The Imperialists in the meantime continued to advance with their trench. On the evening of the 5th of November it was fifteen hundred feet from the salient, and in the rear there was a pretty good _place d'armes_, surrounded by an epaulement with cannon at the angles and abatis of trees, at the foot of the bank. Every night the governor found means to disquiet the enemy, often at intervals of two or three hours, so as to keep him incessantly in alarm. Galas, in the meanwhile, had sent two pieces of ordnance to the right bank of the stream out of sight of the besieged, and on the 7th of November he mounted them on this bank so as to attack the front _à crémaillère_, K,[53] in the rear. The wooden bridge had been burned by the besieged, and the stone bridge barricaded and furnished with a cavalier on the left bank, which swept the right bank. Behind the houses of the western faubourg, Rincourt established a battery armed with three cannons, which had been taken from the arsenal during the night. On the morning of the 8th of November the houses which masked the three pieces having been thrown down, these guns opened their fire against the besieger's battery, which was soon silenced. [Illustration: FIG. 62.] That same day the trench was nine hundred feet from the outwork, and a second _place d'armes_ was commenced at this point (Fig. 62). The governor resolved to overthrow the enemy's works. At two o'clock in the morning he first sent out a troop of five hundred men to attack the _place d'armes_ on the west, while a second troop of two hundred men was to attack it on the east, and himself going out with four hundred men to continue the offensive, if the former had a chance of succeeding, or to protect its retreat. His men were armed with pikes, cutlasses, grenades, and pistols.