“See! through the dim and shadowy forests,
They like deadly serpents creep—
Mark the cruel light in their devilish eyes,
As our frail defence they sweep!
Steady, brothers; comrades, aim low and sure,
Let every good missile tell!
Rain sure on the malignant Iroquois
A consuming fire of hell!”
And they opened then with crash and flame,
And wild, savage cries of pain
Pierced through the roar of the musketoons;
Swift again, and yet again,
Sure volleys burst, hurling death, dismay,
The old gray redoubt around,
And the withering fire from that brave band
Struck many a red fiend down.
For five long days the Iroquois
Swarmed around that frail redoubt,
Repulsed again, aye, and yet again.
Worn by hunger, thirst and doubt,
And want of sleep, the Frenchmen prayed,
And fought with valiant might
Through long, frightful days of carnage
And the horrors of the night.
Iroquois reinforcements now arrived
And the Hurons, in dismay
At the dreadful, inevitable result,
In desertion fled away.
For three days longer seven hundred foes
Beleaguered that frail redoubt,
Defied by the score of dauntless youths,
Still barring the red fiends out
By a ceaseless fire of the musketoons;
Keeping their post night and day
With the unyielding courage of despair,
Holding the red scourge at bay.
And, reeling in uttermost weariness,
Realizing their doom is sealed,
They can but die in the unequal strife,
But must not—no, must not yield!
The Iroquois, covered by wooden shields,
Rushed up to the palisades;
Up swift from the river’s concealing banks,
And sheltering forest glades.
Crouching below the fire of musketoons,
They furiously cut away
Post after post of the frail palisades
That held them so long at bay.
Firing through the loops on their pent-up foes,
Tearing a breach in the walls,
They swarm within with ferocious joy;
But many a red fiend falls
By desperate sweep of the Frenchmen’s steel,
Deliv’ring lightning blows;
Asking no quarter, and receiving none,
From cruel, insatiate foes.
Thus selling their lives in a noble cause,
Not one of the French are spared;
But hundreds of unsparing Iroquois
Their gory death-bed shared.
Thus checked was the advance of the Iroquois
And Canada was saved
By as heroic an act of devotion
As war’s annals ever gave.
And the defence of the Long Sault passage
Shall nevermore fade away;
All time shall honor the heroic defence—
Canada’s Thermopylæ!
Pause, Canadians! pause by this spot—
Seek the Long Sault’s rapid flow—
Call back the famed scene enacted here
Two hundred long years ago.