The following extract from a narrative of the British attack on New-Orleans by Capt. Cooke, late of the British army, will, perhaps, not be without interest to many of my readers.
"I do not remember ever looking for the first signs of day-break with more intense anxiety than on this eventful morning; every now and then I thought I heard the distant hum of voices, then again something like the doleful rustling of the wind before the coming storm, among the leaves of the foliage. But no; it was only the effect of the momentary buzzing in my ears; all was silent--the dew lay on the damp sod, and the soldiers were carefully putting aside their entrenching tools, and laying hold of their arms to be up and answer the first war-call at a moment's warning. How can I convey a thought of the intense anxiety of the mind, when a sombre silence is broken by the intonations of the cannon, and when the work of death begins? Now the veil of night was less obscured, and its murky mantle dissolved on all sides, and the mist sweeping off the face of the earth; yet it was not day, and no object was very visible beyond the extent of a few yards. The morn was chilly--I augured not of victory, an evil foreboding crossed my mind, and I meditated in solitary reflection. All was tranquil as the grave, and no camp-fires glimmered from either friends or foes.
Soon after this, two light companies of the seventh and ninety-third regiments came up without knapsacks, the highlanders with their blankets rolled and slung around their backs, and merely wearing the shell of their bonnets, the sable plumes of real ostrich feathers brought by them from the Cape of Good Hope, having been left in England. One company of the forty-third light infantry also followed, marching up rapidly. These three companies formed a compact little column of two hundred and forty soldiers, near the battery on the high road to New-Orleans. They were to attack the crescent battery near the river, and if possible to silence its fire under the muzzles of twenty pieces of cannon; at a point, too, where the bulk of the British force had hesitated when first they landed, and had recoiled from its fire on the twenty-eighth of last December, and on the first of January. I asked Lieut. Duncan Campbell where they were going, when he replied, "I'll be hanged if I know:" "then," said I, "you have got into what I call a good thing; a far-famed American battery is in front of you at a short range, and on the left of this spot is flanked, at 800 yards, by their batteries on the opposite bank of the river." At this piece of information he laughed heartily, and I told him to take off his blue pelisse-coat to be like the rest of the men. "No," he said gayly, "I will never peel for an American--come, Jack, embrace me." He was a fine young officer of twenty years of age, and had fought in many bloody encounters in Spain and France, but this was to be his last, as well as that of many more brave men. The mist was slowly clearing off, but objects could only be discerned at two or three hundred yards distance, as the morning was rather hazy; we had only quitted the battery two minutes, when a Congreve rocket was thrown up, whether from the enemy or not we could not tell; for some seconds it whizzed backward and forward in such a zigzag way, that we all looked up to see whether it was coming down upon our heads. The troops simultaneously halted, but all smiled at some sailors dragging a two-wheeled car a hundred yards to our left, which had brought up ammunition to the battery, who, by common consent, as it were, let go the shaft, and left it the instant the rocket was let off.--(This rocket, although we did not know it, proved to be the signal of attack.) All eyes were cast upward, like those of so many astronomers, to descry, if possible, what could be the upshot of this noisy harbinger, breaking in upon the solemn silence that reigned around. During all my military services I do not remember seeing a small body of troops thrown into such a strange configuration, having formed themselves into a circle, and halted, both officers and men, without any previous word of command, each man looking earnestly, as if by instinct of his imagination, to see in what particular quarter the anticipated firing would begin.