The end of the drama came swiftly. The American and French entrenchments drew closer and closer to the British lines until they were only three hundred yards apart. Then, on October fourteenth, Lafayette’s men, led by Colonel Alexander Hamilton, charged the British works on the left, while the French grenadiers stormed a redoubt on the right. The outer works were won in this attack, which proved to be the last battle of the Revolution. The next night Cornwallis tried to cut his way out from Yorktown and escape across the York River to Gloucester. Watchful outposts drove him back. On October seventeenth a British drummer appeared on Yorktown’s ramparts and beat a parley. An American and a French officer met two British officers at a farmhouse, and articles of surrender were drawn up and accepted. Two days later, on October 19, 1781, the army of Cornwallis marched out of Yorktown and passed between the American and French troops, commanded respectively by Washington and Rochambeau. The French officer who had prepared the articles of surrender at the farmhouse was Lafayette’s brother-in-law, the Vicomte de Noailles, one of the two young men to whom Lafayette had taken the word that he meant to go “to America to fight for liberty!” Now the Vicomte saw that the ardent hopes of the young enthusiast had borne such glorious fruit! There stands a monument on the heights above the York River, in Virginia, and on one side of it are these words: “At York, on October 19, 1781, after a siege of nineteen days, by 5,500 American and 7,000 French Troops of the Line, 3,500 Virginia Militia under command of General Thomas Nelson and 36 French ships of war, Earl Cornwallis, Commander of the British Forces at York and Gloucester, surrendered his army, 7,251 officers and men, 840 seamen, 244 cannons and 24 standards to His Excellency George Washington, Commander in Chief of the Combined Forces of America and France, to His Excellency the Comte de Rochambeau, commanding the auxiliary Troops of His Most Christian Majesty in America, and to His Excellency the Comte de Grasse, commanding in chief the Naval Army of France in Chesapeake.” It was largely due to Lafayette that the French fleet and the army of Rochambeau had crossed the ocean and that the Americans in Virginia had succeeded in bottling up Cornwallis at Yorktown and so bringing an end to the Revolution. Close to Washington he must forever stand as one of the great men who won liberty for the United States! VIII THE MARQUIS AIDS THE UNITED STATES IN FRANCE