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This promise was made good by the brave and energetic French troops. Perhaps never before had the space of two minutes been of so much importance in the honor of two nations. General Washington who, in his eagerness to see this important action, had ridden near, too near to please his officers and surgeons, had closely watched the storming of the redoubts.
There were nearly fifty forts and redoubts in these lines, of sufficient importance to have names which in those days became household words, not only in the Netherlands, but in Europe; the siege of Ostend being the one military event of Christendom, so long as it lasted. These names are of course as much forgotten now as those of the bastions before Nineveh.
Robert, as they landed, saw anew and in greater detail the immense strength of Quebec. He beheld the line of huge earthworks that Frontenac had built from the river St. Charles to Cape Diamond, and he saw the massive redoubts lined with heavy cannon. Now, he wondered at the boldness of the New Englanders who had assailed the town with so much vigor, and who might have taken it.
The inference is only fair and reasonable that at the very outset he had recognised the misinterpretation of Lord Raglan's orders, and was seeking to change the direction of the charging horsemen, diverting them from the Russian battery towards the redoubts, their proper goal. Fate decreed that this last chance of correcting the terrible error should be denied to the Light Brigade.
In Yorktown itself the English had thrown up two redoubts and had drawn some lines of wall. The French kept up an unremitting cannonade, but it became evident that the redoubts must be taken in order to subdue the place. Washington, much excited, took his place in the central battery along with Generals Knox and Lincoln and their staff.
We commenced the attack early on the 10th of November on a village which was defended by two redoubts. One of these our division took under General Cole, driving the enemy to some heights in the rear, where we again attacked them and drove them over the Nivelle.
The French army, in battle array at the foot of the hill where the King stood, behind fortifications of earth, behind redoubts and fascines of turf, perceived with alarm the men-at-arms and the light horse pressed between these two forces, ten times their superior in numbers. "Sound the charge!" cried Louis XIII; "or my old Coislin is lost."
"Yes," said Bonchamps, "there in the camp at Varin on the right, and the redoubts of Bournan on the left; the fortifications of the town itself lie between them, and a little to the rear of both." "Exactly, M. Bonchamps; the town itself, I take, is the easiest task of the three; but as we are situated it must be the last."
And finally the Moskowa, where the bright sun of Austerlitz shone for the last time; where the contending hosts were mingled in confused melee amid deeds of the most desperate daring: mamelons carried under an unceasing fire of musketry, redoubts stormed with the naked steel, every inch of ground fought over again and again; such determined resistance on the part of the Russian Guards that our final victory was only assured by Murat's mad charges, the concentrated fire of our three hundred pieces of artillery, and the valor of Ney, who was the hero of that most obstinate of conflicts.
Forage abundant all round, and the corn-harvest growing white; here, strange to say, has Friedrich got planted in the inside of those innumerable Daun redoubts, and "woods of abatis;" and might make a very pretty "Bohemian Campaign" of it, after all, were Daun the only adversary he had! By the one effectual method, that of beating him in battle, Daun never would have tried.
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