ee miles up the river. At four the next morning
Murray led them down to the fort, rushing the sentries
and pickets by the way with the bayonet in dead silence.
He then told off two hundred men to take a bastion at
the same time that he was to lead the other four hundred
straight through the main gate, which he knew would soon
be opened to let the reliefs pass out. Everything worked
to perfection. When the reliefs came out they were
immediately charged and bayoneted, as were the first
astonished men off duty who ran out of their quarters to
see what the matter was. A stiff hand-to-hand fight
followed. But every American attempt to form was instantly
broken up; and presently the whole place surrendered.
Drummond, who was delighted with such an excellent
beginning, took care to underline the four significant
words referring to the enemy's killed and wounded--_all
with the bayonet_. This was done in no mere vulgar spirit
of bravado, still less in abominable bloody-mindedness.
It was the soldierly recognition of a particularly gallant
feat of arms, carried out with such conspicuously good
discipline that its memory is cherished, even to the
present day, by the 100th, afterwards raised again as
the Royal Canadians, and now known as the Prince of
Wales's Leinster regiment. A facsimile of Drummond's
underlined order is one of the most highly honoured
souvenirs in the officers' mess.

Not a moment was lost in following up this splendid feat
of arms. The Indians drove the American militia out of
Lewiston, which the advancing redcoats burnt to the
ground. Fort Schlosser fell next, then Black Rock, and
finally Buffalo. Each was laid in ashes. Thus, before
1813 ended, the whole American side of the Niagara was
nothing but one long, bare line of blackened desolation,
with the sole exception of Fort Niagara, which remained
secure in British hands until the war was over.

CHAPTER VI

1814: LUNDY'S LANE, PLATTSBURG, AND THE GREAT BLOCKADE

In the closing phase of the struggle by land and sea the
fortunes of war may, with the single exception of
Plattsburg, be most conveniently followed territorially,
from one point to the next, along the enormous irregular
curve of five thousand miles which was the scene of
operations. This curve begins at Prairie du Chien, where
the Wisconsin joins the Mississippi, and ends at New
Orleans, where the Mississippi is about to join the sea.
It runs easterly along the Wisconsin, across to