uter batteries command
approach to the walls, and along the narrow margin between the fort and
the lake earthworks have been thrown up, mounted with cannon elbowing
to the water's edge. Taking advantage of the elation over Dobbs' raid
on the schooners, Drummond plans a night assault on the 15th of August.
Rain had been falling in splashes all day. The fort trenches were
swimming like rivers, and it may be mentioned that Drummond's camp was
swimming too, boding ill for his men's health. One of the foreign
regiments was to lead {377} the assault round by the lake side, while
Drummond and his nephew rushed the bastions. It will be remembered
these foreign regiments of Napoleonic wars were composed of the
offscourings of Europe. The fighters were to depend "on bayonet alone,
giving no quarter." Splashing along the rain-soaked road in silence
and darkness, scaling ladders over shoulders, bayonets in hand, the
foreign troops came to the earthwork elbowing out into the lake. This
was passed by the men wading out in the lake to their chins; but the
noise was overheard by the fort sentry, and a perfect blaze of musketry
shattered the darkness and drove the mercenaries back pellmell,
bellowing with terror. A few of the English and Canadian troops
pressed forward, only to find that they could not reach within ladder
distance of the walls at all, for spiked trees had been placed above
the trenches in a perfect crisscross hurdle of sharpened ends. In old
letters of the period one reads how the trenches were literally heaped
with a jumbled mass of the dead. The other attacking columns fared
almost as badly. One of the bastions had been entered by the cannon
embrasures, Drummond, Junior, shouting to "give no quarter--give no
quarter," when, from the cross firing in the courtyards, the powder
magazine below this bastion was set on fire, and exploded with a
terrific crash, killing the assailants almost to a man. In
all,--killed, wounded, missing,--the assault cost Drummond's army nine
hundred men. September proved a rainy month. Drummond's camp became
almost a marsh, and the health of the troops compelled a move to higher
ground. It was then the Americans sallied out in assault. Neither
side could claim victory, but the skirmish cost each army more than
five hundred men. Sir James Yeo now comes sailing up Lake Ontario with
some of the sixteen thousand troops sent from England. The weather
became unfavorable to movement