Those hogsheads of sugar, with the thirty black muzzles frowning forth, impress folk as a most formidable fortalice, when the upshooting sun rolls back the fog and offers a view of them. The General, however, does not hesitate; he instantly opens with his five, and the thirty guns of the English bellow their iron response. Hardly a whit behind the General, the active Commodore Patterson drops downstream with the _Louisiana_, and throws the weight of her broadsides against the English.
The big-gun duel is hot and furious, and the rolling clouds of powder smoke shut out the fighters from one another. They do not pause for that, but fire blindly through the smoke, sighting their guns by guess. When the smoke has cloaked the scene, Sir Edward orders two columns of the English foot to storm the General's mud walls.
The columns advance, and run headforemost into the hunting-shirt men. The sleety rain of lead which greets them rolls the columns up like two red carpets. The recoiling columns break, and the English take cover for a second time in those saving ditches. They declare among themselves that mortal man might more easily face the fires of hell itself, than the flame-filled muzzles of the hunting-shirt men, who seem to be Death's very agents upon earth.
As the broken English crouch in those ditches the fire of Sir John Burgoyne's big guns begins to falter. The smoke is so thick that no one may tell the cause. At last the English volleys altogether end, and the General orders Dominique and Bluche, with their swarthy pirate crews from Barrataria, and what other artillerists are serving his quintette of guns, to cease their stormy work. With that a silence falls on both sides.
The breeze from the river tears the smoky veil aside; and lo! that noble fortification of sugar hogsheads is heaped and piled in ruins. The General's solid shot go through and through those hogsheads of sugar, as though they are hogsheads of snow. Five of the thirty English guns are smashed. The proud work of Sir John Burgoyne presents a spectacle of desolation, while the English who serve the batteries go flying for their lives. Not all! The three-score dead remain--the only English whose honor is saved that day!