"Vive Papineau!"
"Down with British rule; death to old Colborne and his red-coats!"
Such were the shouts on one side; on the other, only the din of the heavy file firing, and at times that ringing united cheer, the import or instinct of which there is no mistaking.
By this time the smoke of the blazing presbytery had enveloped the whole church, which, as a wooden edifice, it was supposed would soon catch fire. Now Roland remembered the supposition of the French peasant, that Aurelia might be there, and we may imagine the sensations with which he beheld the dark smoke-wreaths eddying around its taper spire!
"Carry the church by storm!" was now the order of Sir John Colborne; and while a straggling fire was poured upon the column, from the house of the seigneur and others, Wetherall ordered his grenadiers—we had such soldiers still—to lead the van, the post of honour and peril being ever theirs by traditional right.
The blood of all the troops was fairly up, and as the column went forward surging and storming, and firing with the bayonets pointed upward at an angle, the soldiers of the Royal Regiment raised the shout of "Scotland for ever!"—a cri de guerre first used by the Greys at Waterloo, and last by the Duke of Albany's Highlanders at the storming of Kotah in 1858.
Pouring in by the shattered windows, leaping over every obstacle, and plunging like a torrent among the armed crowd within the church, the Royals made a terrible havoc, and among those who fought here was Roland, as yet untouched, and amid all the carnage and mad confusion around him, having but one thought in his heart.
At the same time, some other of the battalion companies, led by Major Ward and Captain Bell (afterwards Sir George and colonel of the regiment in 1868), a Peninsular officer who in this war commanded the fort and garrison of Coteau du Lac, an important post on the frontier, and received the thanks of Sir John Colborne for his exertions in recovering all the 24-pound guns and 4000 shot from the bottom of the river, and getting them in position amid the winter snows to face the rebels—led these and other officers we say, the rest of the Royals gradually fought their way into the church by the rear, and bayoneting all who resisted, set it on fire, and the corpses were consumed in the flames.
One hundred and eighteen men taken prisoners.
"Quartier! Quartier! Je me livre a vous!" (I yield myself up to you) was now the cry of the French colonists.