Day after day Prevost’s armistice kept the British helpless, while supplies and reinforcements for the Americans poured in at every advantageous point.  Brock was held back from taking either Sackett’s Harbour, which was meanwhile being strongly reinforced from Ogdensburg, or Fort Niagara, which was being reinforced from Oswego, Procter was held back from taking Fort Wayne, at the point of the salient angle south of Lake Michigan and west of Lake Erie—­a quite irretrievable loss.  For the moment the British had the command of all the Lakes.  But their golden opportunity passed, never to return.  By land their chances were also quickly disappearing.  On September 1, a week before the armistice ended, there were less than seven hundred Americans directly opposed to Brock, who commanded in person at Queenston and Fort George.  On the day of the battle in October there were nearly ten times as many along the Niagara frontier.

The very day Brock heard that the disastrous armistice was over he proposed an immediate attack on Sackett’s Harbour.  But Prevost refused to sanction it.  Brock then turned his whole attention to the Niagara frontier, where the Americans were assembling in such numbers that to attack them was out of the question.  The British began to receive a few supplies and reinforcements.  But the Americans had now got such a long start that, on the fateful 13th of October, they outnumbered Brock’s men four to one—­4,000 to 1,000 along the critical fifteen miles between the Falls and Lake Ontario; and 6,800 to 1,700 along the whole Niagara river, from lake to lake, a distance of thirty-three miles.  The factors which helped to redress the adverse balance of these odds were Brock himself, his disciplined regulars, the intense loyalty of the militia, and the ‘telegraph.’  This ‘telegraph’ was a system of visual signalling by semaphore, much the same as that which Wellington had used along the lines of Torres Vedras.

The immediate moral effects, however, were even more favourable to the Americans than the mere physical odds; for Prevost’s armistice both galled and chilled the British, who were eager to strike a blow.  American confidence had been much shaken in September by the sight of the prisoners from Detroit, who had been marched along the river road in full view of the other side.  But it increased rapidly in October as reinforcements poured in.  On the 8th a council of war decided to attack Fort George and Queenston Heights simultaneously with every available man.  But Smyth, the American general commanding above the Falls, refused to co-operate.  This compelled the adoption of a new plan in which only a feint was to be made against Fort George, while Queenston Heights were to be carried by storm.  The change entailed a good deal of extra preparation.  But when Lieutenant Elliott, of the American Navy, cut out two British vessels at Fort Erie on the 9th, the news made the American troops so clamorous for an immediate invasion that their general, Van Rensselaer, was afraid either to resist them or to let their ardour cool.