ob of the first
two campaigns into as admirable a weapon of offence and defence as
ever was handled by a general officer.

In July the little army of skeleton regiments, thus carefully drilled,
was ready for the invasion of Canada. On July 5th the fight at
Chippewa took place. The battle was practically between Scott's wing
of Brown's army and Riall's British troops, the numbers being almost
exactly equal. There was very little manoeuvring. After a tolerably
heavy artillery fire and some skirmishing between the light troops and
Indians on each side, in the woods, the British regulars and Scott's
American regulars advanced against each other in line across the
plain, occasionally halting to fire. It was noticed that the fire of
the Americans was the more deadly; their line was thinner and more
extended than that of the British. When within sixty or seventy paces
of one another the two sides charged; there was a clash of bayonets;
then the thinner American line, outflanking the more solid British
column, closed in at the extremities, and the British broke and fled
immediately.

This was not only a needed victory for the Americans, but it was the
first occasion for a generation that British regulars had been faced
in the open, on equal terms, with the bayonet and defeated. At this
very time the British had just brought to a close the terrible war
with the French in the Peninsula. Their troops had been pitted
successfully against the best marshals and the best troops of what was
undoubtedly the foremost military power of Continental Europe; and now
the American regulars, trained by Scott and under his leadership,
performed a feat which no French general and no French troops had ever
been able to place to the credit of their nation.

Three weeks later the British and American forces again came together
at the bloody battle of Lundy's Lane. The most desperate fighting on
this occasion took place during the night, the Americans and British
charging in turn with the bayonet, and the artillery of both sides
being captured and recaptured again and again. The Americans were
somewhat inferior in numbers to the British, and the slaughter was
very great, considering the number of men engaged, amounting to nearly
a third of the total of both forces. In the end the fight ceased from
exhaustion, the armies drawing off from one another and leaving the
field of battle untenanted; but the result was virtually a victory for
the British,