The sequel does not justify Sir Edward's optimism. The moment the English approach within two hundred yards of the General's line, a sheet of fire hisses all along. The English melt away like smoke. They break and run, seeking refuge in the cross ditches which drain the stubble lands. Once in the ditches, they are made to sit fast by the watchful hunting-shirt men, whose aim is death and who shoot at every exposed two square inches of English flesh and blood.
All day the English must crouch in the saving mud and water of those ditches, and it ruffles their self-regard. With darkness for a shield, Sir Edward brings them off. He explains the disaster to his staff by calling it a “reconnoissance.” General Keane also calls it a “reconnoissance”; but there is a satisfied grin on his war-worn face. Sir Edward has received a taste of the mettle of those “peasants,” and may now take a more tolerant, and less politely cynical, view of what earlier setbacks were experienced by General Keane. As for the seventy dead who lie, faces to the quiet stars, among the sugar stubble, they say nothing. And whether it be called a “reconnoissance” or a defeat matters little to them.
“What do you think of it?” asks Sir Edward of his friend, General Gibbs, as the two confer over a bottle of port.
“Sir Edward,” returns the General, “I should call a council of war.”
Sir Edward winces. It is too great an honor for the brother-in-law of Lord Wellington to pay a “Copper Captain” like the General. For all that he calls it; and the call assembles, besides Generals Gibbs and Keane, those saltwater soldiers, Admirals Cochrane, Codrington and Malcolm, and Captain Hardy whom Nelson loved. Sir John Burgoyne, the chief of the English engineers, is also there. The solemn debate lasts hours. The decision is to regard the General's position as “A walled and fortified place, to be reduced by regular and formal approaches.” Which is flattering to the General's engineering skill.
The council breaks up. The next morning Sir John Burgoyne commits a stroke of genius. He rolls out of the storehouses to the English rear countless hogsheads of sugar. Night sets in, foggy and black. Under its protecting cover, Sir John trundles his hundreds of hogsheads to a point not six hundred yards from the General's mud walls. Till daybreak the English work. They set the hogsheads on end--four close-packed thicknesses of them, two tier high. Ingenious portholes are left to receive the muzzles of the guns, and thirty cannon, which have been dragged through the cypress swamp from the fleet, are placed in position.