The New Land

by The New Land (retail) (epub)

  “We’re on the same side, Robert.”

  “What’s got you in such a turmoil?”

  “I don’t like being set against our fellow soldiers.”

  “You heard the man,” McDonnell said. “We’re teaching them.”

  “And they’re hating us for it. We don’t want to be in a tight spot some day and have those Highlanders say to themselves, ‘Ach, those ranger lads, let’s see ‘em teach their way out of that.”

  McDonnell looked surprised. “Since when can you talk like a Scot?”

  “Di’n’ ya know? ‘Tis me third language, I reckon.”

  The rangers had to wait on the shingle beach for a boat to take them back to the transport ship that served as home. Halifax was too small to accommodate the thousands massing for the attack on Louisbourg. Dozens of ships, including three huge ships of the line that bristled with sixty-four guns each, rode the swells in the harbor. Johann compared the bustling scene with the quiet of Broad Bay, where the whole settlement buzzed over the arrival of Armstrong’s small coaster or Waldo’s sloop. His thoughts rarely strayed far from the Prince of Wales stockade and the Mayflower Hof and Christiane. It had been a bad time to leave.

  “Well, well, well, look what we’ve got here.” The rough voice was followed by a few grunts and chuckles. Johann looked up. It was the 34th Highlanders arriving at the beach. “Say, Jock,” the voice continued. It came from their sergeant, a man of middle height but built like a barrel. Curls of russet-colored hair strained to escape from his crested headgear. “Do you reckon those turd-sucking provincials are through wallowing in the mud for one day? Maybe we should help them have another go at it?”

  Johann, his mind lingering on his regrets, rose too slowly. McDonnell strode past him, pointing his finger at the other Scots. “Don’t make me laugh. You fellas couldn’t find your arses with both hands, which is exactly what the colonel was trying to explain. Or are you all too pig-stupid to understand?”

  “Lads, you hear that?” the other sergeant said. “Just as we thought. These fairy boys are after our arses, with both hands. I say we ram our boots up some provincial arse.”

  At the same moment, McDonnell and the other sergeant went for each other. McDonnell used his height to drive the other man to the ground, but the Highlander pulled him down, then rolled him over. Men from both units formed a ring as the fighters regained their feet and began to circle, edging one way, then feinting the other. Both were quick. Johann looked for the Highlander captain, but couldn’t see him.

  “Sergeant McDonnell,” he called out sharply. His voice barely penetrated the clamor. He stepped into the ring between the sergeants, holding his hands out. “Sergeant, I order you to step back!” McDonnell shifted his eyes to Johann. In that moment, the Highlander dove around Johann and drove his shoulder into McDonnell. Legs churning, he pushed the ranger back into the shouting crowd until both lost their footing. Johann jumped after them. The shouting stopped abruptly as Johann was grabbing the Highlander’s arm.

  “Who’s in charge here?” The sharp voice came from a man on horseback. The Scots snapped to attention. Johann turned to face a white horse topped by a tall, florid man with ferrety features. The red hair told Johann who he was.

  “General Wolfe, sir,” he said, saluting. “Captain Overstreet of the Broad Bay rangers.”

  “Justify yourself, sir.” The general, though a young man, had mastered an expression of disdain that encompassed everything before him.

  “No justification, sir. A failure of discipline.”

  The sergeants were on their feet, each at attention. Wolfe offered them some of his disdain, then turned to Johann. “Captain, you’re no Yankee. How did these irregulars”—the word plainly disturbed the general—”end up with a German officer?”

  “We’re settlers on General Waldo’s land, sir. In Massachusetts.”

  “Yes, well, that doesn’t signify for this lack of discipline, does it?” Johann said nothing. The Highlander captain came running onto the scene. After saluting, he said, “General, sir.”

  “Where in the blue blazes have you been, Captain…?”

  “Grant, sir. There was confusion about our sleeping quarters, sir.”

  Wolfe turned his disdain on the Highlander. “I dislike excuses, Captain. They aren’t manly.” Wolfe sat erect on his horse. “Refer these two”—he nodded at the sergeants—”to my headquarters tent in the morning for convening of a court-martial.”

  * * * * * *

  Next morning, Captain Grant and his sergeant were outside Wolfe’s tent when Johann and McDonnell arrived. All four wore spotless uniforms, the Americans in cream-colored hunting shirts and black coats, the Scots in brilliant scarlet and kilts. None looked like he had slept well. Grant and Johann took off their hats and nodded to the guards at the tent’s entrance. A guard ducked inside the tent flap, then pulled it aside for them to enter.

  Wolfe sprawled in a camp chair, a long leg stretched out on a table covered with papers and a half-furled map. The captains came to attention and saluted. The general kept his eyes on his work, forcing the captains to hold their salutes. The plan was for Grant to commence the appeal.

  “At your ease, gentlemen,” Wolfe said, looking up. Intelligence brightened his eye but couldn’t improve his features. A chin dimple made his weak jaw recede farther. His narrow brows didn’t inspire respect. He stood up, stork-like on slender legs. He was a head taller than Johann, half a head taller than Grant. “So, this is when you tell me that these brutes are essential to your companies, that they are good men who had a bad moment, and that I should allow mercy to light my way to grace so we may link arms and go thrash the French.” He looked at each man. “Oh, and it won’t happen again. Am I correct?”

  “Correct, sir,” Grant said.

  “That was better, Captain Grant. But what are we to do about discipline? What kind of soldiers can we expect these men to be, least of all these rabble from the provinces who afflict us, if we close our eyes to brawling sergeants?”

  “We don’t argue against discipline, sir,” Grant said. “Both men should be reduced in rank to corporal and should receive other punishment the general deems fit.”

  “Not broken to private soldiers? If they’re corporals, you can elevate them again when I’m not looking. Isn’t that true, Captain Overstreet?” Wolfe looked at Johann.

  “It is, sir,” Johann said.

  “What have I omitted from your petition for these sergeants?”

  “Nothing, sir.”

  Wolfe returned to his chair and leaned back, tenting his fingers in front of him. “Call them in.”

  Johann stepped to the tent flap and summoned both men.

  The slouching general allowed the sergeants to stand at salute for a full minute. “By the grace of your captains,” he finally said, “I will not have your balls sliced off and fed to you one at a time.” He stood, though he couldn’t use his height to intimidate McDonnell, who was eye-level with the general. “I consider you both an embarrassment to this army. If you wish to make me happy, please commit an additional transgression so I may proceed with the agonizing punishments I am postponing.” He nodded at them. When they didn’t leave, he shook his head in annoyance. “Go.”

  The captains turned to face Wolfe, who addressed Johann. “Why are you familiar, Captain?”

  “Sir?”

  “Your face, your bearing. Why are they familiar?”

  “I was at Dettingen, sir, with the Landgraf’s regiments. When you lost your horse.”

  “Of course! That bloody useless nag. What a nightmare that day was, the goddamned orders going every which way. You—” he pointed at Johann and snapped his fingers—”you’re the bloody wizard with the bayonet.”

  “It was a hard fight, sir.”

  “Do your men know how to use the bayonet too?”

  “I’ve taught them what I can.”

  “Keep on doing it. It could matter a great deal. Colonel Bosworth says your men do well in the woo
ds, with ambush and counter-ambush.”

  “We have to know the woods, sir. They’re all around us.”

  “Light infantry, eh? That’s the answer. The goddamned tactics come straight from Xenophon, though I can’t get anyone in this army to understand it. Small groups, mobile, adapt to the land, strike hard and fast.” He looked up at the two captains and made a face. “Xenophon?”

  “Don’t know him, sir,” Grant said.

  “The tactics sound right, sir,” Johann said.

  “Hard to get in trouble agreeing with the general, eh, Captain?”

  “The tactics still sound right, sir.”

  “They say it’s fighting like the savages.”

  “It isn’t, sir.”

  “How is it different?”

  “The Indians won’t stand and fight even, sir. They don’t like that.”

  “Yes, I see. And we call them primitive.” Wolfe pulled on an ear. “Do you know why I just did what I did, letting those fools off?”

  “Because they’re good men, sir,” Johann said.

  Disdain came back to Wolfe’s feature s. “Hardly,” he drawled. “It’s all this drilling, Captain. The men must be drilled, of course. The landing will be a damned tricky business, and then the fighting’s going to be tough, in the shadows. But the drilling’s hard on real fighters. Sometimes they need a fight.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Next time they do it, they’ll hang.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Wolfe’s smile returned. “And you and that thug of a sergeant really are settled on Waldo’s land?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “God help you. Waldo’s more of a scoundrel than Louis of France is.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  †

  Johann decided to leave General Wolfe’s party early. He had been flattered to be among the captains invited, but when he entered the Great Pontac coffeehouse, eyes adjusting slowly to the bright light of three roaring fires and uncountable candles, several British officers had looked right past him. The experience repeated itself. He was, it turned out, invisible to British captains.

  He spotted some ranger captains and moved in their direction. They, like him, seemed torn between eagerness for a friendly face and a wish not to admit their social inferiority by bunching together. At the punch bowl, he passed a word with General Waldo, who seemed equally ill at ease. The rum punch warmed Johann. He smiled as he nodded to the tune the musicians played—three fiddles, four flutes, and a drum, but they made a cheery noise. It had been five years, at least, since he’d been in a place of leisure like this. Whenever the war ended and he established his carpentry business, he would take Christiane to taverns like this in Portsmouth or Boston.

  When General Waldo left, Johann took it as a signal. Sidling toward General Wolfe to bid him good evening, he passed Captain Grant of the Highlanders. They exchanged shallow nods.

  Stepping into the cool evening, Johann felt at peace with the world, an odd feeling at the beginning of a campaign. Yet he felt the fellowship of the fighting men gathered in this town. It was in the air. It wasn’t, perhaps, enough of a reason to justify the gore and agony of a battlefield, but it was a real thing.

  Putting his hat on against the raw night, he found Wilhelm Koch standing before him, saluting. Koch, a short and intelligent man, rarely saluted. Johann’s good feelings evaporated.

  “I’ve come with bad news, sir. I’m sorry to do so—”

  “Out with it,” Johann said.

  “It’s Robert, sir.”

  “Sergeant McDonnell.”

  “Yes, Sergeant McDonnell. He’s been arrested, sir.”

  Johann took Koch by the arm and led him down the street to where they couldn’t be overheard.

  Johann’s heart sank as Koch related the tale. McDonnell, dissatisfied with the meal offered for the rangers on their last night before taking ship for Louisbourg, had decided that he and Koch should go fishing. As they set off in a borrowed boat, with nothing but fishing string and hooks in their hands, they were stopped by a provost marshal’s patrol.

  “But they let you go?” Johann asked.

  “They did. The officer in charge announced that it was the sergeant who must answer for the crime. They were calling it theft of the boat, but then the sergeant was charged with desertion at the court-martial.”

  “There’s already been a court-martial?”

  Koch drew his mouth into a grim line. His large features and deeply-lined face looked desperate in the thin lantern light. “They tried him quick as lightning. I gave my evidence, told them we were just going to fish. We were going to return the boat in an hour, maybe less. He’s to be shot in the morning. The officer in charge, he was a colonel name of Cameron, he said the fishing story was a ruse to conceal our intent to desert.”

  Johann was quiet for a few moments. “What will you do?” Koch asked.

  “Beg, I suppose. Goddamn his eyes. All he had to do was not get arrested.”

  “I feel terrible about it, sir. I told him it was a bad idea, but you know how he gets, so excited like. The men are going to be frantic.”

  “Wilhelm, go back to the men and for God’s sake, tell them my strict order is that they must do nothing. They can’t help Sergeant McDonnell now.”

  After Koch left, Johann paced in the fog, willing the voices in the coffeehouse to move on to farewells. General Waldo was probably back on his ship for the evening, but that didn’t matter. Waldo was just another Yankee, no matter how rich or how many times he called himself the Hereditary Lord of Broad Bay. He had no power in this army. Only Wolfe could help. Rain began to fall, first a few drops, then more steadily. Johann pressed himself against the coffeehouse wall, trying to squeeze under the roof’s overhang. He was wet to the skin before enough officers had left that Johann resolved to try his luck.

  “Dear God,” Wolfe cried out when Johann came through the door and shook out his hat and coat. “What a sorry sight I behold!” Johann did his best to salute.

  A disgruntled serving woman was lugging the punch bowl to the back of the coffeehouse. Three other officers slouched in chairs and sprawled across tables. Two gazed without focus into the middle distance. The third slept noisily. Wolfe was bright-eyed and cheerful, but not sloppy. He regarded Johann with amusement. “Captain, I insist on officers—even ranger officers—knowing enough to come in out of the rain, except during campaign. And we are not yet on campaign.”

  Johann held his waterlogged hat with both hands and took a step into the room. The serving woman glared at him as she returned to gather up mugs. He was dripping on her floor. “I am sorry to appear like this, but I have an urgent matter.”

  Wolfe looked sharply at him. “Captain, surely you know that disturbing the general during his party is a poor idea.”

  “Your Excellency, I waited until I thought the party over.” He gestured with his hat, triggering a fresh round of drips. “It is a question of life and death, in only a few hours.” Wolfe’s response was to grunt softly and take a chair, stretch out his long legs and cross them at the ankles. Johann told him about McDonnell.

  When he was done, Wolfe said, “Colonel Cameron’s a good man.”

  “Sergeant McDonnell is a good man too. This is a mistake. He just was going fishing, which was stupid beyond my reckoning, I admit it, but he shouldn’t be hanged for it.”

  “This is the sergeant who was brawling the other day?”

  Johann nodded.

  “Hardly the flower of our army, eh, Captain? How many chances is this one miscreant to get? This army is going on campaign, Captain.” Johann nodded. “It’s going to be hard, bloody, and bloody unpleasant. This is precisely when the men become nervy, when desertion becomes a real risk. We must be severe.”

  “He had nothing with him. No weapon, no blankets, no canteen, no food. Just fishing string and hook. No ranger, no American, would desert like that.”

  “In my experience, Captain, criminals are rarely intelligent. A lack of
foresight and planning is a hallmark of the criminal act.” Wolfe stood. “You know I can’t overrule my own officer. Why would you think of asking me? No sergeant could be worth that.”

  Johann took one more step toward Wolfe and held out his hat. “Yes, sir. The sergeant is my friend. We’ve served in the guards in Broad Bay for three years. For us Germans in the settlement, he was important to us, is important to us. I take full responsibility for him. I will accept any discipline you think right for my failure to control him. But you must understand. We are not British soldiers. Sergeant McDonnell is my friend. He’s a friend of my family.”

  “Well, that’s a damned stupid thing. Subordinates aren’t your friends. War isn’t a personal matter.”

  Johann took a breath. “General, we’re not soldiers, not like the others. We’re neighbors. We care for each other’s children. We fight for our homes, not your king.”

  Wolfe stood abruptly. His eyes were cold. “You could be cashiered for that, Captain, and worse. Don’t say such a thing to me or anyone in this army again.” He nodded once. “Good night.”

  * * * * * *

  The slow drumbeat filled the harbor in the morning. Like every morning in this part of the world, it was cool, moist, and breezy. The Broad Bay rangers came ashore in boats.

  Assembling them on the shingle beach, Johann said this would be the worst day of their time in the army. If they broke or cried out in any way, they would dishonor the rangers. They would dishonor Broad Bay. And they would dishonor their friend Robert without helping him. And then they would be executed for mutiny. He looked grimly at each sullen face. They knew they had to be there, to bear witness to the idiocy of this public killing. They might well desert the expedition afterwards, at the first chance they got. That would not surprise Johann. He might too.

  They marched to the boggy field that had served as a drilling ground over the past weeks. The army was drawn up into three sides of a square, the fourth side open to the sea. The Broad Bay men were placed to the front of the formation’s right wing. It was a prominent location, the sort usually occupied by grenadiers or Highlanders in brilliant and complex uniforms. Not by provincial rangers in drab.