Soon after nine o’clock a distant and harmless fire of small-arms began on the slopes of Mount Defiance.  It came from a party of Indians who had just arrived with Sir William Johnson, and who, after amusing themselves in this manner for a time, remained for the rest of the day safe spectators of the fight.  The soldiers worked undisturbed till noon, when volleys of musketry were heard from the forest in front.  It was the English light troops driving in the French pickets.  A cannon was fired as a signal to drop tools and form for battle.  The white uniforms lined the breastwork in a triple row, with the grenadiers behind them as a reserve, and the second battalion of Berry watching the flanks and rear.

Meanwhile the English army had moved forward from its camp by the saw-mill.  First came the rangers, the light infantry, and Bradstreet’s armed boatmen, who, emerging into the open space, began a spattering fire.  Some of the provincial troops followed, extending from left to right, and opening fire in turn; then the regulars, who had formed in columns of attack under cover of the forest, advanced their solid red masses into the sunlight, and passing through the intervals between the provincial regiments, pushed forward to the assault.  Across the rough ground, with its maze of fallen trees whose leaves hung withering in the July sun, they could see the top of the breastwork, but not the men behind it; when, in an instant, all the line was obscured by a gush of smoke, a crash of exploding firearms tore the air, and grapeshot and musket-balls swept the whole space like a tempest; “a damnable fire,” says an officer who heard them screaming about his ears.  The English had been ordered to carry the works with the bayonet; but their ranks were broken by the obstructions through which they struggled in vain to force their way, and they soon began to fire in turn.  The storm raged in full fury for an hour.  The assailants pushed close to the breastwork; but there they were stopped by the bristling mass of sharpened branches, which they could not pass under the murderous cross-fires that swept them from front and flank.  At length they fell back, exclaiming that the works were impregnable.  Abercromby, who was at the saw-mill, a mile and a half in the rear, sent order to attack again, and again they came on as before.

The scene was frightful:  masses of infuriated men who could not go forward and would not go back; straining for an enemy they could not reach, and firing on an enemy they could not see; caught in the entanglement of fallen trees; tripped by briers, stumbling over logs, tearing through boughs; shouting, yelling, cursing, and pelted all the while with bullets that killed them by scores, stretched them on the ground, or hung them on jagged branches in strange attitudes of death.  The provincials supported the regulars with spirit, and some of them forced their way to the foot of the wooden wall.