e they could enfilade a portion of our position. We answered their
fire as best we could, but it was cruel, disheartening work.

"Do you call this war?" asked Peyronie impatiently, after an hour of this
gunnery. "In faith, had I thought 'twould be like this, I had been less
eager to enlist. Why don't the cowards try an assault?"

"Yes, why don't they?" and I looked gloomily at the wall of trees from
which jets of smoke and flame puffed incessantly.

"'Tis not the kind of fighting I've been used to," cried Peyronie. "In
Europe we fight on open ground, where the best man wins; we do not skulk
behind the trees and through the underbrush. I've a good notion to try a
sally. What say you, Stewart?"

"Here comes Colonel Washington," I answered. "Let us ask him." But he
shook his head when we proposed it to him.

"'Twould be madness," he said. "They are three times our number, and
would pick us all off before we could reach the trees. No, the best we
can do is to remain behind our breastwork. It seems a mean kind of
warfare, I admit, but 'tis a kind we must get accustomed to, if we are
to fight the French and Indians;" and he walked on along his rounds,
speaking a word of encouragement here and there, and seemingly quite
unconscious of the bullets which whistled about him.

Yet the breastwork did not protect us wholly, for now and then a man
would throw up his arms and fall with a single shrill cry, or roll over
in the mud of the trench, cursing horribly, with a bullet in him
somewhere. Doctor Craik, who had enlisted as lieutenant, was soon
compelled to lay aside his gun and do what he could to relieve their
suffering. Not for a moment during the afternoon did the enemy's fire
slacken, and the strain began to tell upon our men. The pieces grew foul,
there were only two screw-rods in the camp with which to clean them, and
as the hours passed, our fire grew less and less. The swivels had long
since been abandoned, for the gunners were picked off so soon as they
showed themselves above the breastwork.

There had been mutterings of thunder and dashes of rain all the
afternoon, and now the storm broke in earnest, the rain falling in such
fury as I had never seen. The trenches filled with water, and we tried in
vain to keep dry the powder in our cartouch boxes. Not only was this wet,
but the rain leaked through the magazine we had built in the middle of
the camp, and ruined the ammunition we had stored there. So soon as the
ra