Meantime the Narragansetts annulled the treaty they had been forced to make with the colonists. Their chief, Canonchet, not only received Philip and his Wampanoags, but aided them in constructing a strong fortification in an immense swamp, near what is now South Kingston, Rhode Island. It was on high ground near the center of the swamp, including several acres. The walls were an impenetrable hedge, with palisades and breast-works. Here they constructed five hundred log houses, almost bulletproof. The only entrance was by means of a bridge, over deep water, consisting of the trunk of a large tree, along which persons were forced to walk in single file. As this bridge was also flanked by a blockhouse, the whole plan of the place was an admirable proof of Philip's genius for war. Three thousand warriors under the command of Philip and Canonchet soon assembled at this rendezvous, where they were attacked by the colonists on the morning of December 19, having been guided to the fallen tree by a treacherous Narragansett Indian. As the English rushed to cross this narrow bridge, they were instantly cut down by Philip's sharpshooters. Others promptly took their places only to share their fate. In a few moments six captains and a large number of their men were dead or struggling in the ditch. A few crossed the tree and reached the enclosure, only to fall pierced by the balls of the savages within. At last, Captain Church, the hero of this war, with thirty picked men, forced an entrance into the fort at a point in the rear, not so strongly defended. In a moment they were supported by hundreds more. Once within the enclosure the real struggle was but commenced. The shrieks of the savages mingled with the roar of musketry. "It was," as Augustus Lynch Mason says, "the great struggle of New England. On the one hand fought three thousand Indian warriors, inspired by every feeling of patriotism, hatred, revenge, the sense of oppression, and love for their families. They fought for their native land. On the other were the colonists, the offspring of an age of intolerance and fanaticism, of war and revolution. Exiled from their native land, these men of iron had wrought out for themselves rude homes in the wilderness. Unless they could maintain their settlements in New England against the savages there was no place under the bending sky where they might live in liberty and peace. The inhospitable earth would disown her children. So they fought, nerved by the thought of wife and child, by the memory of the past, by the hopes of the future."