The Fort

by Bernard Cornwell

  “Capture the shore battery,” Saltonstall said in his most lordly voice, “and the fleet will reconsider its opportunities.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Wadsworth said.

  He had been silent as he was rowed ashore from the frigate. Saltonstall was right, Wadsworth did disagree with Lovell. Wadsworth knew the fort was the king on Majabigwaduce’s chessboard, and the three British ships were pawns. Take the fort and the pawns surrendered, but take the pawns and the king remained, yet Lovell would not be persuaded to attack the fort any more than Saltonstall could be persuaded to throw caution to the southwest wind and destroy Mowat’s three sloops. So now the battery must be attacked in hope that a successful assault would persuade the two commanders to greater boldness.

  And time was short and it was shrinking, so Peleg Wadsworth would attack that night. In the dark.

  James Fletcher tacked the Felicity south from Wasaumkeag Point where the rebels had taken over the remaining buildings of Fort Pownall, a decayed wooden and earth-banked fortress erected some thirty years before to deter attacks upriver by French raiders. There was no adequate shelter for wounded men on the heights of Majabigwaduce, so the house and storerooms of the old fort were now the rebels’ hospital. Wasaumkeag Point lay on the far bank of Penobscot Bay, just south of where the river opened from being a narrow and fast-flowing channel between high wooded banks. James, when he was not needed by Wadsworth, used the Felicity to carry wounded men to the hospital and now he did his best to hurry back, eager to join Wadsworth before dusk and the attack on the British battery.

  The Felicity’s course was frustrating. She made good enough progress on each starboard tack, but inevitably the wind drove the small boat nearer and nearer the eastern bank and then James had to endure a long port tack, which, in the flooding tide, seemed to take him farther and farther from Majabigwaduce’s bluff beneath which he wanted to anchor the Felicity. But James was used to the southwest wind. “You can’t hurry the breeze,” his father had said, “and you can’t change its mind, so there’s no point in getting irritated by it.” James wondered what his father would think of the rebellion. Nothing good, he supposed. His father, like many who lived about the river, had been proud to be an Englishman. It did not matter to him that the Fletchers had lived in Massachusetts for over a hundred years, they were still Englishmen. An old, yellowing print of King Charles I had hung in the log house throughout James’s childhood, and was now tacked above his mother’s sickbed. The king looked haughty, but somehow sad, as if he knew that one day a rebellion would topple him and lead him to the executioner’s block. In Boston, James had heard, there was a tavern called the Cromwell’s Head which hung its inn-sign so low above the door that men had to bow their heads to the king-killer every time they entered. That story had angered his father.

  He tacked the Felicity in the cove just north of the bluff. The sound of the cannonade between the fort and the rebel lines was loud now, the smoke from the guns drifting like a cloud above the peninsula. He was on a port tack again, but it would be a short one and he knew he would reach the shore well before nightfall. He sailed under the stern of the Industry, a transport sloop, and waved to its captain, Will Young, who shouted some good-natured remark that was lost in the sound of the cannons.

  James tacked to run down the Industry’s flank where a longboat was secured. Three men were in the longboat while above them, at the sloop’s gunwale, two men threatened the trio with muskets. Then, with a shock, James recognized the three captives: Archibald Haney, John Lymburner, and William Greenlaw, all from Majabigwaduce. Haney and Lymburner had been friends of his father, while Will Greenlaw had often accompanied James on fishing trips downriver and had paid court to Beth once or twice, though never successfully. All three men were Tories, Loyalists, and now they were evidently prisoners. James let his sheets go so that the Felicity slowed and shivered. “What the devil are you doing with the bastards?” Archibald Haney called. Haney was like an uncle to James.

  Before James could say a word in response a sailor appeared at the gunwale above the longboat. He carried a wooden pail. “Hey, Tories!” the sailor called, then upended the bucket to cascade urine and turds onto the prisoners’ heads. The two guards laughed.

  “What the hell did you do that for?” James shouted.

  The sailor mouthed some response and turned away. “They put us here one hour a day,” Will Greenlaw said miserably, “and pour their slops on us.”

  The tide was taking the Felicity north and James tightened the jib sheet to get some way on her. “I’m sorry,” he called.

  “You’ll be sorry when the king asks who was loyal to him!” Archibald Haney shouted angrily.

  “The English treat our prisoners far worse!” Will Young bellowed from the Industry’s stern.

  James had been forced onto a port tack again and the wind took him away from the sloop. Archibald Haney shouted something, but the words were lost on the breeze, all but one. Traitor.

  James tacked the boat again and ran her towards the beach. He dropped her anchor, furled her mainsail, and stowed the foresails, then hailed a passing lighter to give him a dry-ride ashore. Traitor, rebel, Tory, Loyalist? If his father were still alive, he wondered, would he dare be a rebel?

  He climbed the bluff, retrieved the musket from his shelter and walked south to Dyce’s Head to find Peleg Wadsworth. The sun was low now, casting a long shadow over the ridge and along the harbor’s foreshore. Wadsworth’s men were gathering in the trees where they could not be seen from the fort. “You look pensive, young James,” Wadsworth greeted him.

  “I’m well enough, sir,” James said.

  Wadsworth looked at him more closely. “What is it?”

  “You know what they’re doing to the prisoners?” James asked, then blurted out the whole tale. “They’re my neighbors, sir,” he said, “and they called me traitor.”

  Wadsworth had been listening patiently. “This is war, James,” he said gently, “and it creates passions we didn’t know we possessed.”

  “They’re good men, sir!”

  “And if we released them,” Wadsworth said, “they’d work for our enemies.”

  “They would, yes,” James allowed.

  “But that’s no reason to maltreat them,” Wadsworth said firmly, “and I’ll talk to the general, I promise,” though he knew well enough that whatever protest he made would change nothing. Men were frustrated. They wanted this expedition finished. They wanted to go home. “And you’re no traitor, James,” he said.

  “No? My father would say I am.”

  “Your father was British,” Wadsworth said, “and you and I were both born British, but that’s all changed now. We’re Americans.” He said the word as though he were not used to it, but felt a pang of pride because of it. And tonight, he thought, the Americans would take a small step towards their liberty. They would attack the battery.

  In the dark.

  The Indians joined Wadsworth’s militia after sunset. They appeared silently and, as ever, Wadsworth found their presence unsettling. He could not lose the impression that the dark-skinned warriors judged him and found him wanting, but he forced a welcome smile in the dark night. “I’m glad you’re here,” he told Johnny Feathers, who was apparently the Indian’s leader. Feathers, who had been given his name by John Preble, who negotiated for the State with the Penobscot tribe, neither answered nor even acknowledged the greeting. Feathers and his men, he had brought sixteen this night, squatted at the edge of the trees and scraped whetstones over the blades of their short axes. Tomahawks, Wadsworth supposed. He wondered if they were drunk. The general’s order that no liquor was to be given to the Indians had met with small success, but so far as Wadsworth could tell these men were sober as churchwardens. Not that he cared, drunk or sober the Indians were among his best warriors, though Solomon Lovell was more skeptical of their loyalties. “They’ll want something in exchange for helping us,” he had told Wadsworth, “and not just wampum. Guns, probably, and
God knows what they’ll do with those.”

  “Hunt?”

  “Hunt what?”

  But the Indians were here. The seventeen braves had muskets, but had all chosen to carry tomahawks as their primary weapon. The militia and marines had muskets with fixed bayonets. “I don’t want any man firing prematurely,” Wadsworth told his militiamen and saw, in the small light of the waning moon, the look of incomprehension on too many faces. “Don’t cock your muskets till you need to shoot,” he told them. “If you stumble and fall I don’t want a shot alerting the enemy. And you,” he pointed to a small boy who was armed with a sheathed bayonet and an enormous drum, “keep your drum silent till we’ve won!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Wadsworth crossed to the boy who looked scarcely a day over eleven or twelve. “What’s your name, boy?”

  “John, sir.”

  “John what?”

  “John Freer, sir.” John Freer’s voice had not broken. He was rake-thin, nothing but skin, bones, and wide eyes, but those eyes were bright and his back was straight.

  “A good name,” Wadsworth said, “free and Freer. Tell me, John Freer, do you have your letters?”

  “My letters, sir?”

  “Can you read or write?”

  The boy looked shifty. “I can read some, sir.”

  “Then when this is all over,” Wadsworth said, “we must teach you the rest, eh?”

  “Yes, sir,” Freer said unenthusiastically.

  “He brings us luck, General,” an older man put in. He placed a protective hand on the boy’s shoulder. “We can’t lose if Johnny Freer is with us, sir.”

  “Where are your parents, John?” Wadsworth asked.

  “Both dead,” the older man answered, “and I’m his grandfather.”

  “I want to stay with the company, sir!” John Freer said eagerly. He had divined that Wadsworth was contemplating an order that he stay behind.

  “We’ll look after him, sir,” the grandfather said, “we always do.”

  “Just keep your drum quiet till we’ve beaten them, John Freer,” Wadsworth said and patted the boy on the head. “After that you can wake the dead for all I care.”

  Wadsworth had three hundred militiamen, or rather two hundred and ninety-nine militiamen and one small drummer boy. Saltonstall had kept his word and sent fifty marines and had added a score of the Warren’s sailors who were armed with cutlasses, boarding pikes, and muskets. “The crew wants to fight,” Carnes explained the presence of the seamen.

  “They’re most welcome,” Wadsworth had said.

  “And they will fight!” Carnes said enthusiastically. “Demons, they are.”

  The seamen were on the right. The militiamen and Indians were in the center and Captain Carnes and his marines on the left. Lieutenant Dennis was second in command of the marines. They were all lined at the edge of the trees by Dyce’s Head, close to Captain Welch’s grave, and to the east the ground dropped gently away towards the Half Moon Battery. Wadsworth could see the enemy earthwork in the small moonlight, and even if it had been dark its position would have been betrayed by two small campfires that burned behind the emplacement. The fort was a dark silhouette on the horizon.

  Just beyond the enemy battery were the westernmost houses of the village. The closest, which was dwarfed by a large barn, lay only a few paces beyond the British guns. “That’s Jacob Dyce’s house,” James Fletcher told Wadsworth, “he’s a Dutchman.”

  “So no love for the British?”

  “Oh, he loves the British, Jacob does. Like as not old Jacob will shoot at us.”

  “Let’s hope he’s asleep,” Wadsworth said and hoped all the enemy were sleeping. It was past midnight, a Sunday now, and the peninsula was moonlit black and silver. Small wisps of smoke drifted from chimneys and campfires.

  The British sloops were black against the distant water and no lights showed aboard.

  Two of the transport ships had been beached at Majabigwaduce’s eastern tip, while the third had been added to the line of sloops because, in their new position, the British were trying to blockade a much greater width of water. The transport ship, which was anchored at the southern end of the line, looked much bigger than the three sloops, but Carnes, who had used a telescope to examine the ship in daylight, reckoned it carried only six small cannon. “It looks big and bad,” he said now, watching the enemy ships in the dark, “but it’s feeble.”

  “Like the fort,” Lieutenant Dennis put in.

  “The fort gets more formidable every day,” Wadsworth said, “which is why we must use haste.” He had been appalled when, at the afternoon’s council of war, General Lovell had toyed with the idea of starving the British out of Fort George. The Council’s sentiment had been against such a plan, swayed by Wadsworth’s insistence that the British would surely be readying a relief force for the besieged garrison, but Lovell, Wadsworth knew, would not give up the idea easily. That made tonight’s action crucial. A clear victory would help persuade Lovell that his troops could outfight the redcoats, and Wadsworth, looking at the marines, had no doubt that they could. The green-coated men looked grim, lean, and frightening as they waited. With such troops, Wadsworth thought, a man might conquer the world.

  The militia were not so threatening. Some looked eager, but most appeared frightened and a few were praying on their knees, though Colonel McCobb, his mustache very white against his tanned face, was confident of his men. “They’ll do just fine,” he said to Wadsworth. “How many enemy do you reckon?”

  “No more than sixty. At least we couldn’t see more than sixty.”

  “We’ll twist their tails right and proper,” McCobb said happily.

  Wadsworth clapped his hands to get the militiamen’s attention again. “When I give the word,” he called to the men crouching at the edge of the wood, “we advance in line. We don’t run, we walk! When we get close to the enemy I’ll give the order to charge and then we run straight at their works.” Wadsworth reckoned he sounded confident enough, but it felt unnatural and he was assailed by the thought that he merely playacted at being a soldier. Elizabeth and his children would be sleeping. He drew his sword. “On your feet!” Let the enemy be sleeping too, he thought as he waited for the line to stand. “For America!” he called. “And for liberty, forward!”

  And all along the wood’s edge men walked into the moonlight. Wadsworth glanced left and right and was astonished at how visible they were. The silvery light glittered from bayonets and lit the white crossbelts of the marines. The long line was walking raggedly downhill, through pastureland and scattered trees. The enemy was silent. The glow of the campfires marked the battery. The guns there faced the harbor entrance, but how soon could the British turn them to face the approaching patriots? Or were the gunners fast asleep? Wadsworth’s thoughts skittered, and he knew that was caused by nervousness. His belly felt empty and sour. He gripped his sword as he looked up at the fort, which appeared formidable from this lower ground. That is what we should be attacking, Wadsworth thought. Lovell should have every man under his command assaulting the fort, one screaming attack in the dark and the whole business would be over. But instead they were attacking the battery, and perhaps that would hasten the campaign’s end. Once the battery was taken then the Americans could mount their own guns on the harbor’s northern shore and hammer the ships, and once the ships were gone then Lovell would have no excuse not to attack the fort.

  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.

  Th
en 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.