Jackson chose a line two miles above the battlefield, marked by a shallow canal or ditch which crossed the plain at its narrowest point, from the swamp to the river. Behind the ditch he threw up a parapet. In some places cotton bales were used, for the soil was but three feet deep; at that depth one found water, as indeed one found water almost everywhere,--in the foggy air, in the bayous, the river, the swamps, of that low land about New Orleans. In a few days Jackson's arrangements for defence were completed. Fifteen guns were disposed at intervals along the line, some of them manned by Lafitte and his buccaneers. The whole force numbered about three thousand, and the Kentuckians, though not all armed, were used as a reserve. On the river the Louisiana and the Carolina gave the enemy much trouble. The British army, when completely disembarked, seemed to justify the Duke of Wellington's confidence that it could rout any American army he ever heard of. Seven thousand trained British soldiers, seamen, and marines, and a thousand West Indian blacks, were assembled at Villere's plantation, with from twenty-five to thirty guns. There were regiments which had helped Wellington to win Talavera, Salamanca, and Vitoria, and within a few short months some of these same regiments were to stand at Waterloo in that thin red line which Ney and Napoleon's guard could never break. Their general, Pakenham, Wellington's brother-in-law, was a distinguished pupil of his illustrious kinsman. Could frontiersmen who had never fought together before, who had never seen the face of a civilized foe, withstand the conquerors of Napoleon? But two branches of the same stubborn race were represented on that little watery plain. The soldiers trained to serve the strongest will in the Old World were face to face with the rough and ready yeomanry embattled for defence by the one man of the New World whose soul had most of iron in it. It was Salamanca against Tohopeka, discipline against individual alertness, the Briton of the little Isle against the Briton of the wastes and wilds. But there was one great difference. Wellington, "the Iron Duke," was not there; "Old Hickory" was everywhere along the American lines. A grave and moderate historian, comparing the defense of New Orleans with the defence of Washington, finds the two situations not unlike. "The principal difference," he remarks, "was that Jackson commanded."