-tide; to take possession of a series of redoubts built on the only firm points of land, with nothing but quaking morass over which to manoeuvre troops or plant batteries against them, would be a difficult study, even upon paper.
Fashioned in the quiet, in the study, away from the haunts of man, this became the program and the rallying cry, and out on the firing line it was striven for. On the educational battlefields of both Europe and America, where redoubts were being stormed and advance positions taken, this was the one great end in view.
To master such a plexus of canals, estuaries, and dykes, of passages through swamps, of fords at low water which were obliterated by flood- tide; to take possession of a series of redoubts built on the only firm points of land, with nothing but quaking morass over which to manoeuvre troops or plant batteries against them, would be a difficult study, even upon paper.
Caesar did not venture to give battle to the brave enemy six times as strong; to the north of the Aisne, not far from the modern Pontavert between Rheims and Laon, he pitched his camp on a plateau rendered almost unassailable on all sides partly by the river and by morasses, partly by fosses and redoubts, and contented himself with thwarting by defensive measures the attempts of the Belgae to cross the Aisne and thereby to cut him off from his communications.
I suppose that is what General Cathcart will do when he reaches the causeway, though he is a long time coming; and if I were Lord Raglan, I should be in a considerable rage with him. I only wish we had a few hundred of our bluejackets; we should very soon, I suspect, be masters of one or more of the redoubts the Russians have got hold of."
During the night, however, we heard enough to assure us that things were going well, and early on the 5th we received orders to leave the redoubts to a garrison of the unfit and to rendezvous in the old camp, prepared for a "mobile."
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