This work, by command of Louis XV.
The advice of Cardinal Fleury, and direction of Count Asfield,
Shall endure for ever!"
Scarcely had I finished reading this, than an officer of our regiment called to me—
"Hallo! look out! stand back there!"
He had a match in his hand, which he applied to a train, and in one minute the whole fabric, with a tremendous concussion, rent, split, rose into the air amid a cloud of smoke, and vanished as it sank into the surf that boiled over it.
Two armed ships which lay in the inner basin we despatched to England, and eighteen others we burned or sunk filled with stones. On the people of Cherbourg a contribution of forty-four thousand livres was levied by beat of drum; and so rapidly did our miners and devastators do their work, that the whole place was a scene of melancholy ruin and desolation before the Count de Raymond could muster forces of the line sufficient to dislodge us, for France had then two armies in Germany.
Thus, all our troops were on board, and the whole armament ready for sea by the 17th of August; our total loss, after having destroyed, what was styled in the prints of the day, "that most galling thorn in the side of British commerce," being only Captain Lindsay of the Scots Greys, and twenty-four others killed, some thirty wounded, and ten horses.
The whole army re-embarked without molestation at Fort Galette, about three o'clock in the morning.
The commodore, who had now, by the death of his brother, who fell at the head of the 55th Regiment in the disastrous affair of Ticonderoga, succeeded to the title of Viscount Howe, gave the signal for sea, and we sailed on the evening of the 17th for England. I was again on board his ship with the light troop of my regiment.
The destruction I had witnessed, and the distress and alarm of the poor unoffending people, sickened me of war for a time, and I felt happy when we bore up the Channel, though still haunted by memories of the land of Brittany, on which I should never look again—a land of stern and dreary mountains, of dark primæval forests, of rocky bluffs, of ruined castles and giant monoliths—the land where I loved so tenderly and endured so terribly.
On the 19th I saw Old England again, and the whole fleet came to anchor in Portland Roads.