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N ew Years Day began with the British moving their guns forward to the edge of the plantation and firing in earnest on the Jackson Line, hoping to soften the defenses or open a gap for the army to breech in force.

Jackson’s headquarters at McCarty House was leveled and if not for watching the birth of a new foal in the stables, the general and his officers might well have been blown away with the building.

Redcoats lined the distant edge of the field like a bright red ribbon, cheering each time an explosion sent up founts of earth and rubble.

With Fonteyne in charge of the Baratarians, he ordered the twenty-four-pounders to fire high, at an elevation that would cause the shots to fall well short of the British line.

Noting the harmless spouts of earth damaging little more than the American’s pride, the British cheered even louder and hurled insults across the field.

The officers in charge of the artillery gleefully ordered their guns to be moved a hundred yards closer, at which time, Fonteyne not only corrected the elevation on the lighter long guns but ordered the heavy thirty-fours into action.

Lured into the ideal target zone, the British lost thirteen guns and four wagon loads of powder casks and shot. The exploding wagons caused confusion and panic, resulting in scores of wounded men and fifty dead.

While the Line suffered some minor damage from the English bombardment, it was not the victory Packenham likely hoped to achieve.

After three hours of fighting and having done little more than disturb clods of dirt from the earthworks, he ordered the army to withdraw back to the Villere encampment.

There, he vowed in terms that sent his officers cringing under the tirade, that the next time they crossed that field the city would run red with American blood.

Eight days later in pre-dawn darkness and heavy fog, three Choctaw scouts came running into Jackson’s headquarters from three different directions, bringing word that the British army was in motion.

Two battalions had crossed the Mississippi during the night, marching upriver on the west bank, and it was not difficult to anticipate their goal.

Jackson was worried, because they had concentrated their heaviest defenses on the Rodriguez Line and if the British attacked in force and captured the guns protecting Jackson’s right flank, they could then use those same guns to attack the main American force from behind.

With scant warning, Jackson moved five hundred militia from the central lines to reinforce the right bank.

He also sent the order to the Cygnet to blow the levee and flood the canal road as well as the plantation field.

Billy Burr unleashed a concentrated barrage of ten guns at the wall, opening a gap wide enough for the river to burst through like a tidal wave.

Within minutes the water was a foot deep and the fields had become a four-hundred-yard-wide stretch of ankle-twisting mud.

As dawn approached, a signal rocket was launched from the British line lighting a red arc through the fog.

Moments later, their artillery opened up on two fronts.

The battalions that had succeeded in moving upriver during the night began firing on the American defenses across the river.

As luck would have it, when they launched their boats to make the crossing, they sorely underestimated the strength of the current.

While their field guns kept up a steady bombardment, many of the boats they had laboriously transported through the night were carried a thousand yards further downriver than their intended landing.

At the same time, a second force of light infantry was marching up the east bank of the river on the canal road.

The gun crews on board the Cygnet as well as the Louisiana began bombarding the riverbank, the canal, as well as the plantation field.

A larger artillery attack was centred on the earthworks of the Jackson Line, where the British hoped to soften the defenses in advance of the main infantry assault.

From the top of the ramparts, Jackson, Fonteyne, and Lamb had a clear view of the undulating lines of red uniforms amassing on the far side of the field.

All three knew the sheer number of soldiers advancing on them was staggering.

Jackson had slightly over two thousand men facing off against eight thousand seasoned British troops.

The British artillery, while fierce and thunderous, did almost as much damage to the now flooded fields as to the earthworks.

After an hour of pummelling the American line, the sodden earth was churned up which made it difficult, once the order was given for the Foot regiments to advance, to slog through ankle deep, uneven ground.

Adding to the confusion, the company that was supposed to carry the ladders and fascines needed to scale the ramparts, had advanced empty handed, having been told the wrong location to find the ladders.

When they ran back to fetch the equipment, the soldiers advancing behind them thought the army was in retreat and stopped where they were, less than six hundred yards from the American guns in the prime killing zone.

Fonteyne and Jackson observed this through long-glasses, and had the Baratarians load the cannon with chain shot and ball shot which raked through the red lines with merciless effect.

The British soldiers, mired in the mud, still attempted to march forward in straight, disciplined lines, but they soon became fodder for the privateer’s guns …

guns that made no distinction between soldier and officer.

On board the Cygnet , the air screamed with the volleys of shots exchanged between ship and shore.

Rose stalked up and down the length of the main deck, ignoring the exploding rails and cracking yards overhead.

Her path crossed with Billy’s and together they encouraged the crews to shoot at will.

The best marksmen were sent up into the tops to fend off the boats full of soldiers that had been carried downriver by the current.

Rose could hear the cannon booming from the grounded Louisiana and she could hear the distant, rolling waves of thunder from the guns pounding at both sides on the main battlefield.

One hour …two … three … and she was soaked head to foot in sweat.

The air was thick and hot with smoke, burning eyes and lungs.

Great white clouds of it hung over the river, hung over the land reducing visibility.

Billy began to worry they would run short of ammunition.

Two of the long guns had cracked under the pressure of repeated firing and they had expended all but one of the sixty-pound shots blasted out of the belly of the Beast. The canal road was torn to shreds.

The river continued to rush through the gap in the levee making it difficult for the British to pass, and soon it became obvious they were no longer trying to do so.

In fact, what troops they could see through the haze on either bank of the river appeared to be moving south.

“Retreating … or regrouping?” Billy asked, her voice hoarse from shouting.

Rose shook her head. “I don’t know. Is it possible? Could they possibly be pulling back? And if so …does that mean …?”

The question was cut short as a scream from an incoming shot smashed through the rail behind them, blowing both Rose and Billy off their feet.

Sebastien Fonteyne prowled the top of the ramparts like a big black cat.

His gunners were working furiously to answer the heavy British guns, but the rifle brigades had not yet been given the order to open fire.

Jackson had commanded them to wait, to hold off expending ammunition needlessly until the advancing infantry was within range.

The men on the line sweated profusely intimidated by the thick wall of redcoats coming closer and closer.

They crouched behind bales of hay and timber planks, looking to Fonteyne, looking to Jackson, waiting, waiting for the order …

“I know you’re impatient, boys,” Jackson shouted as he paced back and forth. “But wait … wait until you see the whites of their eyes and make every shot count!”

Jean Lafitte, in command of a battalion of guns next to Fonteyne, cursed in every language he knew and some that were made up upon the moment. He had long since taken his hat off his head and stomped it into the ground, and the cigar he clenched between his teeth was chewed to shreds.

Rodney Lamb wiped sweaty palms on his trousers and kept glancing at Jackson, but he had fought under the general before and trusted his instincts.

Mostly. But the sea of red kept coming despite the carnage created by the cannon, despite the fact that even if the soldiers reached the ramparts, they would have no means of clearing the ditch and climbing the ten-foot high redoubt.

When the front line of infantry was ordered to break rank and charge, Jackson waited until they had almost reached the ditch at the base of the rampart before he nodded and calmly said, “ Now ! Now , boys, give them hell!”

The order rippled down both sides of the Line and the men with muskets rose over the barricade to start firing ruinous volleys down at the advancing infantry.

Women crouched beside the men, loading and firing alongside, barely having to aim with the soldiers so close.

Those shot down in the front ranks created obstacles for the redcoats behind with the result that many stumbled and fell, some choosing to hide behind the bodies of their fallen comrades.

The few who made it as far as the wall were easily picked off by the Americans firing from the top of the ramparts.

Without ladders, the soldiers tried carving steps into the earthworks with their bayonets, but when that failed, when men were screaming and dying all around them, the soldiers turned and started running back across the field, shouting a warning to others that it was hopeless, to save themselves and retreat.

Adding to the confusion, most the officers had been cut down alongside their men.

Packenham was shot dead out of his saddle, as was Keane.

A troop of Highlanders, mired in the mud, had been decimated by half before a junior officer screamed a command for the drummers to beat out the retreat.

Like a wave pulling back from shore, the soldiers peeled away and staggered back across the field.

Wounded were helped to their feet and dragged or carried back.

Men wept and reloaded as they ran, pausing to turn and fire in an effort to defend the retreating army.

One of the badly wounded soldiers, propped on a knee in the muck, managed to raise his musket to his shoulder.

He desperately searched for a target and found one in the tall, black-clad devil who leaped on top of a bale of hay to encourage his gunners to keep firing through the chaos.

Seconds before the soldier died, he saw his shot strike the bastard high on his chest, sending him cartwheeling back off the bale of hay to fall out of sight.