The Fort (17 page)

“I did? Then give me cause to preserve your exalted rank.”

“I shall do my best, sir.”

McLean led Fielding to the fort’s western rampart, which faced towards the high wooded bluff. It was ridiculous to call it a rampart, for it was still unfinished and a fit man could leap it easily. The ditch beyond was shallow and the pointed stakes in its bed would hardly delay the enemy for a moment. McLean’s men had begun work to heighten the wall at dawn, but the general knew he needed another week’s uninterrupted labor simply to make the ramparts high enough to deter an attack. He used his stick to help himself up the mound of logs and hard-packed soil that formed the rampart and stared across the harbor, beyond Mowat’s flotilla, to where the enemy warships were anchored in the bay. “No fog this morning, Captain.”

“None, sir.”

“God smiles on us, eh?”

“He is an Englishman, sir, remember?” Fielding suggested with a smile. Captain Michael Fielding was also an Englishman, an artilleryman in a dark blue coat. He was thirty years old, fair-haired, blue-eyed, and disconcertingly elegant, looking as if he would be far more at home in some London salon than in this American wilderness. He was the epitome of the kind of Englishman McLean instinctively disliked, he was too languid, too superior, and too handsome, but to McLean’s surprise Captain Fielding was also efficient, cooperative, and intelligent. He led fifty gunners and commanded a strange assortment of cannon: six-pounders, nine-pounders, and twelve-pounders; some on field carriages, a few on garrison carriages, and the rest on naval trucks. The guns had been scraped together from the depots in Halifax to form makeshift batteries, but then, McLean thought, everything about this expedition was makeshift. He did not have enough men, enough ships, or enough guns.

“Aye,” McLean said wistfully, “I would like an abatis.”

“If you can lend me forty men, sir?” Fielding suggested.

McLean thought about the request. He had almost two hundred men scattered in a picquet line guarding those places where the Yankees might attempt a landing. He reckoned the enemy’s approach to the bluff the previous evening had been just that, a bluff. They wanted him to think they would assault the peninsula’s western end, but he was certain they would choose either the harbor or the neck, and the neck was by far the likeliest landing place. Yet he had to guard all the possible landing places, and the picquets watching the shore consumed almost a third of his men. The rest were laboring to deepen the fort’s well and raise the fort’s walls, but if he were to grant Fielding’s request then he must detach some of those men, which meant slower progress on the vital ramparts. Yet the abatis was a good idea. “Will forty men be enough?”

“We’d need an ox team too, sir.”

“Aye, you will,” McLean said, but his ox teams were busy hauling material from the harbor’s beach, where most of Fielding’s guns were still parked.

McLean glanced at the twin bastions that flanked the fort’s western wall. So far he only had two guns mounted, which was a paltry defense. It would be easy enough to bring more guns into the fort, but the wall was now just at the height where those guns needed platforms, and platforms took time and men. “Where would you place the abatis?” he asked.

Fielding nodded westwards. “I’d cover that approach, sir, and the northern side.”

“Aye,” McLean agreed. An abatis curving around the west and north of the fort would obstruct any Yankee attack from either the bluff or the neck.

“Much of the timber’s already cut, sir,” Fielding said, attempting to persuade McLean.

“So it is, so it is,” McLean said distractedly. He beckoned the Englishman off the wall and across the ditch so they were out of earshot of the working parties that laid logs on top of the rampart. “Let me be frank with you, Captain,” McLean said heavily.

“Of course, sir.”

“There are thousands of the rebel rascals. If they come, Captain, and they will come, then I must suppose that two or three thousand will attack us. You know what that means?”

Fielding was silent for a few seconds, then nodded. “I do, sir.”

“I’ve seen enough war,” McLean said ruefully.

“You mean, sir, we can’t stand against three thousand men?”

“Oh, we can stand, Captain. We can give them a bloody nose, right enough, but can we defeat them?” McLean turned and gestured at the half-finished wall. “If that rampart was ten feet high I could die of old age inside the fort, and if we had a dozen guns mounted then I dare say we could defeat ten thousand men. But if they come today? Or tomorrow?”

“They’ll overrun us, sir.”

“Aye, they will. And that’s not cowardice speaking, Captain.”

Fielding smiled. “No one, sir, can accuse General McLean of cowardice.”

“I thank you, Captain,” McLean said, then stared west towards the high ground. The ridge rose gently, studded with the stumps of felled trees. “I’m being candid with you, Captain,” he went on. “The enemy is going to come, and we’re going to show defiance, but I don’t want a massacre here. I’ve seen that happen. I’ve seen men enraged to fury and seen them slaughter a garrison, and I did not come here to lead good young Scotsmen to an early grave.”

“I understand you, sir,” Fielding said.

“I hope you do.” McLean turned to look north where the cleared ground dropped away to the woods that screened the wide neck. That was where he thought his enemy would appear. “We’ll do our duty, Captain,” he said, “but I’ll not fight to the last man unless I see a chance of defeating the rascals. Enough mothers in Scotland have lost their sons.” He paused, then gave the artillery officer a smile, “But I’ll not surrender too easily either, so this is what we’ll do. Make your abatis. Start on the northern side, Captain. How many field-mounted guns do you have?”

“Three nine-pounders, sir.”

“Put them just outside the fort on the northeastern corner. You have case-shot?”

“Plenty, sir, and Captain Mowat’s sent some grape.”

“Well and good. So if the enemy comes from the north, which I think they will, you can give them a warm welcome.”

“And if they come this way, sir?” Fielding asked, pointing to the high western bluff.

“We lose our gamble,” McLean admitted. He hoped he had judged the tall Englishman right. A foolish man might construe the conversation as cowardice, even treasonable cowardice, but McLean reckoned Fielding was subtle and sensible enough to understand what had just been said. Brigadier Francis McLean had seen enough war to know when fighting was pointless, and he did not want hundreds of needless deaths on his conscience, but nor did he want to hand the rebels an easy victory. He would fight, he would do his duty, and he would cease to fight when he saw that defeat was inevitable. McLean turned back towards the fort, then suddenly remembered a matter that needed to be aired. “Have your rogues been stealing potatoes from Doctor Calef’s garden?” he asked.

“Not that I know of, sir.”

“Well someone has, and the doctor’s not happy!”

“Isn’t it early for potatoes, sir?”

“That won’t stop them! And doubtless they taste well enough, so tell your fellows I’ll be flogging the next man caught stealing the doctor’s potatoes. Or anyone else’s vegetables for that matter. Dear me, I do despair of soldiers. You could march them through heaven and they’d steal every last harp.” McLean gestured towards the fort. “Now let’s see if those eggs are cooked.”

There was a chance, McLean thought, just a slender chance that a rebel attack could be repulsed and Fielding’s proposed abatis would increase that chance a little. An abatis was simply an obstacle of rough timber; a line of big branches and untrimmed trunks. An abatis could not stop an assault, but it would slow an enemy attack as men sought a way through the tangle of timber and, as the Yankees bunched behind the web of branches, Fielding’s guns could hammer them with case-shot like giant shotguns. McLean would place the three nine-pounders on his right flank so that as the enemy came round the open space at the end of the abatis they would advance straight into the cannon-fire, and raw troops, inexperienced in war, would be cowed by such concentrated artillery fire. Maybe, just maybe, the abatis would give the guns time enough to persuade the enemy not to press home their attack. That was a slim chance, but if the Yankees came from the west, from the bluff, then McLean reckoned there was no chance at all. He simply did not have enough artillery and so he would greet them with shots from the two guns emplaced on the western ramparts and then submit to the inevitable.

Laird had poached eggs waiting on a table set in the open air. “And you have fried potatoes, sir,” he said happily.

“Potatoes, Laird?”

“New little potatoes, sir, fresh as daisies. And coffee, sir.”

“You’re a rogue, Laird, you’re an unprincipled damned rogue.”

“Yes, sir, I am, sir, and thank you, sir.”

McLean sat to his breakfast. He looked up at the flag that flew so bright in the day’s new light and wondered what flag would fly there as the sun set. “We must do our best,” he told Fielding, “and that’s all we can do. Our best.”

The marines would be attacking the British battery on Cross Island, which meant General Wadsworth could not use them in the assault on the bluff. “That really doesn’t signify,” Solomon Lovell had declared. “I’m sure the marines are very fine fellows,” he had told Wadsworth, “but we Massachusetts men must do the work! And we can do the work, upon my soul, we can!”

“Under your inspired leadership, General,” the Reverend Murray chimed in.

“Under God’s leadership,” Lovell had said reprovingly.

“The good Lord chooses His instruments,” Murray said.

“So this will be a victory for the militia alone,” Lovell had told Wadsworth.

And Wadsworth thought that perhaps Lovell was right. He felt that hope as he stood on the afterdeck of the sloop
Bethaiah
and listened to Major Daniel Littlefield talk to the men of the York County militia. “The redcoats are just boys!” Littlefield told his men. “And they’re not trained to fight the way we fight. Remember all those evenings on the training field? Some of you groused about that, you’d rather have been drinking Ichibod Flander’s spruce beer, but you’ll thank me when we’re ashore. You’re trained! And you’re better than any damned redcoat! They’re not cunning like you are, they don’t shoot as straight as you do, and they’re frightened! Remember that! They’re frightened young boys a long way from home.” Littlefield grinned at his men, then pointed at a bearded giant who crouched in the front row of his assembled troops. “Isaac Whitney, you tell me this. Why do British soldiers wear red?”

Whitney frowned. “Maybe so the blood don’t show?”

“No!” Littlefield cried. “They wear red to make themselves easy targets!” The men laughed. “And you’re all good shooters,” Littlefield went on, “and today you shoot for liberty, for your homes, for your wives, for your sweethearts, and so that none of us has to live under a foreign tyranny!”

“Amen to that,” a man called.

“No more taxes!” another man shouted.

“Amen to that!” Littlefield said. The York County captain exuded confidence, and Wadsworth, watching and listening, felt immensely cheered. The militia was understrength and too many of its men were graybeards or else hardly men at all, yet Daniel Littlefield was inspiring them. “We’re going ashore,” Littlefield said, “and we have to climb that rare steep slope. See it, boys?” He pointed to the bluff. “It’ll be a hard enough climb, but you’ll be among trees. The redcoats can’t see you among the trees. Oh, they’ll shoot, but they won’t be aiming, and you just climb, boys. If you don’t know where to go, follow me. I’ll be going straight up that slope and at the top I’m going to shoot some of those red-coated boys all the way back across the ocean. And remember,” he paused, looking earnestly at his men one by one, “remember! They’re much more frightened of you than you are of them. Oh, I know they look very fine and fancy on parade, but it’s when you’re in the woods and the guns begin to speak that a soldier earns his pay, and we’re the better soldiers. You hear that? We’re the better soldiers, and we’re going to kick their royal backsides from here to kingdom come!” The men cheered that sentiment. Littlefield waited for the cheer to stop. “Now, boys, go clean your guns, oil your locks, and sharpen your bayonets. We have God’s great work to do.”

“A fine speech,” Wadsworth congratulated the major.

Littlefield smiled. “A true speech, sir.”

“I never doubted it.”

“Those redcoats are just frightened boys,” Littlefield said, looking towards the bluff where, he assumed, the British infantry was waiting among the trees. “We magnify the enemy, sir. We think because they wear red coats that they must be ogres, but they’re just boys. They march very prettily, and they know how to stand in a straight line, but that doesn’t make them soldiers! We’ll beat them. You were at Lexington, I think?”

“I was.”

“Then you saw the redcoats run!”

“I saw them retreat, yes.”

“Oh, I don’t deny they’re disciplined, sir, but you still beat them back. They’re not trained for this sort of fight. They’re trained to fight big battles in open land, not to be murdered in the undergrowth, so don’t you have any doubts, sir. We shall win.”

And the major was right, Wadsworth reflected, the redcoats were trained to fight great battles where men had to stand in the open and exchange musket volleys. Wadsworth had seen that at Long Island and he had reluctantly admired the enemy’s iron discipline, but here? Here among Majabigwaduce’s dark trees? The discipline would surely be eroded by fear.

The British battery atop the bluff bellowed noise and smoke. It was invisible from the
Bethaiah
because the redcoats had positioned it to fire south towards the harbor entrance rather than west towards the anchored transports. The guns were shooting towards the
Hampden
, which was again cannonading the British sloops. The
Tyrannicide
and
Black Prince
sailed behind the New Hampshire ship, their job to distract the British and keep the Royal Marines on board the sloops. Wadsworth wondered how well the guns on the heights of Dyce’s Head were protected. “Your task,” he said to Littlefield, “is merely to threaten the enemy. You understand that?”