“Soldiers, this is the advance guard of the Irish-American army for the liberation of Ireland from the yoke of the oppressor. For the sake of your own country you enter that of the enemy. The eyes of your countrymen are upon you. Forward, march!”
Following this harangue they started off on their expedition with O’Neill at their head. Before leaving, O’Neill instructed Le Caron to bring to his support on their arrival a party of 400 men who were coming from St. Albans. The men marched with a certain amount of military precision for all of them had received some degree of military training. There is no doubt of the patriotic feelings that filled their hearts. In spite of the lack of uniformity, and possibly because of it, the scene was picturesque. Here and there a Fenian coat with its green and gray faced with gold sparkled in contrast with the civilian clothing and the more somber garb of the others.
Finally the volunteers reached a little wooden bridge and deployed as skirmishers in close order, advancing with fixed bayonets and cheering wildly. Not a soldier appeared to dispute their way, but the dark Canadian trees hid from their view the ambushed Canadian volunteers, who were only awaiting the signal to spring out upon the unsuspecting invaders.
All this time Le Caron, who had spent years of intimate association with many of the Irishmen and who was regarded as their friend and confidant, stood upon the hilltop to watch the inevitable slaughter. They advanced a few yards farther, and on their startled ears came the whistling sound of many bullets from the rifles of the ambushed Canadians as they poured a deadly volley straight into their ranks.
Little remains to be told. There was fierce fighting and terrible bloodshed, but the invaders were overcome by superior numbers and well disciplined troops. Finally they were forced to retreat up to the hill where Le Caron stood, still under the fire of their adversaries and leaving their dead to be subsequently buried by the Canadians.
Seeing that all was over, for the time at least, the spy had hurried off to the point where the St. Albans contingent had arrived and were forming. He actually took part in this ceremony, and while engaged in superintending it he was afforded, as he says, practical evidence of the termination of O’Neill’s part in the fight. While he was standing in the middle of the road where the men were forming into line, he was startled by the cry:
“Clear the road, clear the road!”
He was almost knocked down by a team of horses pulling a covered carriage, and as the conveyance flashed by him he caught through the carriage window a hurried glimpse of the dejected face of General O’Neill, who was seated between two men. He said in speaking of this that he might have given the command to shoot the horses as they turned an adjacent corner, but it was no part of his purpose to restore O’Neill to his command.
It became known later that O’Neill was in the custody of the United States Marshal, General Foster, who, acting under instructions from Washington, had arrived on the scene of the battle immediately after Le Caron left and arrested O’Neill on the charge of breaking the neutrality laws. O’Neill, who was in the company of his comrades, refused to surrender and threatened force, but when General Foster placed a revolver at his head he succumbed.
Late that afternoon when the news of O’Neill’s arrest became known, a council of war was held, presided over by John Boyle O’Reilly. On the following morning General Spear, the secretary of war of the Fenian Brotherhood, arrived at St. Albans and tried to do something practical in the way of continuing the invasion. He pleaded with Le Caron to supply him with 400 or 500 stands of arms and ammunition within the next twenty-four hours, but the spy felt that it would not do for him to allow further operations, and so he said that it would be impossible to grant the demands under the condition of affairs then prevailing. Thousands of Canadian troops had arrived on the border and were making the position of the Irish volunteers more precarious every moment.