our front were broken, and we dashed through. But we were again hemmed
in, and again it was fought hand to hand, with that degree of
determination, which the assurance that life and death were on the
issue, could alone produce. There cannot be a doubt that we should have
fallen to a man, had not the arrival of fresh troops at this critical
juncture turned the tide of affairs. As it was, little more than a third
part of our picquet survived, the remainder being either killed or
taken; and both Charlton and myself, though not dangerously, were
wounded. Charlton had received a heavy blow upon the shoulder, which
almost disabled him; whilst my neck bled freely from a thrust, which the
intervention of a stout leathern stock alone hindered from being fatal.
But the reinforcement gave us all, in spite of wounds and weariness,
fresh courage, and we renewed the battle with alacrity.

In the course of the struggle in which we had been engaged, we had been
borne considerably out of the line of our first position, and now found
that the main-road and the picquet of the rifles, were close in our
rear. We were still giving way--for the troops opposed to us could not
amount to less than fifteen hundred men, whilst the whole force on our
part came not up to one hundred--when Captain Harris, major of brigade
to Colonel Thornton, came up with an additional company to our support.
Making way for them to fall in between us and the rifles, we took ground
once more to the right, and driving back a body of the enemy, which
occupied it, soon recovered the position from which we had been
expelled. But we did so with the loss of many brave men, and, among
others, of Captain Harris. He was shot in the lower part of the belly at
the same instant that a musket-ball struck the hilt of his sword, and
forced it into his side. Once more established in our ditch, we paused,
and from that moment till the battle ceased to rage we never changed
our attitude.