All the time, whether in attack or retreat, the smoke continued to increase and to inflame and excite.  It was like a gas, its taste was acrid and bitter as death.  Robert coughed and tried to blow it away, but it returned in waves heavier than ever, and then he ceased to fight against it.

The British and American troops came again and again to the attack, their officers leading them on.  Never had they shown greater courage or more willingness to die.  When the first lines were cut down at the barrier, others took their places.  They charged into the vast mass of fallen trees and against the spikes.  Blinded by the smoke of so much firing, they nevertheless kept their faces toward the enemy and sought to see him.  The fierce cheering of the French merely encouraged them to new attempts.

The battle went on for hours.  It seemed days to Robert.  Mass after mass of British and Colonials continued to charge upon the wooden wall, always to be broken down by the French fire, leaving heaps of their dead among those logs and boughs and on that bristling array of spikes.  At last they advanced no more, twilight came over the field, the terrible fire that had raged since noon died, and the sun set upon the greatest military triumph ever won by France in the New World.

Twilight gathered over the most sanguinary field America had yet seen.  In the east the dark was already at hand, but in the west the light from the sunken sun yet lingered, casting a scarlet glow alike over the fallen and the triumphant faces of the victors.  Within the works where the French had stood fires were lighted, and everything there was brilliant, but outside, where so much valor had been wasted, the shadows that seemed to creep out of the illimitable forest grew thicker and thicker.

The wind moaned incessantly among the leaves, and the persistent smoke that had been so bitter in the throat and nostrils of Robert still hung in great clouds that the wind moved but little.  From the woods came long, fierce howls.  The wolves, no longer frightened by the crash of cannon and muskets, were coming, and under cover of bushes and floating smoke, they crept nearer and nearer.

Robert sat a long time, bewildered, stunned.  The incredible had happened.  He had seen it with his own eyes, and yet it was hard to believe that it was true.  The great Anglo-American army had been beaten by a French force far less in numbers.  Rather, it had beaten itself.  That neglect to bring up the cannon had proved fatal, and the finest force yet gathered on the soil of North America had been cut to pieces.  A prodigious opportunity had been lost by a commander who stayed a mile and a half in the rear, while his valiant men charged to certain death.

Young Lennox walked stiffly a few steps.  No one paid any attention to him.  In the dark, and amid the joyous excitement of the defenders, he might have been taken for a Frenchman.  But he made no attempt, then, to escape.  No such thought was in his mind for the moment.  His amazement gave way to horror.  He wanted to see what was beyond the wooden wall where he knew the dead and wounded lay, piled deep among the logs and sharpened boughs.  Unbelievable it was, but it was true.  His own eyes had seen and his own ears had heard.  He listened to the triumphant shouts of the French, and his soul sank within him.