6. Care should be taken to join the attacks; that is, they should have communications, to the end that they may be able to support each other.
7. Never to advance a work, unless it be well supported; and for this reason, in the interval between the 2d and 3d place of arms, the besiegers should make, on both sides of the trenches, smaller places of arms, extending 40 or 50 toises in length, parallel to the others, and constructed in the same manner, which will serve to lodge the soldiers in, who are to protect the works designed to reach the third place of arms.
8. Take care to place the batteries of cannon in the continuation of the faces of the parts attacked, in order to silence their fire; and to the end that the approaches, being protected, may advance with great safety and expedition.
9. For this reason the besiegers shall always embrace the whole front attacked, in order to have as much space as is requisite to place the batteries on the produced faces of the works attacked.
10. Do not begin the attack with works that lie close to one another, or with rentrant angles, which would expose the attack to the cross fire of the enemy.
Stores required for a month’s Siege are as follows:
| Powder, as the garrison is more or less strong | 8 or 900,000 lb. | ||||||
| Shot | - | for battering pieces | 6000 | ||||
| of a lesser sort | 20,000 | ||||||
| Battering cannon | 80 | ||||||
| Cannons of a lesser sort | 40 | ||||||
| Small field-pieces for defending the lines | 20 | ||||||
| Mortars for throwing | - | shells | 24 | ||||
| stones | 12 | ||||||
| Shells for mortars | 15 or 16,000 | ||||||
| Hand-grenades | 40,000 | ||||||
| Leaden bullets | 180,000 | ||||||
| Matches in braces | 10,000 | ||||||
| Flints for musquets, best sort | 100,000 | ||||||
| Platforms complete for guns | 100 | ||||||
| Platforms for mortars | 60 | ||||||
| Spare | - | carriages for guns | 60 | ||||
| mortar-beds | 60 | ||||||
| spunges, rammers, and ladles, in sets | 20 | ||||||
| Tools to work in trenches | 40,000 | ||||||
Several hand-jacks, gins, sling-carts, travelling forges, and other engines proper to raise and carry heavy burdens; spare timber, and all sorts of miner’s tools, mantlets, stuffed gabions, fascines, pickets, and gabions.
SIENS, Fr. The plural of sien, his, her’s or one’s own. This word is used among the French, to signify the same as gens, men, people, soldiers; viz. ce général fut abandonné par les siens. That general was abandoned by his own soldiers.
SIEVE, an instrument, which by means of hair, lawn, or wire, is capable of separating the fine from the coarse parts of any powder. See [Gunpowder], [Laboratory], &c.