It is impossible to imagine the disorder and confusion that I found in the hornwork.[Q] The dread and consternation was general. M. de Vaudreuil listened to everybody, and was always of the advice of he who spoke last. No order was given with reflection and with coolness, none knowing what to order or what to do. When the English had repulsed the two hundred Canadians that had gone up the height at the same time that I came down from it, pursuing them down to the bakehouse, our men lost their heads entirely; they became demoralized, imagining that the English troops, then at the bakehouse, would in an instant cross the plain and fly over the St. Charles river into the hornwork as with wings. It is certain that when fear once seizes hold of men it not only deprives them totally of their judgment and reflection, but also of the use of their eyes and their ears, and they become a thousand times worse than the brute creation, guided by instinct only, or by that small portion of reason which the author of nature has assigned it, since it preserves the use of it on all occasions. How much inferior to them do the greater portion of mankind appear, with their boasted reason, when reduced to madness and automata, on occasions when they require the more the use of their reason. The hornwork had the River St. Charles before it, about seventy paces broad, which served it better than an artificial ditch; its front, facing the river and the heights, was composed of strong, thick, and high palisades, planted perpendicularly, with gunholes pierced for several pieces of large cannon in it; the river is deep and only fordable at low water, at a musket shot before the fort. This made it more difficult to be forced on that side than on its other side of earthworks facing Beauport, which had a more formidable appearance; and the hornwork certainly on that side was not in the least danger of being taken by the English, by an assault from the other side of the river. On the appearance of the English troops on the plain of the bakehouse, Montguet and La Motte, two old captains in the Regiment of Bearn, cried out with vehemence to M. de Vaudreuil, "that the hornwork would be taken in an instant, by an assault, sword in hand; that we would be all cut to pieces without quarter, and that nothing else would save us but an immediate and general capitulation of Canada, giving it up to the English."