The New Land

by The New Land (retail) (epub)

  Musicians, the same ones who played at General Wolfe’s party the night before, stood behind the formation. They began the death march, a dirge Johann had heard too often while serving the Landgraf.

  The first condemned man, from the Welsh regiment, walked before a sergeant, a corporal, and ten privates. The man stopped before a man-sized hole dug into the soft earth. The escort came to parade rest fifteen paces from him. Each of the other condemned men arrived with a similar escort, in a similar manner. McDonnell was the fourth of five.

  With the prisoners in place, the musicians stopped. Thousands of uniformed, armed men stood at attention. The only sound was the breeze past their ears.

  An officer walked across the open side of the formation, offering blindfolds to the condemned. McDonnell, standing erect, refused. Johann thought he had seen McDonnell’s eyes sweep over the Broad Bay men, but he couldn’t be sure. Johann didn’t look at the other rangers. Each soldier retreated to his own thoughts. A few might feel self-righteous superiority over the condemned, and satisfaction that the army’s code of conduct was to be enforced. More would feel simple gratitude to be neither one of the condemned nor in an execution party. For most, like Johann, the dominant feeling was horror. They had joined the army to kill the enemies of their king, of their nation, of their families. Yet they would start by killing their own.

  Drums began a slow roll. The officer in charge called to attention the company that stood before the Welshman. More commands brought the company’s guns level, aimed at the prisoner. Johann looked straight ahead, not at the execution. The cry, “Fire!” disappeared in the roar of ten muskets, a roar that triggered flinches through the army. Johann kept his eyes in front of him. He tried to control the tremble in his left hand. He waited. The acrid, sweet powder smoke blew across the Broad Bay men. Then, “Bang!” It was the pistol shot of the provost marshal to the prisoner’s head, to be sure he was dead. Johann breathed. Four to go.

  The officer in charge called the second company to attention. In the silence came the sound of hoofbeats. Johann forced himself to look to the harbor side of the formation. He saw the fallen Welshman, lying at an unnatural angle.

  Wolfe rode a white stallion into the formation. He drew up before the remaining prisoners and held his head in an arrogant pose, his long legs reaching the bottom of his mount’s deep chest. The general stood in his stirrups. “By the grace of our King George, the remaining prisoners are hereby pardoned and returned to the ranks.”

  Wolfe turned the horse, who pranced through the movement. “Colonel,” he called in a high, ringing voice, “parade the army by the remains of this wretch.” He indicated the Welshman. He turned the horse to look over the full formation, nodded to the army, and walked the horse back the way he had come.

  Johann closed his eyes and breathed deeply. When he next saw McDonnell, he thought, he just might strangle the man with his bare hands.

  CHAPTER TEN

  †

  “Look at these!” Sigrid ran toward a bed where low strawberry plants had spread. “Papa was right that they would grow here.”

  “Pick them all, even if they don’t look ripe,” Christiane said. “We don’t want the rabbits getting them.”

  Sigrid, already kneeling with her bucket next to her, popped a bright red one into her mouth. The juice tasted sweet and lush. “Mmm,” she said, “they’re divine.”

  Christiane smiled as she reached the potato patch at Mayflower Hof. “Divine, are we? You’re sounding a bit blasphemous.”

  “God made strawberries, didn’t He? So they can be divine.”

  “Did He make these black flies divine also?” Christiane slapped at her neck, then pulled her shawl up over her neck. The day was cool and the sky full of clouds that ranged from silver to dark grey.

  “The ways of the Lord are mysterious, I suppose. At least that’s what Herr Nungesser says.”

  Christiane was relieved when she dug up the first potato. It was a good size. She should be able to fill at least two buckets. Everyone in the stockade was hungry. Able to farm only four hours a week, they grew too little food. With so many off at Louisbourg, there were fewer to feed, but also fewer to hunt and trap and fish.

  The Indians were growing bold. Only last week, Indian canoes had charged two Broad Bay fishermen, driving them off the river. If the guards had to protect the fishermen, too, that would reduce even further the settlers’ ability to feed themselves.

  When Armstrong’s coaster arrived, it would take three more families to Boston. It hadn’t come for weeks, which meant that the settlers hadn’t shipped the firewood they needed to trade for the food they couldn’t grow or hunt. Christiane suspected Armstrong was staying away because of the Indians. She had never trusted him.

  Most settlers had felt better when Herr Leichter moved into the Prince of Wales stockade. Announcing that he would stay until Broad Bay’s rangers returned, he took over the guards and supervised the stockades. Broad Bay needed someone to lead now, someone who could help stave off the frustrations and the isolation, but Christiane could see in Leichter’s face an impatience, a desire to be somewhere else, after only two months in the settlement. He wasn’t Johann. Not for her, to be sure, but also not for the others.

  “Alec,” she called out to the McDonnell boy, one of their guards. “Shouldn’t you two spread out?” Johann insisted that the guards flank the settlers as they worked on their lands. The other guard was a boy, too, the Heilman boy, no longer chubby. They had been talking of trout fishing. “And watch the woods?” She waved at the forest behind their cabin, empty for nearly three years now and looking like it. The two boys stepped away from each other.

  Christiane, halfway down the row, went back for her second bucket. She was ashamed now that she had lost her feelings for Johann until it was time for him to leave, to serve as a soldier, which he never wanted to do again. He took up his rifle without complaint. She was grateful to be with a man like that, one you could trust. The children trusted him too. Her eyes smarted to think of that. She would have to tell him that. It would please him. She tried to imagine him in front of her, his low voice covering her like a caress.

  Freya’s barks were rapid, angry. Christiane looked up. The dog jumped back and forth at the tree line, excitement making her voice climb.

  “Sigrid!” Christiane called. “Sigrid!” The girl was at the far end of the berry patch, looking toward the frenzied dog. “Now! We go!”

  The boy guards were alert, peering into the trees. “Missus,” Alec called to her. “We should go.” He fired a shot into the woods. Christiane didn’t think he could see anything to shoot at. Right, she thought, the shot was the alarm. He had a cooler head than she did.

  “Leave the berries!” Christiane called to the girl, who had stumbled and spilled her bucket. “Now!”

  The four of them moved toward the path back to the stockade. “What about Freya?” Sigrid said, hesitating, looking back.

  “Go!” Christiane ordered. “She’s a dog.”

  Holding her skirts off the ground, the girl matched strides with the guards, her legs as long as theirs. When Freya’s mad barking soared into an anguished cry of pain, they stopped short. “Go!” Christiane shouted. “Go!”

  The path had never seemed so long. The slope after the Heilmans’ farm gave Christiane a pain in her side. She couldn’t keep up. Alec looked over his shoulder and waited, holding out a hand for her. “Missus, come on. We’ll make it. Hurry now.”

  He waited for her to go by. Christiane’s breathing was too loud. She wouldn’t hear if anyone was behind them. When had she become so decrepit, an old lady to be protected by children? Maybe they were hurrying into an ambush? Johann always worried about ambushes. He said the Indians were clever, they fought only when they had the advantage. Was this the time when they would attack all of Broad Bay, as they had ten years before? She had to get to Walther and Hanna and Franklin.

  Sigrid and the Heilman boy were a hundred paces ahead and pulling away
. “Are they following?” Christiane gasped, looking over her shoulder.

  “Can’t tell, missus. Keep going, you’re doing well.”

  He was so young. She put her head down and tried to go faster. As she rounded a curve in the path, she saw Sigrid fall into her mother’s arms up ahead. Leichter stepped around them with two more guards carrying muskets.

  Leichter trotted toward them. “That’s everyone?” he called.

  Christiane nodded, but her voice wouldn’t come. “Yes, sir,” Alec said. Leichter took Christiane by the arm as she doubled over.

  “Did you see them?” Leichter asked.

  Christiane was about to say no, but Alec said, “Two, in the woods. The dog alerted us. I think they got the dog.”

  “Freya!” Sigrid screamed, tears streaming down her face. Her mother hugged her hard and pulled her toward the settlement.

  “Reload,” Leichter said to Alec. He turned to Christiane. “Go on back. We need to be sure there’s nothing more to watch for.”

  She held her arm across her middle as her breathing slowed. “You’re not going back there?”

  “Not all the way,” Leichter said. “Far enough to be sure they didn’t follow. Please, go.”

  “There’s no other attack?”

  “No. Not yet.” He turned to Alec. “Get them to the stockade.”

  Christiane had to do her chores that afternoon with Walther and Hanna clinging to her. They had only a bit of salt fish for dinner, with some cabbage that Frau Heilman shared. Christiane thought bitterly of the potatoes and berries they had left behind. The children would have liked them.

  In the evening, when Christiane walked out to empty the pot, she saw Leichter sitting before the fire in Ursula and Sigrid’s room. They spoke in low voices. Sigrid was probably asleep, worn out by the scare. Christiane was surprised to hear Ursula call Leichter “Mathias.” Christiane had never known his given name.

  In the morning, Alec and a different guard came to take them back to Mayflower Hof. When Christiane explained that Walther and Hanna insisted on coming to look for Freya, Alec looked troubled. “Herr Leichter won’t like that. Not such small ones. If there’s trouble?”

  Christiane said they could go by boat. They could take Johann’s boat. The oars were in Johann’s workroom. Alec went to get them.

  When they reached the landing for Mayflower Hof, Sigrid ran up the slope, calling out, “They took the berries, and the potatoes.”

  “And the buckets?” Christiane asked, holding each child by the hand.

  “Gone.”

  Christiane’s anger made her walk more quickly. They stole food from the mouths of people who worked for it. Johann would say that the Indians were hungry too, but she didn’t care about that. She hated the idea of them eating her potatoes.

  “Wait,” she called to Sigrid, who had already reached the cabin. “Wait for Alec before you go past there.”

  They moved together toward the tree line, searching for Freya. They walked from one end to the other, then back again. “Where is she, Mama?” Walther asked. “In the woods?”

  “I don’t know,” Christiane said.

  “We shouldn’t go in there, missus,” Alec said.

  Christiane nodded and crouched next to Walther and Hanna. “Maybe she ran away.” She couldn’t say that the Indians, hungry as they were, probably took her. Or that, after being hurt, she may have crawled off to die in whatever sheltered place she could find.

  “Why would she leave us?” the little boy said. “She protected us.”

  “Yes, she did protect us. She was a wonderful dog.” Christiane fought to control her voice. “She may have been afraid. Or maybe she chased them away for us.”

  “Freya,” Walther called out. “Freya, come home! Freya!”

  When she looked up, she saw Alec turn his head, his face clouded with feeling, a boy pretending to be a man. The children hugged her as they cried. “Come now,” she said, her voice now her own. “Freya wouldn’t want you to cry for her. She was such a brave dog. She would expect us to be brave like her.” The children nodded, each head against one of her shoulders.

  “I hate them,” Sigrid shouted to the sky. Then her shoulders slumped. She said quietly, “They take everything.”

  Christiane had planned to look for more potatoes, but she couldn’t bear to stay there. None of them could.

  Back in the boat, with Alec pulling the oars, Walther trailed a finger in the water even though he had been told never to do that. Christiane let him be.

  “Mama,” he said. “Papa is protecting us, too, isn’t he?”

  “Yes, Walther.”

  “Will he come back?”

  “As soon as he can.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  †

  Broad Bay’s rangers thrilled to the spectacle of the fleet’s departure from Halifax. Nearly two hundred ships stretched from one end of the horizon to the other, sails bellied out, bright pennants snapping in the wind. They included dozens of transports, more dozens of supply ships, and warships ranging from lightly-armed sloops to massive ships of the line. From the rail of their small transport, Johann thought that finally, finally the British were coming to the aid of Broad Bay. King George’s fleet had many goals other than helping Broad Bay, but it would also do that.

  A gale promptly scattered the fleet through the waters off Nova Scotia, though the Broad Bay men fared well enough. They knew bad weather and the water, so they weren’t the ones hanging sweaty faces over putrid-smelling buckets. When calmer days arrived, they could see the beginnings of land as they headed for the fleet’s rendezvous off Louisbourg.

  Johann wasn’t sure how the rangers would perform. Several, like Wilhelm Koch, had grey in their beards. They could wilt under the backbreaking labor involved in taking a fortress like Louisbourg. A few, like the Wagner boy, were young and fit but still soft at heart. They all understood danger. Anyone who lived in Broad Bay knew the perils of the forest—those posed by humans, by wild animals, and by nature.

  The rangers’ anchors would be McDonnell, Meisner, Huffnagel, and Johann. That’s how it had worked through their drilling at Halifax. It would have to keep working that way.

  Johann watched for the men to show resentment, anger, any negative residue from McDonnell’s near-execution. He hadn’t seen it yet. The men decided that General Wolfe learned about the court-martial at the last moment, when he intervened in a triumph of British justice. Johann didn’t tell them otherwise, though he thought the affair was a staged spectacle designed to terrorize the army into obedience. McDonnell had been lucky not to be the first one, the sacrificial victim.

  “All right,” Johann said, stepping into the circle the men formed on the ship’s forecastle. “We’ve talked about the siege.” Some of the men nodded. “Much of it won’t be like the drilling we’ve just been through.”

  Koch, who felt most seared by McDonnell’s near-execution, broke in. “So why do they drill us for a fight we won’t have?”

  “We may have fights like that, in the woods, or even out in the open. Maybe with the French, more likely with their Indians or the Canadians.” Johann held his hand up to squelch further questions. “But attacking a fortress is different.”

  He talked about how Louisbourg had stout and irregular walls designed so defenders could rain wicked crossfires down on attackers. He had attacked fortresses in Germany. The only way to take one was for cannon to pound its walls to rubble. For the guns to do that, they had to get close. So soldiers had to dig trenches for them, zigzagging closer and closer to the fortress. He drew the pattern in the air with his hands. They had to throw up earthen defenses for each trench, then haul the artillery—often under enemy fire—to each new trench. Then they had to do it again, even closer. And again.

  “But we’re rangers, not ditch-diggers.” This came from McDonnell. “We came here to fight and go home.”

  “We’ll fight when the enemy sallies out to attack us, to disrupt our digging, to spike our guns.
They’ll ambush us when they can, sneak up at night. That’ll be our fighting. But the way we win is to get the guns close and knock down the fort.”

  “How do they get the cannons off the ships?” Young Wagner asked this.

  Several rangers looked around the deck, which had one gun at the front and one at the back. They shook their heads.

  “Heavy bastards, those,” McDonnell said.

  Johann grinned. “These are the small ones. They’ll take the big ones from the ships of the line.”

  “How?” Wagner asked again.

  “There are engineers who know how to do that. You can watch and learn.”

  “How long will this take?” McDonnell asked.

  Johann paused. This was the question on every ranger’s mind. They wanted to get back to their families, exposed and vulnerable in Broad Bay. He believed in telling the truth, as much as he could, but he also believed in keeping their spirits up. “The fighting season is short up here,” Johann said. “If we’re not inside Louisbourg by September, I don’t know that we’ll get home this year.” Shadows crossed their faces. What would their families eat through a hard winter without them? Would the St. Francis Indians sweep down on Broad Bay as they had years before? “So,” Johann added, “we should dig fast, and fight hard.”

  * * * * * *

  “Christ almighty, man,” McDonnell called down to Josef Wagner, who dangled halfway out of the whaling boat that was to carry them to shore. A sailor holding the boat’s tiller with one hand used his other to grab Wagner by the collar, allowing him to swing his legs over the side and roll into the boat. McDonnell, suspended from the rope ladder at the side of the ship, shouted, “Move, damn your German hide! I’d like to get in before the war’s over.”

  “Goddamn. Can’t see a fucking thing,” Wagner croaked out as he scrambled forward. His recent education in army language had begun with cursing and stalled out there.

  The heaving swells of Gabarus Bay brought the boat achingly close to the rangers’ transport ship, then plunged it five feet below. Wagner’s tumble was the result of poor timing.