hanked me for so completely
satisfying him that the orders so important would be certainly and
well executed.

Colonel Mullins may have been guilty of conduct unbecoming an officer,
for which he was tried and cashiered in England; he probably saved his
life at the expense of his honor, in being absent from his post on that
day. But the British officers magnified the importance of the presence
of himself and his regiment with their fascines and ladders ready for
use. Even with the help of these devices, there were not men enough in
the English army to have crossed the ditch, climbed the parapet, and
made a breach in the breastwork line of the Americans. Some of them
might have reached the ditch alive, as did some of their comrades, but
like those comrades they would have died in the ditch or been made
prisoners. The Americans, too, could have used the bayonet as well as
the British, if necessary.

BATTLE OF THE EIGHTH OF JANUARY ON THE WEST BANK OF THE RIVER.

We have mentioned that after the night battle of the twenty-third of
December General Jackson ordered General Morgan to move his command of
Louisiana troops from English Turn, seven miles below the British camp
at Villere's, and to take a position on the west bank of the
Mississippi, opposite to the American camp. Very naturally, the
possibility, and even the probability, of the enemy, when his army was
made formidable by all the reinforcements coming up, throwing a heavy
flanking force across the river, marching it to a point opposite New
Orleans and forcing a surrender of the city, suggested itself to the
military eye of Jackson. After the latter entrenched at Rodrique Canal,
by the first of January, there was no other strategical route by which
the British could have successfully assailed the city. The importance of
this seems to have been fully comprehended neither by the one combatant
nor the other until too late to fully remedy the omission.

Just such a flanking movement was undertaken by the English at the
latest day, which brought on a second battle on the eighth, on the right
bank of the river, resulting in a defeat to the American forces, and
well-nigh ending in disaster to the American cause. It is in evidence
that this strategic movement was the result of a council of war held by
the British officers, at which Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane was
present. This idea of reaching the city by a heavy detachment thrown
across the river and marchin