Arriving at Lacolle, it was not hard to see why the Americans had thought their plan would work. There was nothing to the place. Built on the north bank of a small river, there was no settlement as such, just a stone house, a stable and a sawmill. The blockhouse was the dominant feature. Squat and square and two storeys high, with firing slits cut into the thick log walls. There were unglazed windows with shutters for defence. The first storey overhung the ground floor and there were slits in the overhang floor so the defenders could fire down upon any attackers, not unlike a medieval donjon. Around the blockhouse was a small tented village and several crude huts; accommodation for extra troops and the auxiliaries, de Salaberry explained.

Originally, the post had been built to protect the sawmill as well as a signal beacon, sited to the east where the river flowed into the larger Richelieu River and which, in times of emergency could be used to alert the garrison at Île aux Noix.

So they wouldn’t have needed to ride there for help, Hawkwood thought. If there’d been time for someone to get to the beacon, they could have just lit a fire.

The post housed forty-five militia and twenty-three Mohawk auxiliaries, who might have been able to defend their position against three times their number, but to fend off four hundred attackers for any length of time would have been wishful thinking. What Quade hadn’t allowed for had been de Salaberry and his Voltigeurs and the other militia units and auxiliaries who’d been quartered in the nearby woods and on farms a couple of miles further along the Lacolle to Montreal road. The Americans’ intelligence had been lacking on every count.

The surgeon’s name was Brossard. Having returned to the post from visiting a militia captain with a broken leg, he turned his attention to the now conscious Lawrence in a hastily arranged surgery set up in the blockhouse. It wasn’t the worst field hospital Hawkwood had been in, by any stretch.

“God must have been looking down on you, Major,” the surgeon declared cheerfully as he examined the wound, grunting as his probing discovered the ball lodged only a centimetre beneath the skin. “I suspect most of its energy was spent on the journey from muzzle to muscle, which suggests either weak powder or else the shooter was at the limit of his range. If so, it was a remarkable shot,” he added admiringly, as he extracted the offending projectile with the aid of a small pair of forceps.

He looked equally fascinated when he was directed to the wounds in Lawrence’s abdomen, to which wads of congealed root and moss still adhered. To Hawkwood’s utter surprise, Brossard murmured in appreciation as he peeled away the poultices.