1812: The Rivers of War

by Eric Flint

  The British were pushing this assault far more vigorously—almost recklessly—than they ever would have for a simple diversionary movement. Driscol thought there would be at least another thousand soldiers arriving now on this side of the river. They’d be here soon enough.

  In the meantime—

  “Look, Sergeant! The bastards are leaving!” Excitedly, one of the gunners pointed toward the river, where the head of the British column could be seen moving to the northwest. “They’re running away!”

  Ball was there in an instant, swatting the man. Fortunately, he did it with his bare left hand, not the cutlass. “And what do I care, you stupid curree? Get back to your post! Fire on ’em, boys! Keeping firing, the Lord damn you! I want those bastards bled and gutted every step of the way!”

  Splendid, splendid. Driscol wondered if Jackson’s quirkiness would extend as far as to allow Driscol to promote Ball to a commissioned rank.

  Maybe. You never knew, with Jackson.

  After the sound of the guns faded, Robert Ross looked at Tiana, sitting across from him at the table on the square. Her face had remained expressionless, but seemed tighter than before.

  He started to open his mouth, prepared to reassure her, but stopped almost at once. He brought the cup of his tea to his lips, to disguise the moment’s lapse.

  How could he reassure her? Driscol might well be dead by now.

  Or not. Battles were unpredictable things. There had been many times in his life when Robert Ross had thought the peculiarly abstract nature of military terminology—those fussy and precise terms like enfilade and all the rest, often enough drawn from a foreign tongue—served the main purpose of shielding soldiers from the raw certainty that battles were nothing but chaos, carnage, ruin, and agony. Battles would be unbearable, faced without that prism to shield the human heart and mind.

  “He’s dead now, isn’t he?” There was no tone at all in Tiana’s voice, though the voice itself seemed brittle.

  Robert shook his head firmly. “There’s no way to know, girl. Trust me about this. There is simply no way to know.”

  Steadily, like a metronome, Pakenham’s fist kept pounding the tree trunk. Very gently, now.

  “I wonder if he’s being wise, sir,” commented Gibbs, watching the British column that was continuing north along the riverbank.

  Pakenham shook his head firmly. “We shall not be second-guessing Colonel Thornton, General. He knows he’s far behind schedule. No fault of his own, of course. So he’s leaving that bastion behind, and going for the critical guns. What other course can he follow?”

  Pakenham wondered what he might have chosen to do, in Thornton’s place. He didn’t wonder more than a moment, though. The very same thing. Err on the side of aggressiveness, if err you must.

  “A splendid regimental commander,” he pronounced. “I’ll see him knighted, so help me God.”

  Jackson was back at his window, studying the battle through his glass. Once the British column moved past the naval battery they’d overrun, he lowered the glass and shook his head.

  “I will be good goddamned,” he stated, lapsing into blasphemy. “The niggers held. The only ones that did except the regulars, goddamn all Kentuckians.”

  He swiveled his head and glared at his aides. “What’s the name of Driscol’s chief sergeant over there? The black one, I’m talking about—black as the ace of spades. The fellow he brought with him from Washington.”

  The aides glanced at each other. Reid cleared his throat. “Not sure, sir. ‘Ball,’ I think.”

  The glare was joined by a grin that was, if anything, more ferocious still. “Well, he’s Lieutenant Ball now. Army regulations be damned, along with the whole state of Kentucky.”

  Jackson turned back to the open window, leaned out of it, and shook the eyeglass in the direction of New Orleans. “Take that, you trembling bastards! Take that, you craven curs! Rot on your stinking plantations, you treacherous cowards!”

  He continued in that enthusiastic vein for a time, becoming more vulgar and profane as he went. Andrew Jackson, in a mood for cursing, was extraordinarily good at it.

  When Houston saw the oncoming British column, he skidded to a halt. “Hold up!” he shouted. “Form a line!”

  Fortunately, the sailors from Patterson’s unit were veterans, so they had the three-pounders in line quickly enough to give the rest of Houston’s regiment an anchor point. The three-pounders were positioned directly across the narrow dirt road that led up the riverbank. Houston placed his Baltimore dragoons on either side, and extended the Capitol volunteers in a line stretching toward the nearby swamp.

  There was no time to make breastworks, of course. The British weren’t more than three hundred yards away by now. But Sam was sure that, firing in a line against a narrow column, his men would at least be able to hold the British for a few minutes.

  That left Major Ridge and his two hundred Cherokees.

  “Can you get through that cypress?” Sam asked.

  Ridge glanced at the swamp. “It’ll take a bit of time.”

  “Sure. I’ll give you the time. You get in there and hit them on the flank.” He peered into the distance. “There’s not more than two hundred yards between the river and the swamp, where I’ll stop them.”

  Ridge left immediately, fading swiftly into the underbrush with his Cherokees in tow. John Ross went with them, without waiting to hear what Sam wanted him to do.

  Sam was a little surprised by that. John was normally punctilious about military protocol, even if his own status in the U.S. Army was somewhat anomalous. But, clearly, the young Cherokee captain had decided his identity here was with his own nation.

  So be it. Houston wouldn’t really have known what to do with him anyway. The situation was about as clear and simple as it could get: the American regiment would start firing on the British once they got within a hundred yards, and keep shooting until it was all over.

  “We’ll stand here, boys!” he shouted. Belatedly, he remembered his sword. A moment later, he had it waving about. “We’ll win here or we’ll die here, but whatever else, we shall not retreat!”

  The regiment sent up a cheer. A bit too wavering a cheer, to Sam’s mind.

  “D’you hear me, blast it! We’ll stand and win, or stand and die!”

  His mind raced through the Iliad, then raced back again to the beginning. Yes, that verse would do nicely.

  “Since great Achilles and Atrides strove,

  Such was the sov’reign doom, and such the will of Jove!”

  Most of the veterans from the Capitol burst into laughter.

  “I’m getting a little predictable,” Sam muttered.

  But . . .

  Being predictable, he decided, was probably a good quality for a military commander. To his men, at least, if not the enemy. And besides, that laughter from the veterans seemed to have braced the morale of the rest even more than the preceding cheer.

  He wondered why that should be so, other than the general quirkiness of the human soul. But he didn’t wonder for long. The British were coming fast, now. They’d be breaking into a full run any moment. The oncoming rows of bayonets made them seem not so much like an army, but a single beast. A great huge snake, making its strike.

  “All right, boys, let’s kill that snake!” They were in range now, Sam decided. Certainly for the three-pounders. “Let ’em have it!”

  The cannons went off before he finished the sentence. Grapeshot shattered the front lines of the column.

  “Let ’em have it, I say!”

  The first musket volley was fairly done, if somewhat ragged. But the men shot straight enough, the most of them. And if their ensuing fire was ragged, it didn’t slack off. They had the inevitable advantage that a line always has, firing on a column. There wasn’t much coming in the way of return fire, to rattle his inexperienced troops.

  And—though Sam didn’t know it—those first volleys decapitated the snake.

  Colonel Thornton’s shou
lder was shattered by a grapeshot. The blow spun him around. Reeling but still on his feet, his face pale with shock, he stared at Gubbins.

  “Keep the men—”

  Whatever Thornton’s last command might have been went unspoken. A musket ball penetrated the back of his head and blew out his left eye.

  Gubbins wiped the gore off his face. “Forward, damn you! Forward, I—”

  He choked, clutching his throat, torn by a musket ball. Blood spewed out instead of words. Another musket ball struck him in the ribs, spinning him sidewise; then another passed through his jaw, smashing out most of his teeth along the way.

  Gubbins collapsed. On a dirt road by the Mississippi River, he bled to death.

  “You’re in command, sir!” cried the pale-faced young lieutenant of the Eighty-fifth. “Colonel Thornton and Colonel Gubbins have both fallen.”

  Captain James Money of the Royal Navy stared at the head of the column, some fifty yards or so in front of his own marines. The column was bunched up, now. No longer a column as much as a ragged lot of men trying to form an impromptu line, with no officers and a narrow front to boot. The charge had stumbled to a halt. Bayonets wouldn’t do it here, clearly enough.

  Money looked back at the rest of the column.

  “Right. No help for it, then. We’ve got to form a line and fight it out. Lieutenant, I want—”

  A musket ball struck his left shoulder and drove him to his knees. Turning his head, his mouth open, Money saw a wave of wild savages pouring out of the cypress swamp. The Indians had begun their charge with a volley, apparently, as soon as they emerged from the trees.

  A volley of sorts, at least. Money’s mind was too dazed to remember exactly what he’d heard. All he could do was watch as the savages slammed into his unprepared men. They fired again, once—no volley there; just each savage as he would, those who had muskets—and then began killing with war clubs and spears.

  Captain Money detested this idiot war in the gulf. The terrain and climate were the worst he’d ever encountered. Nothing that happened in the next half a minute caused him to reconsider his opinion. Certainly not the war club that shattered his skull.

  “Back! Back to the woods!” Major Ridge’s voice, like Driscol’s, was eminently capable of carrying across a raging battlefield. “Get back now!”

  For a wonder, the warriors obeyed him. That alone, John Ross knew, as he plunged back into the cypress along with the others, was enough to make clear Ridge’s status. Cherokee warriors weren’t terribly prone to discipline. Ferocity, yes. Obedience in the face of commands—

  He actually chuckled, once he reached the dark safety of the trees.

  Not hardly.

  Apparently Ridge heard the chuckle. John had stayed close to him throughout the charge out of the swamp, and the quick retreat back into it.

  He gave the younger man a crease of a smile. “Amazing, isn’t it? But it only worked because they aren’t stupid.”

  John nodded. The attack had caught the British completely by surprise, and had inflicted a lot of casualties on them. But John’s own experience in the swamps on the night of the twenty-third had taught him how dangerous British soldiers could be, once they were planted and ready to fight. There were still at least twice as many enemy soldiers on that road as there were Cherokees. If Ridge had tried to stand and slug it out, they’d have started getting butchered.

  “What now?” he asked.

  Ridge was peering through the trees at the British column on the road. John, doing the same, could see British officers racing up and down, bringing order to their troops. Faster than he would have imagined possible, the enemy was forming a line to defend their flank.

  “We’ll just wait a bit,” Ridge answered. “Let Houston do whatever he’s going to do first, and then we’ll see what things look like. If they come at us, here in the swamp, we’ll rip them. The same would happen to us, if we were stupid enough to charge back out there against that line.”

  It made sense to Ross. So, he took the time to reload his pistol. He’d even hit an enemy soldier with the round he’d fired during the charge, he thought.

  That wasn’t much of an accomplishment, of course. Not at point-blank range, against a mass of men caught with their backs to the river. John added the experience to the long list he was compiling, which was proving to him that there was something ultimately absurd about war.

  Or, at least, the way men talked about it.

  Why did men boast so, about a field of endeavor whose greatest achievement was to do the crudest thing imaginable, in as simple a way as possible? No Cherokee woman, after all, would have bragged that she’d made the ugliest garment in the world, using the fewest possible stitches.

  “Shall we charge them, Colonel Houston?” Lieutenant Pendleton asked eagerly. “We bloodied ’em good!”

  Sam took a moment from his study of the enemy to glance at the young dragoon officer who was standing next to him.

  He was tempted to say, Do I look like an idiot? The British, their charge having been broken, were forming a line about one hundred and fifty yards away. He was amazed at the speed and precision with which they’d done so. Sam knew perfectly well his own regiment would have made a dragged-out mess of the business, if they could have even managed it at all after suffering such casualties.

  And he could practically feel the savage eagerness of the British soldiers to see him marching toward them. Oh, they’d get some of their own back, then! Surely they would.

  “No, Lieutenant. Face facts—that’s the first thing an officer has to learn. Those are regulars over there, and we aren’t. So we’ll not be so foolish as to try matching them line against line. Tell the men to start digging in and form a breastworks, and tell the three-pounders to hold their fire unless the enemy advances. They’ll be getting low of ammunition, anyhow. We’ll just stand here. That’s really all we need to do. If we keep the enemy away from the commodore’s guns, we’ve done our job.”

  It was almost comical, the way Pendleton’s face fell.

  “Now, Lieutenant.”

  “Yes, sir.” Pendleton raced off.

  Well. Slouched off hurriedly. But Sam wasn’t inclined to chide him over his posture. Now that the immediate danger was past, he was worrying about Driscol and his men.

  Were they still alive? If so, they were trapped back there—and Sam didn’t dare charge to their rescue as long as the British had that line across the road. If the enemy broke his charge, which they most likely would, there’d be nothing between them and Patterson’s guns.

  “Why is everything so quiet now, Robert?”

  Somehow, she’d still managed to keep her face expressionless. But Ross thought the lines of the face itself were tighter than any drum he’d ever seen.

  “The assault’s been beaten off,” he said, trying not to sigh. “For the moment, at least.”

  He suspected that his own face was as tightly drawn as Tiana’s. Under the circumstances, for the moment was a meaningless phrase. Ross knew the battle plan Thornton had been following. The thing either had to be done quickly, or there was no point in doing it at all.

  The tree was starting to shed bark, under that softly but steadily pounding fist. Gibbs was genuinely amazed. He’d never seen Pakenham able to restrain himself to such a degree in a battle.

  Wellington, he knew, would have been pleased to witness Pakenham’s unwonted control. The duke had won the Peninsular War because he’d always been able to contain himself, when the need be. Something few of his immediate subordinates could have managed.

  Including Gibbs. If he’d been in command here, despite his own great doubts about the prospects, the men would have started across Chalmette field at least an hour earlier.

  They might have even carried the day. Who was to know? Leading a charge was so much easier than being the commander who had to order it—or refrain from doing so.

  Another piece of bark fluttered to the ground.

  “Come at me, blast you,” Ja
ckson hissed. He was back on the line now. He didn’t need a glass to see the British formations, hundreds of yards away. Not when all he had to do was look across the bareness of Chalmette field.

  He’d cover that beautiful empty field with red-coated corpses, if they came across. He knew it as surely as he knew the sun would rise on the morrow.

  CHAPTER 47

  By the time Colonel Rennie and his Forty-third Light Infantry came ashore, Rennie already knew the expedition on the west bank was in danger of disintegrating. He’d seen enough from the barges while crossing the river to know that much. The continuing sound of gunfire from the north told him that Thornton was stalled somewhere upriver.

  The delay in ferrying all the troops across had badly scrambled the original plan of action. Instead of hitting the enemy with a solid mass of two thousand men, they’d been forced to feed their troops into the action piecemeal. Thornton and his Eighty-fifth were already engaged before Rennie’s men had even finished climbing into the boats.

  As soon as all the men were ashore, Rennie started the march. He was so preoccupied with the situation to the north that he completely failed to realize there was still an active American battery on the scene. The first thing he saw as his column entered the wide area in the swamps where Morgan had constructed his feeble breastworks were the British soldiers manning the overrun American battery by the riverbank.

  The men were waving a banner. A bit frantically, it seemed. Perhaps they were coming under attack.

  Rennie started to order the column to step up the pace when the bastion he’d overlooked on the far left of the field erupted with cannon fire. An instant later, round shot was ripping into the head of his column.