76 PREMATURE EXPLOSION OF THE MINE. 



subsequently my brothers William and Charles, had 

 followed me to Kiel and Friedrichsort to prepare 

 the firing communication, to enable the mine to be 

 exploded in case of an attempted storming of the 

 ramparts. 



The ships had no\v really approached within 

 range. My three serviceable cannons were manned 

 and the oven for heating the balls in full activity, 

 I prohibited firing, however, before the ships forced 

 the entrance. The rest of the men I had collected 

 in the fortress-yard to distribute them and exhort 

 them to bravery, when suddenly before the fort-gate 

 rose a vast fire -sheaf. I felt a violent compression 

 succeeded by a violent expansion of the chest: the 

 first sensation was accompanied by the clatter of 

 broken window-panes, and the second by the elevation 

 of the tiles of all the roofs to the height of a foot 

 and their subsequent fall with a dreadful din. 



Of course it could only be the mine, whose ex- 

 plosion had produced the mischief. I thought at once 

 of my poor brother Fritz. I ran to the gate to look 

 after him, but before I reached it he met me uninjured. 

 He had prepared the mine, set up the battery on the 

 terre-plein. connected the one igniting wire with the 

 one pole of the battery and fastened the other to the 

 branch of a tree to have it ready to hand, and was 

 about to announce this when the explosion occurred, 

 and the atmospheric pressure hurled him down from 

 the rampart into the interior of the fort. The rather 

 violent wind had shaken the second firing-wire from 



