The Fort

by Bernard Cornwell

  “He’s efficient,” Lovell said uncertainly, then more vigorously, “everyone assures me he’s efficient.”

  “In his own interests, yes,” Todd said.

  “And he knows his guns,” Wadsworth asserted.

  Todd looked at Wadsworth and paused before speaking. “I do hope so, sir.”

  “He’s a patriot!” Lovell said in a tone of finality. “No one can deny that! Now, gentlemen, back to work.”

  The moon was full and its light whispered silver across the bay. The tide was ebbing to carry the Penobscot’s waters out to the wide Atlantic while on Cross Island the rebels were digging a new emplacement for the guns that would hammer Mowat’s ships.

  And on the bluff the redcoat picquets waited.

  General McLean had been inordinately grateful for the two days’ respite the rebels had granted him. The enemy fleet had arrived on Sunday, now it was late on Tuesday evening and there had still been no attack on Fort George, which had given him the opportunity to emplace two more guns and to raise the parapet by another two feet. He knew only too well how vulnerable his position was. He was resigned to that. He had done his best.

  That night he stood at Fort George’s gate, which was nothing more than a brushwork barricade that could be pulled aside by the two sentries. He gazed southwards, admiring the sheen of moonlight on the harbor water. It was a pity that the artillerymen had been driven from their battery on Cross Island, but McLean had always known that position was indefensible. Wer alles verteidigt, verteidigt nichts. Making that battery had consumed men and time that might have been better spent on strengthening Fort George, but McLean did not regret it. The battery had done its work, deterring the American ships from entering the harbor and thus buying the last two days, but now, McLean supposed, the rebel ships would make their assault and with them would come the rebel infantry.

  “You look pensive, sir,” Lieutenant Moore joined the general in the gateway.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be asleep?”

  “I am, sir. This is but a dream.”

  McLean smiled. “When are you on duty?”

  “Another two hours yet, sir.”

  “Then you might accompany me,” the general suggested and led the way eastwards. “You heard the enemy approached the bluff again?”

  “Major Dunlop told me, sir.”

  “And withdrew again,” McLean said, “which suggests to me they are trying to deceive us.”

  “Or lack the nerve to make an assault, sir?”

  McLean shook his head. “Never underestimate an enemy, Lieutenant. Treat every foe as though he holds the winning cards and then, when his hand is declared, you won’t be unpleasantly surprised. I think our enemy means us to believe he will assault the bluff, and so force us to commit troops there, while in truth he plans to land elsewhere.”

  “Then post me elsewhere, sir.”

  “You will stay on the bluff,” McLean said firmly. The general had decided to thicken the picquet line facing north towards the marshy isthmus that joined Majabigwaduce to the mainland, for he still believed that to be the likeliest enemy approach. That picquet line should delay the rebels, and the tangle of the abatis would hold them for a few more moments, but inevitably they would break both those defenses and charge the fort. “If the enemy does land on the neck,” he told Moore, “then I shall recall your picquet and you’ll help defend the fort.”

  “Yes, sir,” Moore said resignedly. He feared battle and he wanted battle. If the main fight tomorrow, if a fight even came tomorrow, was to be at the neck then Moore wanted to be there, but he knew he would not change McLean’s mind, and so did not try.

  The two men, one so young and the other a veteran of Flanders and Portugal, walked the path just north of the Hatch cornfield. Lamplight glowed bright from the windows of Doctor Calef’s house, their destination. The doctor must have seen them approach in the moonlight because he threw open his door before McLean could knock. “I have a house full of women,” the doctor greeted them morosely.

  “Some men are more blessed than others,” McLean said. “Good evening to you, Doctor.”

  “There’s tea, I believe,” Calef said, “or something stronger?”

  “Tea would be a pleasure,” McLean said.

  A dozen women were gathered in the kitchen. The doctor’s wife was there, as were Colonel Goldthwait’s two daughters, the Banks girls, and Bethany Fletcher. They sat on chairs and stools about the big table, which was covered with scraps of cloth. It was evident that the evening gathering was ending, because the women were stowing their work into bags. “A sewing circle?” McLean asked.

  “War doesn’t stop a woman’s work, General,” Mrs. Calef answered.

  “Nothing does,” McLean said. The women appeared to have been making and mending clothes for children, and McLean remembered his own mother joining just such a group every week. The women would talk, tell stories, and sometimes sing as they darned and stitched. “I’m glad you’re all here,” McLean said, “because I came to warn the good doctor that I expect a rebel attack tomorrow. Ah, thank you,” this last was to the maid who had brought him a mug of tea.

  “You’re sure about tomorrow?” Doctor Calef asked.

  “I cannot speak for the enemy,” McLean said, “but if I were in his shoes then I would come tomorrow.” In truth, had McLean been in the enemy’s shoes, he would have attacked already. “I wished to tell you,” he went on, “that in the event of an assault you must stay indoors.” He looked at the anxious lamplit faces around the table. “There’s always a temptation to witness a fight, but in the confusion, ladies, a face seen through smoke can be mistaken for an enemy. I have no reason to believe the rebels will want to capture any of your houses, so you should be safe inside your own walls.”

  “Wouldn’t we be safer inside the fort?” Doctor Calef asked.

  “The very last place to be,” McLean said firmly. “Please, all of you, stay home. This is excellent tea!”

  “If the rebels . . .” Mrs. Calef began, then thought better of what she had been about to say.

  “If the rebels capture the fort?” McLean suggested helpfully.

  “They’ll find all those sworn oaths,” Mrs. Calef said.

  “And take revenge,” Jane Goldthwait, whom everyone called Lil for a reason long forgotten, added.

  “Mister Moore,” McLean looked at the young lieutenant, “if it looks likely that the fort will fall, then you will be responsible for burning the oaths.”

  “I’d rather be killing the enemy on the ramparts, sir.”

  “I am sure you would,” McLean said, “but you will destroy the oaths first. That’s an order, Lieutenant.”

  “Yes, sir,” Moore said in a chastened voice.

  Over six hundred local people had come to Majabigwaduce and signed the oath of loyalty to King George, and Lil Goldthwait was right, the rebels would want revenge on those folk. Dozens of families who lived about the river had already been forced from their homes in and near Boston and now they faced yet another eviction. McLean smiled. “But we place the carriage in front of the horses, ladies. The fort has not fallen and, I can assure you, we shall do our utmost to repel the enemy.” That was not true. McLean had no wish to stand to the last man. Such a defense would be heroic, but utterly wasteful.

  “There are men here who would willingly man the walls with you,” Doctor Calef said.

  “I am grateful,” McLean replied, “but such an action would expose your families to the enemy’s anger and I would rather that did not happen. Please, all of you, remain in your homes.”

  The general stayed to finish his tea, then he and Moore left. They stood a moment in the doctor’s garden and watched the flicker of moonlight on the harbor. “I think there’ll be a fog tomorrow,” McLean said.

  “The air’s warm,” Moore said.

  McLean stepped aside as a group of women came from the house. He bowed to them. The Banks girls, both young, were walking back to their father’s house on the
western side of the village beneath the fort, while Bethany Fletcher was going directly down the hill to her brother’s house. “I haven’t seen your brother lately, Miss Fletcher,” McLean said.

  “He went fishing, sir,” Bethany said.

  “And hasn’t returned?” Moore asked.

  “He’s sometimes away for a week,” Bethany said, flustered.

  “Mister Moore,” McLean said, “do you have time to escort Miss Fletcher safely home before you report for duty?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then pray do so.”

  “I’m safe, sir,” Bethany said.

  “Indulge an old man’s wishes, Miss Fletcher,” the general said, then bowed, “and I bid you a good night.”

  Moore and Bethany walked downhill in silence. It was not far to the small house. They stopped by the woodpile, both feeling awkward. “Thank you,” Bethany said.

  “My pleasure, Miss Fletcher,” Moore said, and did not move.

  “What will happen tomorrow?” Bethany asked.

  “Maybe nothing.”

  “The rebels won’t attack?”

  “I think they must,” Moore said, “but that is their decision. They should attack soon.”

  “Should?” Bethany asked. The moonlight glossed her eyes silver.

  “We sent for reinforcements,” Moore said, “though whether any such will come, I don’t know.”

  “But if they attack,” Bethany said, “there will be a fight?”

  “It’s why we’re here,” Moore said and felt his heart give a lurch at the thought that tomorrow he would discover what soldiering really was, or perhaps the lurch came from gazing at Bethany’s eyes in the moonlight. He wanted to say things to her, but he felt confused and tongue-tied.

  “I must go indoors,” she said. “Molly Hatch is sitting beside my mother.”

  “Your mother is no better?”

  “She will never be better,” Bethany said. “Good night, Lieutenant.”

  “Your servant, Miss Fletcher,” Moore said, bowing to her, but even before he straightened she was gone. Moore went to collect his men who would take over the picquet duty on Dyce’s Head.

  Dawn was fog-shrouded, though from the new battery on Cross Island the British ships were clearly visible. The closest, HMS Nautilus, was now only a quarter-mile from the big guns that Revere’s men had taken ashore. Those men had worked all night and they had worked well. They had cut a path through the trees of Cross Island and dragged a pair of eighteen-pounder cannon, one twelve-pounder, and a five-and-a-half-inch howitzer to the island’s summit, where the rocky land made a perfect artillery platform. More trees had been felled to open a field of fire for the cannon and in the dawn Captain Hoysteed Hacker, whose sailors were armed with muskets to protect the gunners, gazed at the three British sloops. The furthest away, the North, was a gray shape in the gray fog and mostly hidden by the bulk of the other two sloops, but the closest, Nautilus, was clearly visible. Her figurehead was a bare-chested sailor whose blond hair was wreathed with seaweed. “Aren’t we supposed to be turning that ship to splinters?” Hacker asked the artillery officer. The gunners were standing about their formidable weapons, but no man seemed to be either loading or aiming the guns.

  “We lack wadding,” Lieutenant Philip Marett, a cousin of Colonel Revere and the officer commanding the battery, explained.

  “You what?”

  Marett looked sheepish. “We seem to lack ring-wadding, sir.”

  “The round shot is the wrong size too,” a sergeant said grimly.

  Hacker scarcely believed what he was hearing. “The round shot? Wrong size?”

  The sergeant demonstrated by lifting a round shot and pushing it into the barrel of one of the two eighteen-pounders. One of his men rammed the shot, thrusting the ball up the long gun which, because it was mounted on the highest point of Cross Island, was aimed slightly downwards so that it pointed at the bows of the Nautilus. The gunner pulled the rammer clear and stepped aside. Hacker heard a slight noise from the gun. The rumbling, metal on metal, became louder as the ball rolled slowly down the barrel and then, pathetically, dropped from the muzzle to thump onto the pine needles that coated the ground. “Oh God,” Hacker said.

  “There must have been confusion in Boston,” Marett said helplessly. He pointed to a neat pyramid of round shot. “It seems they’re for twelve-pounders,” he went on, “and even if we could wad them the windage would make it near useless.” Windage was the tiny gap between a missile and the cannon’s barrel. All guns suffered from windage, but if the gap was too great then much of the gun’s propellant would waste itself around the ball’s edges.

  “You’ve sent for Colonel Revere?”

  Marett’s eyes darted round the cleared space as if searching for somewhere to hide. “I’m sure there’s eighteen-pounder ammunition on the Samuel, sir,” he said evasively.

  “Suffering Christ,” Hacker said savagely, “it’ll take two hours to fetch it downriver!” The Samuel was anchored well to the north, a long way from the creek south of Cross Island.

  “We could open fire with the twelve-pounder,” Marett suggested.

  “You have wadding for that?”

  “We could use turf?”

  “Oh for God’s sake, let’s do it properly,” Hacker said, then had a sudden inspiration. “The Warren mounts eighteen-pounders, doesn’t she?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “She does, and she’s a hell of a lot closer than the Samuel! We’ll ask her for ammunition.”

  Hoysteed Hacker’s inspiration proved a happy one. Commodore Saltonstall snorted derision when he heard of the request for ammunition, but he acceded to it, and Captain Welch sent to the General Putnam and ordered Captain Thomas Carnes to assemble a work party of marines to carry the necessary wadding and round shot ashore. Carnes, before he joined the marines, had served in Colonel Gridley’s Artillery Regiment and afterwards commanded a battery of the New Jersey Artillery in the Continental Army and he was a cheerful, energetic man who rubbed his hands with delight when he saw how close the Nautilus lay to the guns. “We can use the twelve-pounder shot in the eighteens,” he declared.

  “We can?” Marett asked.

  “We’ll double-shot,” Carnes said. “Load an eighteen-pound ball by the charge and wad a twelve on top. We’re going to splinter that nearest ship, boys!” He watched the Massachusetts gunners, all imbued now with enthusiasm from Carnes’s energy, load and lay the cannon. Carnes stooped by the barrel and peered along its upper side. “Aim slightly higher,” he said.

  “Higher?” Marett asked. “You want us to aim for the masts?”

  “A cold barrel shoots low,” Carnes said, “but as it heats up she’ll shoot true. Lower her elevation after three shots, and take it one degree lower than you reckon necessary. I don’t know why, but round shot always rises from a barrel. It’s just a fraction, but if you compensate then you’ll hit true and hard when the guns are hot.”

  The sun was glowing bright in the fog when, at last, the battery opened fire. The two big eighteen-pounders were the ship-killers and Carnes used them to shoot at the Nautilus’s hull while the twelve-pounder fired bar shot at her rigging and the howitzer lobbed shells over the Nautilus to ravage the decks of the North and Albany.

  The guns recoiled hard and far on the rocky ground. They needed realigning after each shot, and every discharge filled the space between the cleared trees with thick powder smoke that lingered in the still air. The smoke thickened the fog to such an extent that aiming was impossible until the view cleared, and that necessity slowed the rate of fire, but Carnes heard the satisfying crunch of round shots striking timber. The British could not return the fire. The Nautilus had no bows chasers, and her broadside of nine cannon was aimed west towards the harbor approach. Captain Tom Farnham, who commanded the Nautilus, might have warped his ship around to face Cross Island, but then Mowat would have lost a third of the cannons guarding the channel, and so the sloop had to endure.


  The commodore, satisfied that the battery was at last in action, sent an order that Carnes and his handful of marines were to return to their ships, but before he left Carnes used a small telescope to stare at the Nautilus and saw the holes ripped in her bows. “You’re hitting her hard, Captain!” he told Marett. “Remember! Aim low at this range and you’ll sink that bastard by noon! Good day to you, sir!” This last greeting was to Brigadier-General Lovell who had come to watch the new battery in action.

  “Good morning! Good morning!” Lovell beamed at the gunners. “’Pon my word, but you’re hitting that ship hard, lads!” He borrowed Carnes’s telescope. “My word, you’ve knocked an arm off that ugly figurehead! Well done! Keep going and you’ll sink her soon enough!”

  The Nautilus was still afloat an hour before noon when Colonel Revere arrived with eighteen-pounder ammunition from the Samuel. He came in his smart white-painted barge, which belonged to the Castle Island garrison and which Revere had commandeered for the expedition. Revere ordered sailors from the Providence to carry the round shot to the battery, then strode uphill to discover General Lovell still standing beside the guns. The fog had lifted and the general was peering through a glass that he rested on a gunner’s shoulder. “Colonel!” he greeted Revere cheerfully, “I see we’re striking hard!”

  “What the devil do you mean, the wrong ammunition?” Revere ignored Lovell and challenged Captain Marett who pointed to the twelve-pounder round shot and began a halting explanation of his difficulties, but Revere brushed him aside. “If you brought the wrong round shot,” he said, “then you’re to blame.” He watched as the gunners hauled one of the huge eighteen-pounders back into place. The gunner squinted down the barrel, then used a long-handled maul to drive a wedge deeper under the breech. The wedge slightly lifted the rear of the barrel, lowering the muzzle, and the gunner, satisfied with the angle, nodded at his crew to reload the cannon.

  “They must be suffering, Colonel,” Lovell said happily. “I can see distinct damage to her hull!”

  “What are you doing?” Revere again ignored Lovell, rounding on Marett instead. The colonel had peered down the barrel and had not liked what he saw. “Are you shooting at the water, Captain? What’s the use of shooting into the water?”