A Passionate Girl

by Thomas Fleming

  I promised him it was in safe hands. He mounted his horse and rode off into the deepening twilight. Back at Dr. Kempson’s house, Dr. Tom Gallaher was waiting on the dark porch for me.

  “I’m leaving tomorrow at 4:00 A.M. with a medical wagon to join the army. Can you handle a two-horse team?

  “Of course. I grew up on a farm.”

  “It could be dangerous. But I think you’re like me. You enjoy danger.”

  “Not really,” I said, “but I’ll come.”

  He knocked softly on my bedroom door at 4:00 A.M. It was already dawn. The June nights are surprisingly short in northern New York and Canada. The wagon was waiting beside the house; in it were some medical supplies, mostly opium, procured from Dr. Kempson and the Fort Erie pharmacy. We rode along the river road for some four miles and met no fewer than fifty or sixty Fenians. They shambled past, declining to look us in the face.

  “Stragglers,” Tom Gallaher said. “Donnelly told me to expect them. There’s some before every battle.”

  “But we need every man,” I said, glaring at them.

  “Better they run now than when the shooting starts. They might panic everyone,” Gallaher said.

  We swung west as the sun began to rise and jounced for several more miles through open, thinly wooded country. At length we struck a rail line and followed it on a parallel road that ran along a ridge. Rounding a bend, we caught sight of our army on the road a half mile ahead of us. We persuaded our two tired horses to go a little faster and soon reached the rear of the column. Up ahead we could see O’Neil and the other colonels, all in Union blue, on horseback. As we watched, Dan and two other horsemen came racing up to them. Dan waving his wide tan hat to whip his horse. They reined up and reported urgent news to O’Neil, pointing to the west.

  O’Neil turned and shouted an order to the column, which quickened its pace. Dan rode down the line of march to us. He glared at me. “I knew you’d get out here,” he said through clenched teeth.

  “Why did you bring her?” he said to Gallaher. “Don’t you have any brains at all?”

  Dan wheeled and galloped away. “I knew love was blind,” Gallaher said. “Now I see it is also deaf and dumb.”

  “Have you ever been in love?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Bad for the digestion.”

  The Fenians had been marching parallel to the river as well as the railroad. Ahead lay a crossroad that ran into their route at right angles. In the southeast corner of the intersection stood a fine brick farmhouse with a barn and other outbuildings. From the crossroad, pastureland sloped gradually for a half mile, broken by several fences. On the left as we faced this open ground was a lower road also roughly parallel to the river. The crossroad was really the crest of a ridge, and under John O’Neil’s direction the Fenians moved along it to form a battle line. Several companies took up positions around the farm and in a grove of trees beyond it. There was a ditch running along the road, fringed with trees and shrubs. The men pulled down a fence on the opposite side of the road and made A-shaped rifle pits with the rails, jamming loose stones between them.

  As they worked, we heard the sound of a train engine to the west, then a clear, unmistakable bugle call. The enemy were on the scene. They had come by rail from Port Colborne to the nearby village of Ridgeway. Several dozen of our men emerged from a grove of maple trees on the far left of our battle line and ran swiftly across the fields in that direction to vanish into a thicket of pines. Dan rode up to us and ordered Gallaher to get the medical wagon and me behind the brick house.

  “Where are they going?” I asked, pointing to the running men. I wondered if they were more deserters.

  “Skirmishers,” Dan said. “We’re goin’ to try to tease them into a nice little trap here.”

  Even my unmilitary eyes could see the position was well chosen. We were largely invisible to the enemy, who would have to advance across open fields to reach us. For another minute, all remained perfectly still. There were only the sounds of summer, birds twittering, a faint breeze stirring the topmost branches of the tress. The day was growing very hot.

  Then came the crack of a gun, followed by another, and another. In an instant it was followed by the rolling crash of a dozen guns, joined by the staccato cracks of so many more that they became a continuous thunder. Still there was not a sign of a man in the fields between us and the pine trees, or on the road that ran along the edge of the fields about three hundred yards below us on the sloping ridge. Dan sat quietly on his horse, the battle glow gleaming darkly on his somber face. “Heavy skirmishin’,” he said.

  I thought of how many other times he had heard the sound of those guns and seen his friends falling before their murderous mouths. If he thought about it, he gave no sign.

  For twenty minutes the heavy firing continued. Then the first of our skirmishers appeared, running in and out among the trees by the lower road. Others burst from the pine trees and raced across the pastures to crouch behind fences and single trees for another shot. Suddenly the enemy was there, an explosion of brilliant red against the green and brown and yellow landscape. From the lower road to the edge of the pasture directly opposite us they formed a long swaying yelling line. They advanced erratically, pausing to fire, then whooping and running forward again. Our skirmishers waited until they were climbing over a fence to return their fire and retreat once more. Twice I saw a Redcoat clutch his chest and fall.

  A tremendous crash of riflery erupted from the grove of maple trees at the far left of our line. The red line opposite them wavered, recoiled; two or three men dropped, but they rallied, and squads of them went racing to the right to get around the flank of that position.

  “I don’t like this,” Dan said. “They’re fightin’ like veterans.”

  He rode to the center of our line to confer with John O’Neil, then rode back, waved a junior officer to his side, and in a moment detached a half dozen men from the battle line. They followed Dan across the road to where the horses belonging to colonels and lieutenant colonels were tied in a grove of trees. Dan’s men mounted these and rode rapidly off to the north.

  Before I could wonder where they were going, much less ask, the men all around us opened fire. I thought my head would split and my eyes spring from my head, the noise was so tremendous. An acrid haze of gunsmoke swirled over the field, in some places so thick the Canadians appeared like ghosts through it. Up and down the whole battle line, the firing became universal. The Canadians returned it with a vengeance and came on, cheering and shouting. Bullets hummed all around us, but most of them were high, clipping twigs and leaves from the trees above us. A few whizzed close enough to make me crouch behind a brick wall, but Dr. Gallaher stood calmly in the open, taking his own pulse. He later explained that he was trying to determine scientifically whether he was a hero or a coward.

  Suddenly the red line halted, and there was a loud bugle call. Men pointed to the north, and we heard someone shout, “Cavalry.” They scampered back a few hundred feet and began trying to form squares, the standard formation for infantry attacked by horsemen. Now I knew where Dan had gone and what was about to happen.

  “Soldiers of Ireland,” John O’Neil roared. “Charge.”

  Out of the rifle pits and from behind the trees and fences the Fenians sprang. At their head raced a lad carrying a great green flag. Bayonets flashed in the sun. They stopped, fired a volley into the Canadian squares, and resumed the charge, roaring and yelling like men possessed. The howl of the Union veterans mingled with the shrill yi-yi-yi of the Confederate yell. Redcoats toppled right and left. Everywhere the squares buckled. Dan and his half dozen horsemen appeared on their northern flank firing pistols and rifles into them. A wild bugle call and the squares dissolved. But their last volley brought down the lad carrying the green flag when he was within ten yards of them. Behind them came his roaring fellows. A few Canadians tried to make a stand and were swiftly dispatched. The rest ran.

  What a glorious sight that was, t
he backs of those red coats. They scampered pell-mell, flinging away guns and packs, screaming like frightened children. It was hard to believe they were the same confident, cheering soldiers who had advanced so bravely only minutes before. They had thought the contemptible Irish would run at the first volley. Their bravery was born of prejudice and ignorance.

  I found myself cheering like a madwoman. “We beat them, we beat them!” I screamed. I sprang up on the stone wall and leaped off into Tom Gallaher’s arms. Battle lust, battle madness, I was drunk with it.

  Heavy firing continued for a few more minutes on the left. Some of the companies that had made the charge let the rest continue the pursuit of the Canadian center and swung to cut off the Redcoats who had attempted to out-flank our position in the maple trees. This they did handily, turning that branch of the Canadian army into frantic fugitives like the rest, while a half dozen threw down their guns and surrendered.

  Five more minutes and it was over. Not a sound but an occasional triumphant yell and a random shot from far down the road. “Now we must go to work,” Tom Gallaher said.

  “What?” I said blankly. In my frenzy I had forgotten he was a doctor, why we were here.

  “Go to work,” he said. He took off his coat, rolled up his sleeves, and took a white apron from the rear of the wagon. He gave it to me and tied another around his waist. He handed me a box containing opium pills and bandages. We walked slowly down the line of the rifle pits. We heard a groan. In the ditch lay my red-haired friend, Captain Hennessy. He had been shot through the face. His dead eyes stared at me in a sort of ghastly surprise. Beside him writhed another man, clutching his belly. Blood trickled through his fingers.

  “Oh, my God,” I gasped and turned away. I lurched past Tom Gallaher, the ground heaving beneath me, the blue sky turning black and purple. He grabbed my arm and cuffed me in the face. He was a muscular man. Except for the Ku Klux whip, I never felt such pain.

  “If you can cheer for them, you can bandage them,” he said.

  I clutched my aching cheek, too stunned to be angry.

  “I can’t help it, I—”

  “You can help it,” he said, and struck me again.

  “You—you bastard,” I cried.

  “Precisely,” he said, with a cold smile. “That is precisely what you must be in this business. Now cut away his shirt and trousers and hold him while I probe for the bullet.”

  He handed me a scissors. With a hand so steady I could not believe it, I cut away the bloody cloth and confronted the torn red ugliness of the wound. Dr. Gallaher knelt down, the steel scalpel in his hand. “If I can get the bullet out before it works too far into him, it will be all to the good. Give him an opium pill.”

  I popped one into the man’s mouth, and Dr. Bastard went to work. The man clung to me, groaning in agony. He was about thirty, a thickset fellow. I asked him his name. He said it was Doyle. He had been in the Civil War from Bull Run to Appomattox with never a scratch. He had a wife and child in New York. “Oh, Jaysus, I know the belly’s bad, is it bad, Doctor?” he gasped.

  “You’ll be fine,” Dr. Gallaher said with his empty smile. He called to some men from Doyle’s company and ordered them to carry him into the brick house.

  “He’ll be dead before morning,” Gallaher said as soon as Doyle was out of earshot.

  So we proceeded across the battlefield in the blazing heat of Sunday, the third of June, closing the eyes of the dead like poor Hennessy and probing wounds, bandaging them. We treated friend and foe alike as we came to them. Around the maple grove there were a half dozen Canadians either dead or badly wounded. I was shocked by their youth. I asked one of the least wounded, a blond red-cheeked boy so pretty he could have passed for a woman if he wore skirts, how old he was. “Seventeen,” he said.

  “Good God,” I said, “what are you doing here?”

  He glared at me. “Defending my country,” he said.

  By the time we reached the field where the Canadians had tried to form their squares against Dan’s cavalry feint, my artificial calm, created by the shock of Tom Gallaher’s slaps, was beginning to crumble. He saw it and began another shock treatment. He told me how he had sat on the porch last night and imagined himself in bed with me, slowly seducing me, touch by kiss by touch. It was described with cold intensity, with no detail left unimagined. Yet it did not seem in the least obscene.

  “And then I took the nipple of your left breast and placed it in my mouth and rotated my tongue against it,” he whispered and simultaneously felt for the bullet in the breast of a half-conscious young Canadian.

  We gazed down at the crumpled figure of our color bearer, wrapped in the folds of his green flag. “Your mons veneris was as warm and soft as the inside of a rose,” he said as he took the pulse, found nothing, and closed the sightless eyes.

  A few feet away, two Fenians were tugging loose a Union Jack from beneath the body of a young Canadian, about the same age as the Irish color sergeant. We performed the same sad service for him, while my mad doctor said, “You cried out when I entered you. Never had you known such pleasure was possible.”

  He began to infect me with his madness. I suppose it was preferable, anything was preferable, to thinking about what we were doing.

  “You make it sound so interesting, I might let you try it,” I said. “If he didn’t object.”

  Dan strode across the field toward us, stepping over the dead bodies as if they were stones or stumps. There was no victorious exultation on his face. Nor was there any on or within any part of me, now.

  “We’re goin’ to fall back to Fort Erie,” he said. “Those boys won’t stop runnin’ till they get to Port Colborne. But the other column is a different story. Twice as big and with cavalry and artillery. We’ve got to get some reinforcements. Maybe you can get back across the river and tell about this fight. It might change some minds.”

  “Yes,” I said dully, without the slightest hope.

  “We’ll go ahead with the wounded—the ones worth moving,” Tom Gallaher said. “The rest we’ll leave in the farmhouse.”

  We loaded a dozen wounded into the wagon, gave them more opium pills, and set out for Fort Erie. It was late afternoon by the time we came down the river road into the center of town. We noticed a tug tied up at the wharf. Our hopes rose wildly. Had the river been opened? Not until we got much closer did we realize the tug was flying the Union Jack. It was impossible to flee. A ride in a runaway wagon would have destroyed the wounded men. So we continued steadily to the door of the post office. There we were confronted by a big man in a red coat. On the side street lounged half a hundred men wearing the enemy’s colors. “What’s this?” the big man boomed.

  “Wounded men,” Tom Gallaher answered.

  “And who might you be?”

  “Dr. Thomas Gallaher, volunteer surgeon with the Irish Republican Army.”

  “I am Colonel J. S. Dennis, brigade major of Her Majesty’s loyal militia in this district, and you are under arrest. So are those criminals and your wagon and that woman, whoever she is.”

  “She’s a nurse. Her name is Fitzmaurice.”

  “She’s under arrest, too. Get off that wagon. Where is Colonel Booker?”

  “Was he the commander of the column that marched from Port Colborne?” I asked.

  “Of course,” snapped Dennis, who had a short Prince Albert beard below a huge pendulous nose. He was the very picture of British pomposity.

  “I imagine he may have reached Port Colborne by now,” Tom Gallaher said. “He was running well ahead of his men the last time I saw him.”

  “This is not the time or the place for jokes, sir,” huffed Colonel Dennis.

  “I’m not joking, and I would like to get my patients out of the sun and into the expert hands of my colleague, Dr. Donnelly.”

  Colonel Dennis mouthed a few words and then rushed down the wharf to confer with the captain of the tug. We helped our wounded down from the wagon and half-walked, half-carried them to the mattres
ses Dr. Donnelly had stretched on the floor inside. While we worked, Donnelly told us that Dennis had arrived from Port Colborne with two companies of Canadian volunteers aboard the tug and arrested about sixty of the stragglers we had seen that morning on the river road. They were imprisoned belowdecks in the tug.

  We heard shouts in the street. We rushed out to discover an old man on horseback, anxiously pointing to the bluff above the town. “They’re comin’, the whole dang bunch of them,” he yelled.

  “Form, form,” bellowed Colonel Dennis, and his men scrambled into ranks in the street before the ferry wharf. They stood there in parade formation, with Colonel Dennis on the wharf facing them. “Remember, men,” he said, “you are fighting for Canada and the queen. Duty—”

  He was stopped in midsentence by the appearance of the Fenians on the bluff above the town. They were led by Lieutenant Colonel Bailey on a white horse. As they spread out along the ridge, it was obvious that they numbered in the hundreds. The old man had told the truth. Colonel Dennis remained paralyzed, speechless, like a man struck by a spell. Terror had numbed his brain.

  A sensible officer would have rushed his fifty men aboard the tug and fled. A pugnacious one might have thrown his men into nearby houses for shelter, and tried to make a fight of it. Dennis did neither. He let his men stand there in the street. The Fenians on the bluff fired a volley over their heads, hoping to drive them off without bloodshed. A Redcoat in the first rank, with as Irish a face as I’ve ever seen, dropped to his knee, aimed his rifle and replied. Lieutenant Colonel Michael Bailey clutched his chest and toppled from his horse. The men on the ridge fell back, amazed by such deadly aim.

  Still Colonel Dennis stared, gape-jawed, his men drawn up in the street. The Fenians started firing back at them in earnest. The Canadians opened their ranks a bit and began returning their fire. We stood in the door of the post office, watching in disbelief. When the first shot was fired, there were ten or fifteen civilians in the street, some of them women and children. They huddled against the houses, in terror of the bullets. “Get in here,” I called to the nearest of them, and they scampered to the safety of the post office’s stout wooden walls.