end to end in a single row.  The line extended from the southern slopes of the hill on the left across a tract of rough ground to the marshes on the right.  The forest, choked with bushes and clumps of rank ferns, was within a few yards of the barricade, and there was scarcely time to hack away the intervening thickets.  Three cannon were planted to sweep the road that descended through the pines, and another was dragged up to the ridge of the hill.  The defeated party began to come in; first, scared fugitives both white and red, then, gangs of men bringing the wounded; and at last, an hour and a half after the first fire was heard, the main detachment was seen marching in compact bodies down the road.

Five hundred men were detailed to guard the flanks of the camp.  The rest stood behind the wagons or lay flat behind the logs and inverted bateaux, the Massachusetts men on the right, and the Connecticut men on the left.  Besides Indians, this actual fighting force was between sixteen and seventeen hundred rustics, very few of whom had been under fire before that morning.  They were hardly at their posts when they saw ranks of white-coated soldiers moving down the road, and bayonets that to them seemed innumerable glittering between the boughs.  At the same time a terrific burst of war-whoops rose along the front; and, in the words of Pomeroy, “the Canadians and Indians, helter-skelter, the woods full of them, came running with undaunted courage right down the hill upon us, expecting to make us flee."[310] Some of the men grew uneasy; while the chief officers, sword in hand, threatened instant death to any who should stir from their posts.[311] If Dieskau had made an assault at that instant, there could be little doubt of the result.

[Footnote 310:  Seth Pomeroy to his Wife, 10 Sept. 1755.]

[Footnote 311:  Dr. Perez Marsh to William Williams, 25 Sept. 1755.]

This he well knew; but he was powerless.  He had his small force of regulars well in hand; but the rest, red and white, were beyond control, scattering through the woods and swamps, shouting, yelling, and firing from behind trees.  The regulars advanced with intrepidity towards the camp where the trees were thin, deployed, and fired by platoons, till Captain Eyre, who commanded the artillery, opened on them with grape, broke their ranks, and compelled them to take to cover.  The fusillade was now general on both sides, and soon grew furious.  “Perhaps,” Seth Pomeroy wrote to his wife, two days after, “the hailstones from heaven were never much thicker than their bullets came; but, blessed be God! that did not in the least daunt or disturb us.”  Johnson received a flesh-wound in the thigh, and spent the rest of the day in his tent.  Lyman took command; and it is a marvel that he escaped alive, for he was four hours in the heat of the fire, directing and animating the men.  “It was the most awful day my eyes ever beheld,” wrote Surgeon Williams to