On the seventeenth of August, I was ordered to take two invalids into the general hospital, and after giving them up to the doctor, I was returning to my residence: eight hundred men arrived a few days before, from Great Britain, called the British volunteers, under the command of Colonel Burrel. The men, who were drinking in the town, saw me passing, and called out to me to come and take a glass of wine. Accordingly I went in with them, and I stopped during the night; early on the following morning (the eighteenth), I heard a gun fire from the battery; they asked me what was the meaning of that gun firing. I told them I thought it was something going to turn up that day, and in a very short period. The battery guns were in full play, I shook hands with them, and made off to where our company lay; when I arrived, the captain asked me where I had been; I told him I had been to the general hospital with two invalids. He said, “Look sharp up into the room and get your accoutrements on,” but when I came into the room they were all taken away and put into the quarter-master’s stores; I came down and informed the captain, then ran over to the quarter-master’s stores, and looked about for my accoutrements, but could not discover them; I picked up an old kit of belts that had not had a bit of pipeclay on them for months; I lifted an old firelock and a bayonet, they were very rusty; I looked into the pouch to see if there was any ammunition, and found it was empty; I went over to the barrel where the ammunition was kept, and filled my pouch with sixty rounds, and forty in an old haversack I lifted; I then made my way out to the company as soon as I could. The battalion was all ready to march off--we proceeded over a gully into the field of action, the battalion companies formed lines, and the light company in skirmishing order; the bugle sounded to commence fire, I primed, and found she was loaded, she flashed in the pan,--I tried her again, and she flashed in the pan again; I said to my next man, “Lend me your worm to draw the charge;” I stooped down behind a lot of stones, thinking I could not get shot while drawing the charge; I sprang the ramrod, and she was all right, I loaded her, and she flashed in the pan again; she was so foul that she would not go off; I lifted her by the muzzle, hit the butt of her on a rock, and broke her short in two, for I was so agitated, thinking I was not going to get a shot at the enemy. I advanced about three hundred yards, when I discovered three sergeants of the enemy lying dead; I lifted one of their fuzees, and tried her to see if she was loaded; she was discharged, but I soon charged her, and she went off most beautifully. I fired sixty-three rounds, and she did not miss fire once.