The Fort: A Novel of the Revolutionary War

by Bernard Cornwell

  McLean smiled. His undignified perch on the table gave him an excellent view of the ground over which the rebels must advance. He reached into a pocket of his red coat and took out a folded penknife. “Sergeant, would you be so kind as to open that?”

  “Going to stick a rebel, General?” Lawrence asked as he extracted the blade. “I reckon your sword will do more damage.”

  McLean took the knife back. The hand of his injured right arm was too weak to loosen the halliard holding the flag and so he held the short blade in his left hand ready to cut the line when the moment came.

  Captain Fielding came to the bastion where he insisted on laying the twelve-pounder cannon himself. “What’s the charge?” he asked Lawrence.

  “Quarter charge, sir,” Lawrence said, “three pounds.”

  Fielding nodded and made some calculations in his head. The gun was cold, which meant the shot would lose some power, so he elevated the barrel just a trifle, then used the trail spike to aim the gun at a knot of men standing close to the rebels’ bright flags. Satisfied that his aim and elevation were good, he stepped back and nodded to Sergeant Lawrence. “Carry on, Sergeant,” he said.

  Lawrence primed the gun, ordered the crew to cover their ears and step aside, then touched flame to the portfire. The gun roared, smoke smothered the bastion, and the round shot flew.

  It flew above the abatis and over the shattered stumps, and it began to lose height as the ground rose to meet it. To Peleg Wadsworth, standing to Lovell’s left, the ball appeared as a lead-gray streak in the sky. It was a flicker of gray, a pencil stroke against the sudden white-gray of powder smoke that obscured the fort, and then the streak vanished and the ball struck. It hit a militiaman in the chest, shattering ribs, blood, and flesh in an explosion of butchery, and plunged on, flicking blood behind its passage, to rip a man in the groin, more blood and meat in the air, and then the ball struck the ground, bounced, and decapitated one of Revere’s gunners before vanishing noisily into the woods behind.

  Solomon Lovell was standing just two paces away from the first man struck by the round shot. A splinter of rib hit the general on the shoulder and a stringy splat of bloody flesh spattered wetly across his face, and just then HMS North, which lay closest to the fort, fired its broadside at the marines who were on the right of Lovell’s lines, and the thunder of the sloop’s gunfire filled the Majabigwaduce sky as Captain Fielding’s second gun fired. That second ball hit a tree stump just in front of Colonel McCobb’s men and struck with such violence that the stump was half-uprooted as it shattered into scraps that drove into McCobb’s front rank. A man screamed in pain.

  Sergeant Lawrence’s crew, drilled and practiced, had swabbed and reloaded the first gun, which they now levered back to the low embrasure so Lawrence could fire it a second time. The ball struck the ground just paces from Lovell and bounced harmlessly overhead, though not before it drove a shower of soil at the general’s staff.

  The man whose groin had been pulped by the first shot was still alive, but his belly was eviscerated and his guts coiled on the ground and he breathed in short, desperate spasms. Lovell, transfixed, watched appalled as a pulse of blood, obscenely thick, spilled out of the man’s gutted trunk. The wounded man was making a pathetic noise and Lieutenant-Colonel Revere, whose uniform had been spattered by blood, was white-faced, staring wide-eyed, unmoving. Wadsworth noted the pine needles sticking to the loops of intestine on the ground. The man somehow brought up his head and looked beseechingly at Wadsworth, and Wadsworth involuntarily moved towards him, wondering what in God’s name he could do or say when, with another surge of blood from his ruined guts, the man’s head fell back.

  “Oh dear God,” Lovell said to no one.

  “God rest his soul,” the Reverend Jonathan Murray said, his voice unusually strained.

  Wadsworth looked into the dead man’s face. No movement there except for a fly crawling on an unshaven cheek. Behind Wadsworth a man vomited. He turned to stare at the fort where the cannon smoke lingered. “We should advance, sir,” he said to Lovell, and was surprised that he had spoken at all, let alone sounded so detached. Lovell seemed not to have heard him. “We should advance, sir!” Wadsworth said in a louder voice.

  Solomon Lovell was gazing at the fort where another billow of smoke jetted from an unfinished bastion. The ball flew to the general’s left, crashing into a tree behind the militia. “Colonel Revere?” Lovell asked, still looking at the fort.

  “General?” Revere acknowledged.

  “Can your artillery reduce the fort?”

  “It can,” Revere said, though without any of his usual confidence. “It can,” he said again, unable to take his eyes from the bloody mess on the ground.

  “Then we shall give your guns that chance,” Lovell said. “The men will shelter in the trees.”

  “But now’s the moment to advance and’” Wadsworth began a protest.

  “I can’t attack into those guns!” Lovell interrupted shrilly. He blinked, surprised by his own tone of voice. “I can’t,” he began again, then seemed to forget what he wanted to say. “We shall reduce their walls with artillery,” he said decisively, then frowned as another British gun hammered a ball up the ridge. “The enemy might counterattack,” he went on with a note of panic, “so we must be ready to repel them. Into the trees!” He turned and waved his sword at the thick woods. “Take the men into the trees!” he shouted at the militia officers. “Dig defenses! Here, at the tree line. I want earthworks.” He paused, watching his men retreat, then led his staff into the cover of the high wood.

  Brigadier-General McLean watched in astonishment as his enemy vanished. Was it a trick? One moment there had been hundreds of men forming into ranks, then suddenly they had all retreated into the trees. He watched and waited, but as time passed he realized that the rebels really had gone into the woods and were showing no sign of renewing their attack. He let out a long breath, took his hand from the flag’s halliard, and pushed the open penknife back into his pocket. “Colonel Campbell!” he called, “stand down three companies! Form them into work parties to heighten the ramparts!”

  “Yes, sir!” Campbell called back.

  Fort George would live a few hours yet.

  From Brigadier-General Lovell’s despatch to Jeremiah Powell, President of the Council Board of the State of Massachusetts Bay, dated July 28th, 1779:

  This morning I have made my landing good on the S.W. Head of the Peninsula which is one hundred feet high and almost perpendicular very thickly covered with Brush and trees, the men ascended the Precipice with alacrity and after a very smart conflict we put them to rout, they left in the Woods a number killed and wounded and we took a few Prisoners our loss is about thirty kill’d and wounded, we are with in 100 Rod of the Enemey’s main fort on a Commanding peice of Ground, and hope soon to have the Satisfaction of informing you of the Capturing the whole Army, you will please to excuse my not being more particular, as you may Judge my situation.

  Am Sir your most Obedient Humble Servant

  From Brigadier-General Solomon Lovell’s Journal. Wednesday July 28th, 1779:

  When I returned to the Shore it struck me with admiration to see what a Precipice we had ascended, not being able to take so scrutinous a view of it in time of Battle, it is at least where we landed three hundred feet high, and almost perpendicular and the men were obliged to pull themselves up by the twigs and trees. I don’t think such a landing has been made since Wolfe.

  From the letter of Colonel John Brewer to David Perham, written in 1779 and published in the Bangor Daily Whig and Courier, August 13th, 1846:

  The General [McLean] he received me very politely, and said . . . “I was in no situation to defend myself, I only meant to give them one or two guns, so as not to be called a coward, and then have struck my colors, which I stood for some time to do, as I did not want to throw away the lives of my men for nothing.”

  Chapter Eight

  Marine Captain Thomas Carnes and thirty men
had been on the right flank of the marines who had fought their way up the bluff. Carnes’s route lay up the steepest part of the bluff’s slope and his men did not reach the summit until after Welch was shot and after the sudden counterattack by a company of redcoats who, their volley fired, had retreated as suddenly as they had arrived. Captain Davis had taken over command of Dyce’s Head and his immediate problem was the wounded marines. “They need a doctor,” he told Carnes.

  “The nearest surgeon is probably still on the beach,” Carnes said.

  “Damn it, damn it,” Davis looked harried. “Can your men carry them down? And we need cartridges.”

  So Carnes took his thirty men back to the beach. They escorted two prisoners and, because they carried eight of their own wounded and did not want to cause those casualties even more pain, they descended the bluff very slowly and carefully. The injured men were laid on the shingle, joining the other men who waited for the surgeons. Carnes then led his two captives to where another six prisoners were under militia guard beside the big granite boulder. “What happens to us, sir?” one of the prisoners asked, but the man’s Scottish accent was so strange that Carnes had to make him repeat the question twice before he understood.

  “You’ll be looked after,” he said, “and probably a lot better than I was,” he added bitterly. Carnes had been taken captive two years earlier and had spent a hungry six months in New York before being exchanged.

  The narrow strip of beach was busy. Doctor Downer, distinguished by his blood-soaked apron and an ancient straw hat, was using a probe to track a musket-ball buried in a militiaman’s buttock. The injured man was held down by the doctor’s two assistants, while the Reverend Murray knelt beside a dying man, holding his hand and reciting the twenty-third psalm. Sailors were landing boxes of musket ammunition, while those wounded who did not require immediate treatment were waiting patiently. A number of militiamen, too many to Carnes’s eyes, seemed to have no purpose at all on the beach, but were sitting around idle. Some had even lit driftwood fires, a few of which were much too close to the newly arrived boxes of musket cartridges that were stacked above the high-tide line. That ammunition belonged to the militia, and Carnes suspected the minutemen would not be generous if he requested replacement cartridges. “Sergeant Sykes?”

  “Sir?”

  “How many thieves in our party?”

  “Every last man, sir. They’re marines.”

  “Two or three of those boxes would be mighty useful.”

  “So they would, sir.”

  “Carry on, Sergeant.”

  “What’s happening on the heights, Captain?” Doctor Eliphalet Downer called from a few paces away. “I’ve found the ball,” he said to his assistants as he selected a pair of blood-caked tongs, “so hold him tight. Stay still, man, you’re not dying. You’ve just got a British ball up your American bottom. Did the redcoats counterattack?”

  “They haven’t yet, Doctor,” Carnes said.

  “But they might?”

  “That’s what the general believes.”

  Their conversation was interrupted by a gasp from the wounded man, then the dull boom of a British cannon firing from the distant fort. When Carnes had left the heights to bring the wounded down to the beach all the American forces had been back among the trees, but the British gunners were still sustaining a desultory fire, presumably to keep the Americans at bay. “So what happens now?” Eliphalet Downer asked, then grunted as he forced the tongs into the narrow wound. “Mop that blood.”

  “General Lovell has called for artillery,” Carnes said, “so I guess we batter the bastards before we assault them.”

  “I’ve got the ball,” Downer said, feeling the jaws of his tongs scrape and close around the musket-ball.

  “He’s fainted, sir,” an assistant said.

  “Sensible fellow. Here is comes.” The ball’s extraction provoked a spurt of blood which the assistant staunched with a linen pad as Downer moved to the next patient. “Bone saw and knife,” Downer ordered after a glance at the man’s shattered leg. “Good morning, Colonel!” This last was to Lieutenant-Colonel Revere who had just appeared on the crowded beach with three of his artillerymen. “I hear you’re moving guns to the heights?” Downer asked cheerfully as he knelt beside the injured man.

  Revere looked startled at the question, perhaps because he thought it was none of Downer’s business, but he nodded. “The general wants batteries established, Doctor, yes.”

  “I hope that means no more work for us today,” Downer said, “not if your guns keep the wretches well away.”

  “They will, Doctor, never you fret,” Revere said, then walked towards his white-painted barge, which waited a few paces down the shingle. “Wait here,” he called back to his men, “I’ll be back after breakfast.”

  Carnes was not certain he had heard the last words correctly. “Sir?” He had to repeat the word to get Revere’s attention. “Sir? If you need help taking the guns up the slope, my marines are good and ready.”

  Revere paused at the barge to give Carnes a suspicious look. “We don’t need help,” he said brusquely, “we’ve got men enough.” He had not met Cames and had no idea that this was the marine officer who had been an artilleryman in General Washington’s army. He stepped over the barge’s gunwale. “Back to the Samuel,” he ordered the crew.

  The general wanted artillery at the top of the bluff, but Colonel Revere wanted a hot breakfast. So the general had to wait.

  Lieutenant John Moore accompanied his two wounded men to Doctor Calef’s barn, which now served as the garrison’s hospital. He tried to comfort the two men, but felt his words were inadequate, and afterwards he went into the small vegetable garden outside where, overcome with remorse, he sat on the log pile. He was shaking. He held out his left hand and saw it quivering, and he bit his lip because he sensed he was about to shed tears and he did not want to do that, not where people could see him, and to distract himself he stared across the harbor to where Mowat’s ships were cannonading the rebel battery on Cross Island.

  Someone came from the house and wordlessly offered him a mug of tea. He looked up and saw it was Bethany Fletcher and the sight of her provoked the tears he had been trying so hard to suppress. They rolled down his cheeks. He attempted to stand in welcome, but he was shaking too much and the gesture failed. He sniffed and took the tea. “Thank you,” he said.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “The rebels beat us,” Moore said bleakly.

  “They haven’t taken the fort,” Beth said.

  “No. Not yet.” Moore gripped the mug with both hands. The cannon smoke lay like fog on the harbor and more smoke drifted slowly from the fort where Captain Fielding’s cannons shot into the distant trees. The rebels, despite their capture of the high ground, were showing no sign of wanting to attack the fort, though Moore supposed they were organizing that attack from within the cover of the woods. “I failed,” he said bitterly.

  “Failed?”

  “I should have retreated, but I stayed. I killed six of my men.” Moore drank some of the tea, which was very sweet. “I wanted to win,” he said, “and so I stayed.” Beth said nothing. She was wearing a linen apron smeared with blood and Moore flinched at the memory of Sergeant McClure’s death, then he remembered the tall American in his green coat charging across the clearing. He could still see the man’s upraised cutlass blade reflecting the day’s new light, the bared teeth, the intensity of hatred on the rebel’s face, the determination to kill, and Moore remembered his own panic and the sheer luck that had saved his life. He made himself drink more tea. “Why do they wear white crossbelts?” he asked.

  “White crossbelts?” Beth was puzzled.

  “You could hardly see them in the trees, except they wore white belts and that made them visible,” Moore said. “Black crossbelts,” he said, “they should be black,” and he had a sudden vision of the spray of blood from Sergeant McClure’s mouth. “I killed them,” he said, “by being selfis
h.”

  “It was your first fight,” Beth said sympathetically.

  And it had been so different from anything Moore had expected. In his mind, for years, there had been a vision of redcoats drawn up in three ranks, their flags bright above them, the enemy similarly arrayed and the bands playing as the muskets volleyed. Cavalry was always resplendent in their finery, decorating the dream-fields of glory, but instead Moore’s first battle had been a chaotic defeat in dark woods. The enemy had been in the trees and his men, ranked in their red line, had been easy targets for those men in green coats. “But why white crossbelts?” he asked again.

  “Were there many dead?” Beth asked.

  “Six of my men,” Moore answered bleakly. He remembered the stench of shit from McPhail’s corpse and closed his eyes as if he could blot that memory away.

  “Among the rebels?” Beth asked anxiously.

  “Some, yes, I don’t know.” Moore was too distracted by guilt to hear the anxiety in Bethany’s voice. “The rest of the picquet ran away, but they must have killed some.”

  “And now?”

  Moore finished the tea. He was not looking at Beth, but gazing at the ships in the harbor, noting how HMS Albany seemed to shiver when her guns fired. “We did it all wrong,” he said, frowning. “We should have moved most of the picquet to the beach and shot at them as they rowed towards the shore, then put more men halfway up the slope. We could have beaten them!” He put the mug on the logs and saw that his hand was no longer shaking. He stood. “I’m sorry, Miss Fletcher, I never thanked you for the tea.”

  “You did, Lieutenant,” Beth said. “Doctor Calef told me to give it to you,” she added.

  “That was kind of him. Are you helping him?”

  “We all are,” Beth said, meaning the women of Majabigwaduce. She watched Moore, noting the blood on his finely tailored clothes. He looked so young, she thought, just a boy with a long sword.

  “I must get back to the fort,” Moore said. “Thank you for the tea.” His job, he remembered, was to burn the oaths before the rebels discovered them. And the rebels would come now, he was sure, and all he was good for was burning papers because he had failed. He had killed six of his men by making the wrong decision and John Moore was certain that General McLean would not let him lead any more men to their deaths.