Authors: Bernard Cornwell
Wadsworth leaped a small ditch. He could hear the waves breaking on the shingle to his right. The long line of attackers was very ragged now, and he remembered the children on the common at home and how he had tried to rehearse maneuvering them from column to line. Maybe he should have advanced in column? The gun emplacement was only two hundred yards away now, so it was too late to try and change the formation. James Fletcher walked beside Wadsworth, his musket held in clenched hands. “They’re sleeping, sir,” Fletcher said in a tight voice.
“I hope so,” Wadsworth said.
Then the night exploded.
The first gun was fired from the fort. The flame leaped and curled into the night sky, the lurid flash lighting even the southern shore of the harbor before the powder smoke obscured the fort’s silhouette. The cannon-ball landed somewhere to Wadsworth’s right, bounced and crashed into the meadows behind and then two more guns split the night, and Wadsworth heard himself shouting. “Charge! Charge!”
Ahead of him a flame showed, then he was dazzled as he heard the sound of the gun and the whistle of grape shot. A man screamed. Other men were cheering and running. Wadsworth stumbled over the rough ground. Marines were dark shapes to his left. Another round shot slammed into the turf, bounced, and flew on. A splinter of light came from an enemy musket in the gun emplacement, then another cannon sounded and grape shot seethed around Wadsworth. James Fletcher was with him, but when Wadsworth glanced left and right he saw very few militiamen. Where were they? More muskets shot flame, smoke, and metal from the battery. There were men standing on the rampart, men who vanished behind a rill of smoke as still more muskets punched the night. The marines were ahead of Wadsworth now, running and shouting, and the sailors were coming from the beach and the battery was close now, so close. Wadsworth had no breath to shout, but his attackers needed no orders. The Indians overtook him and a cannon fired from the emplacement and the sound deafened Wadsworth, it punched the air about him, it dizzied him, it wreathed him in the foul egg stench of powder smoke that was thick as fog and he heard the screaming just ahead and the clash of blades, and a shouted order that was abruptly cut off, and then he was at the earthwork and he saw a smoking cannon muzzle just to his right as Fletcher pushed him upwards.
The devil’s work was being done inside the emplacement where marines, Indians, and sailors were slaughtering redcoats. A gun fired from the fort, but the ball went high to splash harmlessly into the harbor. Lieutenant Dennis had stabbed a sword into a British sergeant who was bent over, trapping the steel in his flesh. A marine clubbed the man on the head with a musket butt. The Indians were making a high-pitched shrieking sound as they killed. Wadsworth saw blood bright as a gun-flame spurt from a skull split by a tomahawk. He turned towards a British officer in a red coat whose face was a mask of terror and Wadsworth slashed his sword at the redcoat, the blade hissing in empty air as a marine drove a bayonet deep into the man’s lower belly and ripped the blade upwards, lifting the redcoat off his feet as an Indian chopped a hatchet into the man’s spine. Another redcoat was backing towards the fires, his hands raised, but a marine shot him anyway, then smashed the stock of his musket across the man’s face. The rest of the British were running. They were running! They were vanishing into Jacob Dyce’s cornfield, fleeing uphill towards the fort.
“Take prisoners!” Wadsworth shouted. There was no need for more killing. The gun emplacement was taken and, with a fierce joy, Wadsworth understood that the battery was too low on the shore to be hit by the fort’s guns. Those guns were trying, but the shots were flying just overhead to splash uselessly into the harbor. “Let’s hear your drum now, John Freer!” Wadsworth shouted. “You can sound the drum as loud as you like now!”
But John Freer, aged twelve, had been clubbed to death by a redcoat’s brass-bound musket butt. “Oh dear God,” Wadsworth said, gazing down at the small body. The bloodied skull was black in the moonlight. “I should never have let him come,” he said, and felt a tear in one eye.
“It was that bastard,” a marine said, indicating the twitching body of the redcoat who had tried to surrender and who had been shot before having his face beaten in by the marine. “I saw the bastard hit the lad.” The marine stepped to the fallen redcoat and kicked him in the belly. “You yellow bastard.”
Wadsworth stooped beside Freer and put a finger on the drummer’s neck, but there was no pulse. He looked up at James Fletcher. “Run back to the heights,” he said, “and tell General Lovell we’re in possession of the battery.” He held out a hand to check Fletcher. Wadsworth was gazing east-wards at the British ships. The dark shapes seemed so close now. “Tell the general we need to put our own guns here,” he said. Wadsworth had captured the British guns, but they were smaller than he had expected to find. The twelve-pounder cannons must have been moved back to the fort and replaced with six-pounders. “Tell the general we need a pair of eighteen-pounders,” he said, “and tell him we need them here by dawn.”
“Yes, sir,” Fletcher said, and ran back towards the high ground and Wadsworth, watching him go, saw militiamen scattered on that long slope leading to Dyce’s Head. Too many militiamen. At least half had refused to attack, evidently terrified by the British cannon-fire. Some had kept going and now stood in the battery watching the fifteen prisoners being searched, but most had simply run away and Wadsworth shuddered with anger. The marines, Indians, and sailors had done the night’s work, while most of the minutemen had hung back in fear. John Freer had been braver than all his comrades, and the boy had a crushed skull to prove it.
“Congratulations, sir,” Lieutenant Dennis smiled at Wadsworth.
“You and your marines achieved this,” Wadsworth said, still looking at the militia.
“We beat their marines, sir,” Dennis said cheerfully. The gun emplacement had been protected by Royal Marines. Dennis sensed Wadsworth’s unhappiness and saw where the general was looking. “They’re not soldiers, sir,” he said, nodding towards the militiamen who had refused to attack. Most of those laggards were now walking towards the battery, chivvied by their officers
“But they are soldiers!” Wadsworth said bitterly. “We all are!”
“They want to get back to their farms and families,” Dennis said.
“Then how do we take the fort?” Wadsworth asked.
“They have to be inspired, sir,” Dennis said.
“Inspired!” Wadsworth laughed, though not with any amusement.
“They’ll follow you, sir.”
“Like they did tonight?”
“Next time you’ll give them a speech, sir,” Dennis said, and Wadsworth felt his former pupil’s gentle childing. Dennis was right, he thought. He should have given them a rousing encouragement, he should have reminded the militia why they fought, but then a strange ripping noise interrupted his regrets and he turned to see an Indian crouching by a corpse. The dead marine had been stripped of his red coat, now he was being scalped. The Indian had cut the skin across the crown and was tearing it loose by the hair. The man sensed Wadsworth’s gaze and turned, his eyes and teeth bright in the moonlight. Four other corpses had already been scalped. Marines were searching among the billets, discovering tobacco and food. The militiamen just watched. Colonel McCobb was haranguing the three hundred men, telling them they should have behaved better. A marine knocked the top from one of two huge hogsheads that stood at the back of the emplacement and Wadsworth wondered what they contained, then was diverted by a dog barking fiercely from the battery’s southern edge. A sailor tried to calm the dog, but it snapped at him and a marine casually shot the animal. Another marine laughed.
That was the last gunfire of the night. Mist thickened on the harbor. James Fletcher returned to the captured battery just before dawn to say that General Lovell wanted Wadsworth back on the heights. “Is he going to send the guns?” Wadsworth asked.
“I think he wants you to arrange that, sir.”
Meaning Lovell wanted Wadsworth to deal with Lieutenant-Colonel Revere. The sailors had already gone back to their ships and Captain Carnes had been instructed to return with his marines as soon as possible, but Wadsworth was unhappy leaving the militia to guard the captured battery and Carnes agreed that a dozen marines should stay under Lieutenant Dennis’s command. “I’ll leave a good sergeant with young Dennis,” Carnes said.
“He needs that?”
“We all need that, sir,” Carnes said, and shouted at Sergeant Sykes to pick a dozen good men.
Colonel McCobb was officially in charge of the battery. “You might start by throwing up a rampart,” Wadsworth suggested to him. The existing semicircular rampart looked towards the harbor entrance and Wadsworth wanted an earthwork that faced the fort. “I’ll be bringing the guns as soon as I can,” he said.
“I’ll be waiting, sir,” McCobb promised.
Three hundred men now guarded the captured battery that could be used to destroy the ships. Then Lovell might attack the fort. And then the British would be gone.
Brigadier McLean appeared in a nightcap. He was in uniform and had a gray greatcoat, but had been given no time to dress his hair and so wore the red cap with its long blue tassel. He stood on Fort George’s southwestern bastion and stared down at the low ground where the Half Moon emplacement was mostly hidden by the cornfield. “I think we’re wasting our cannon-fire,” he told Fielding, who himself had been woken by the sudden eruption of firing.
“Cease fire!” Fielding called.
An alert gunner sergeant had seen the rebels attacking down the open slope from Dyce’s Head and had opened fire. “Give the man an extra ration of rum,” McLean said, “and my thanks.”
The gunners had done well, McLean thought, yet their efforts had not saved the Half Moon Battery. The Royal Marines and gunners evicted from the emplacement were straggling into the fort and telling their tale of rebels swarming over the ramparts. They claimed there had been hundreds of attackers, and the defenders had numbered just fifty. “Tea,” McLean said.
“Tea?” Fielding asked.
“They should brew some tea,” McLean gestured at the defeated men.
Hundreds? He wondered. Maybe two hundred. The sentries on Fort George’s ramparts had been given a clear view of the attackers, and the most reliable men reckoned they had seen two or three hundred rebels, many of whom had not pressed home the attack. Now a growing fog was obscuring all the lower ground.
“You sent for me, sir?” Captain Iain Campbell, one of the 74th’s best officers, now joined the brigadier on the rampart.
“Good morning, Campbell.”
“Good morning, sir.”
“Only it’s not a good morning,” McLean said. “Our enemy has shown initiative.”
“I heard, sir.” Iain Campbell had dressed hurriedly and one of his coat buttons was undone.
“Have you ever captured an enemy earthwork, Campbell?”
“No, sir.”
“Unless your men are very well-disciplined it leads to disorganization,” McLean said, “which leads me to believe that our enemy are rather disorganized right now.”
“Yes, sir,” the highlander said, smiling as he understood what the brigadier insinuated.
“And Captain Mowat won’t like it if the enemy holds the Half Moon Battery, he won’t like it at all.”
“And we must help the Royal Navy, sir,” Campbell said, still smiling.
“Indeed we must, it is our God-given duty. So take your good lads down there, Captain,” McLean said, “and shoo the rogues away, will you?”
Fifty marines had been surprised and driven from the Half Moon Battery so McLean would send fifty Scotsmen to take it back.
McLean went to have his hair dressed.
Excerpt of a letter from Brigadier-General Solomon Lovell to Jeremiah Powell, President of the Council Board of the State of Massachusetts Bay, August 1st, 1779:
. . . that with the Troops that now constitute my Army it is not practicable to gain a Conquest by a storm and not probable without length of time to reduce them by a regular siege. To Effect the First I must request a few regular disciplined troops and Five Hundred hand Grenades . . . at least four Mortars of Nine Inches or as near as your Ordnance will admit with an ample supply of Fire Shells.
Excerpt of a letter from the Board of War to the Council Board of Massachusetts, August 3rd, 1779:
The Board of War would represent to your Honors that by the great expence incurred by the Penobscot expedition they are so draind of Money that they are under the greatest embarrasments in the execution of the Common business of the Office, and are now calld upon for the payment of £100,000 due to persons for provision sent upon that expedition. The present scarcity of bread in the publick magazines both state and continental is alarming and may be attended with fatal consequences. . . .
Excerpt of a letter from Samuel Savage, President of the Board of War, Boston, to Major-General Nathaniel Gates, August 3rd, 1779:
Reports say that our Forces at penobscot have, after a most vigorous resistance, obliged the Enemy to surrender themselves both Naval and Land Forces, Prisoners of War, and that this glorious event took place on Saturday last.
The sun had not risen when Peleg Wadsworth roused Lieutenant-Colonel Revere, who, publicly ordered to sleep ashore, had erected the tents captured on Cross Island and made them his new quarters. They were the only tents in Lovell’s army and some men wondered why they had not been offered to the general himself.
“I only just got to sleep,” Revere grumbled as he pushed the tent flap aside. Like most of the army he had watched the gunflashes in the night.
“The enemy battery is taken, Colonel,” Wadsworth said.
“I saw that. Very satisfying.” Revere pulled a wool blanket round his shoulders. “Friar!”
A man crawled from a turf-and-timber shelter. “Sir?”
“Rouse the fire, man, it’s chilly.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Very satisfying,” Revere said, looking at Wadsworth again.
“The captured battery is being entrenched,” Wadsworth said, “and we need to move our heaviest guns there.”
“Heaviest guns,” Revere echoed. “And boil some tea, Friar.”
“Tea, sir, yes, sir.”
“Heaviest guns,” Revere said again, “I suppose you mean the eighteens?”
“We have six of them, do we not?”
“We do.”
“The new battery is close to the enemy ships. I want them hit hard, Colonel.”
“We all want that,” Revere said. He went close to the campfire that, newly revived, flamed bright. He shivered. It might have been high summer, but the nights in eastern Massachusetts could be surprisingly cold. He stood by the blaze which lit his blunt face. “We’re scarce of eighteen-pounder round shot,” he said, “unless the commodore can provide some?”
“I’m certain he will,” Wadsworth said. “The shot is intended for the enemy ships, he can’t possibly object.”
“Possibly,” Revere said with evident amusement, then he shook his head as if clearing his mind of some unwelcome thought. “Do you have children, General?”
Wadsworth was taken aback by the question. “Yes,” he said after a pause, “I have three. Another coming very soon.”
“I miss my children,” Revere said tenderly. “I do miss them dearly.” He gazed into the flames. “Teapots and buckles,” he said ruefully.
“Teapots and buckles?” Wadsworth asked, wondering if they were nicknames for Revere’s children.
“How a man earns his living, General. Teapots and buckles, cream jugs and cutlery.” Revere smiled, then shrugged his home thoughts away. “So,” he sighed, “you want to take two of the eighteens from our lines here?”
“If they’re the closest, yes. Once the ships are sunk they can be returned.”
Revere grimaced. “If I put two eighteens down there,” he said, “the British are not going to like it. How do we defend the guns?”
It was a good question. Brigadier McLean would hardly stand idly by while two eighteen-pounders knocked splinters off the three sloops. “Colonel McCobb has three hundred men at the battery,” he told Revere, “and they’ll stay there till the ships are destroyed.”
“Three hundred men,” Revere said dubiously.
“And you may place smaller cannon for your defense,” Wadsworth suggested, “and by now the entrenchments should be well begun. I believe the battery will be safe.”
“I could take guns down in the fog,” Revere suggested. The air felt clammy and wisps of mist were already showing among the high trees.
“Then let’s do it,” Wadsworth said energetically. If the guns could be emplaced by midday then the enemy ships might be cruelly hurt by dusk. The range was short and the eighteen-pounder balls would strike with a savage force. Sink the ships and the harbor would belong to the patriots, and after that Lovell would have no reason not to storm the fort. Wadsworth, for the first time since the rebels had taken the heights of Majabigwaduce, felt optimistic.
Get it done, he thought. Pull down the enemy flag. Win.
And then the muskets sounded.
Captain Iain Campbell led his fifty highlanders down to the village, then followed a cart track westwards till the company reached the edge of Jacob Dyce’s land. A small light flickered from behind the Dutchman’s shutters, suggesting he was awake.
The highlanders crouched by the corn and Campbell stood above them. “Are you all listening well?” he asked them, “because I have a thing to tell you.”
They were listening. They were youngsters, most not yet twenty, and they trusted Iain Campbell because he was both a gentleman and a good officer. Many of these men had grown up on the lands of Captain Campbell’s father, the laird, and most of them bore the same surname. Some, indeed, were the captain’s half-brothers, though that was not a truth admitted on either side. Their parents had told them that the Campbells of Ballaculish were good people and that the laird was a hard man, but a fair one. Most had known Iain Campbell since before he became a man, and most supposed they would know him till they followed his coffin to the kirk. One day Iain Campbell would live in the big house and these men, and their children, would doff their hats to him and beg his help when they were in trouble. They would tell their children that Iain Campbell was a hard man, but a fair one, and they would say that not because he was their laird, but because they would remember a night when Captain Campbell took all the risks he asked them to take. He was a privileged man and a brave man and a very good officer.
“The rebels,” Campbell spoke low and forcefully, “captured the Half Moon Battery last night. They’re there now, and we’re going to take it back. I talked to some of the men they drove away, and they heard the rebels shouting at each other. They learned the name of the rebel leader, their officer. He’s a MacDonald.”
The crouching company made a noise like a low growl. Iain Campbell could have given them a rousing speech, a blood and thunder and fight-for-your-king speech, and if he had been given the tongue of an angel and the eloquence of the devil that speech would not have worked as well as the name MacDonald.
He had invented MacDonald’s existence, of course. He had no idea who led the rebels, but he did know that the Campbells hated the MacDonalds and the MacDonalds feared the Campbells, and by telling his men that a MacDonald was their enemy he had roused them to an ancient fury. It was no longer a war to suppress a rebellion, it was an ancestral blood feud.
“We’re going through the corn,” Captain Campbell said, “and we’ll form line at the other side and you charge with your bayonets. We go fast. We win.”
He said no more, except to give the necessary orders, then he led the fifty men past the field of corn that grew taller than a bonneted highlander’s head. Fog was spreading from the water, thickening over the battery and hiding the dark shapes of the highlanders.
The sky behind Campbell was lightening to a wolf-gray, but the tall corn shadowed his men as they spread into a line. Their muskets were loaded, but not cocked. Metal scraped on metal as men slotted and twisted their bayonets onto gun muzzles. The bayonets were seventeen-inch spikes, each sharpened to a wicked point. The battery was only a hundred paces away, yet the rebels had still not seen the kilted highlanders. Iain Campbell drew his broadsword and grinned in the half-darkness. “Let’s teach the Clan Donald who is master here,” he said to his men, “and now let’s kill the bastards.”
They charged.
They were highlanders from the hard country on Scotland’s west coast. War was in their blood, they had suckled tales of battle with their mother’s milk, and now, they believed, a MacDonald was waiting for them and they charged with all their clan’s ferocity. They screamed as they charged, they raced to be first among the enemy and they had the advantage of surprise.
Yet even so Iain Campbell could not believe how quickly the enemy broke. As he neared the battery and could see more through the dark fog he had a moment of alarm because there seemed to be hundreds of rebels, they were far more numerous than his company, and he thought what a ridiculous place this was to meet his death. Most of the rebels were in the battery itself, which was as crowded as a Methodist meeting. Only about twenty men were working on the entrenchments and it was evident they had set no sentries or, if they had placed picquets, those sentries were asleep. Astonished faces turned to stare at the shrieking highlanders. Too many faces, Campbell thought. There would be a marble plaque in the kirk with his name and this day’s date and a dignified epitaph, then that vision vanished because the enemy was already running. “Kill!” Campbell heard himself shout. “Kill!” And the shout spurred even more of the enemy to flee westwards. They dropped their picks and spades, they scrambled over the west-facing rampart and they ran. A few, very few, fired at the approaching highlanders, but most forgot they were carrying muskets and just abandoned the battery to run towards the heights.
One group of men was dressed in dark uniforms crossed by white belts and those men did not run. They tried to form a line and they presented muskets and they fired a ragged volley at Campbell’s men as the highlanders leaped the newly dug scratch of a ditch. Iain Campbell felt the wind of a ball whip past his cheek, then he was swinging his heavy blade at a smoking musket, knocking it aside as he brought the sword back to stab low and fast. The steel punctured cloth, skin, flesh, and muscle, and then his Campbells were all around him, screaming hatred and lunging with bayonets, and the outnumbered enemy broke. “Give them a volley!” Campbell shouted. He twisted his blade in the enemy’s belly and thumped his left fist into the man’s face. Corporal Campbell added his bayonet and the rebel went down. Captain Campbell kicked the musket from the enemy’s grasp and dragged his blade free of the clinging flesh. Musket flashes cast sudden stark light on blood, chaos, and Campbell fury.
A lone American officer tried to rally his men. He slashed his sword at Campbell, but the laird’s son had learned his fencing at Major Teague’s Academy on Edinburgh’s Grassmarket and he parried the swing effortlessly, reversed, turned his wrist and lunged the blade into the American officer’s chest. He felt the sword scrape on a rib, he grimaced and lunged harder. The man choked, gasped, spewed blood, and fell. “Give them a volley!” Campbell shouted again. He had hardly needed to think to defeat the rebel officer, it had all been instinctive. He dragged his sword free and saw an American sergeant in a green uniform coat stagger and fall. The sergeant was not wounded, but a highlander had thumped the side of his head with a musket stock and he was half-dazed. “Take his musket!” Campbell called sharply. “Don’t kill him! Just take him prisoner!”
“He could be a MacDonald,” a Campbell private said, quite ready to thrust his bayonet into the sergeant’s belly.
“Take him prisoner!” Campbell snapped. He turned and looked towards the heights where the dawn was lighting the slope, but the fog hid the fleeing rebels. Scottish muskets coughed smoke, stabbed flame into the fog, and shot balls uphill to where the Americans retreated. “Sergeant MacKellan!” Campbell called. “You’ll set a picquet! Smartly now!”
“You sure this bastard’s not a MacDonald?” the private standing above the dazed rebel sergeant asked.
“He’s called Sykes,” a voice said, and Campbell turned to see it was the wounded rebel officer who had spoken. The man had propped himself on an elbow. His face, very white in the dawn’s wan light, was streaked with blood that had spilled from his mouth. He looked towards the green-coated sergeant. “He’s not called MacDonald,” he managed to say, “he’s called Sykes.”
Campbell was impressed that the young officer, despite his chest wound, was trying to save his sergeant’s life. That sergeant was sitting now, guarded by Jamie Campbell, the youngest son of Ballaculish’s blacksmith. The wounded officer spat more blood. “He’s called Sykes,” he said yet again, “and they were drunk.”
Campbell crouched beside the injured officer. “Who was drunk?” he asked.
“They found barrels of rum,” the man said, “and I couldn’t stop them. The militia.” The highlanders were still shooting into the fog, hastening the retreat of the rebels who had now vanished into the fog that spread inexorably up the long slope. “I told McCobb,” the wounded officer said, “but he said they deserved the rum.”
“Rest,” Campbell said to the man. There were two great hogsheads at the back of the battery and they had evidently been full of naval rum, and the rebels, celebrating their victory, had celebrated too hard. Campbell found a discarded knapsack that he put beneath the wounded officer’s head. “Rest,” he said again. “What’s your name?”
“Lieutenant Dennis.”
The blood on Dennis’s coat looked black and Campbell would not even have known it was blood except that it reflected a sheen in the weak light. “You’re a marine?”
“Yes,” Dennis choked on the word and blood welled at his lips and ran down his cheek. His breath rasped. “We changed sentries,” he said, and whimpered with sudden pain. He wanted to explain that the defeat was not his fault, that his marines had done their job, but the militia picquet that had replaced his marine sentries had failed.
“Don’t speak.” Campbell said. He saw the fallen sword nearby and slid the blade into Dennis’s scabbard. Captured officers were allowed to keep their swords, and Campbell reckoned Lieutenant Dennis deserved it as a reward for his bravery. He patted Dennis’s blood-wet shoulder and stood. Robbie Campbell, a corporal, and almost as great a fool as his father, who was a drunken drover, had found a drum that was painted with an eagle and the word “Liberty” and he was beating it with his fists and capering like the fool he was. “Stop that noise, Robbie Campbell!” Campbell shouted, and was rewarded with silence. The drummer boy’s corpse was lying beside a newly dug grave. “Jamie Campbell! You and your brother will make a stretcher. Two muskets, two jackets!” The quickest way to fashion a stretcher was to thread the sleeves of two jackets onto a pair of muskets. “Carry Lieutenant Dennis to the hospital.”
“Did we kill the MacDonald, sir?”
“The MacDonald ran away,” Campbell said dismissively. “What do you expect of a MacDonald?”
“The yon bastards!” a private said angrily and Campbell turned to see the bloodied heads of the Royal Marine corpses, their scalps cut and torn away. “Bloody heathen savage god-damned bastards,” the man growled.