A full garrison for Fort Warren would be not far from twenty-five hundred men, and that number could be quartered in the casemates.
Above these buildings are the ramparts, on which the chief part of the armament is placed, and these ramparts are walled in by a parapet of about five feet in height, of very thick masonry, intended to protect the men while working the guns, from the fire of an enemy. These ramparts are now provided with a full armament of ten inch and fifteen inch guns, placed as near together as convenience in working would permit, but in our day the greater part of the guns were four inch and thirty-two pounders, the casemate battery alone, consisting of eight inch columbiads.
The entire equipment of the Fort comprises over three hundred of these heavy guns, of which some seventy may always be concentrated upon any one point of the channel which they defend. Outside, and immediately surrounding the walls of the casemated fort is a fosse, or ditch, some fifty feet in width, and outside of this are other defences, (which outwardly, are earthworks,) including an exterior curtain on the north, a ravelin on the south, and a water battery on the northwest, the whole composing in fact a fortress of great strength, even in these days of iron-clads and great guns.
To one who thoroughly explores the Island there will recur vivid reminiscences of the mysterious castles of romance and of history. He will find here a sally-port, a postern, a drawbridge, and a portcullis. Here, too, are passages under ground and in the walls; turret staircases, huge vaulted apartments, and safe and dark dungeons, the ways to and through which may be set down upon the plans of the engineer corps, but are familiar to no living man. One can be easily bewildered among the crooks and turns, the ups and downs of the corridors, and it needs only a dark and windy night to make almost real the romantic descriptions of the Castle of Udolfo, with its clanging sounds of chains, its sweeping gusts of air, its strange moanings and howlings, and the startling noise of some sudden clang of a shutting door reverberating among the arches.
More than twelve years had passed since the 32d Regiment left Fort Warren for more stirring scenes, when the writer for the first time since that day, again visited the Island.