When all was ready, we sat down on our hams in a circle around a great fire, near which a large stake was fixed. After a while the war-chief of the Cayugas arose, as the person of greatest respectability present and, placing himself in the centre, by the stake, began rehearsing all the gallant exploits of his life. He dwelt upon the number of enemies he had killed, describing with gestures how he stalked them, struck them down, scalped them – how he stole horses, ripped open enemies’ lodges as an insult, did this and that atrocious deed. His recital, which was spoken with great fluency and dramatic earnestness, cannot have lasted less than three hours. He was greeted with great acclamation and cries of Etow! Etow! He continually knocked against the stake with his war-club, making it the witness to the truth of his boasts. I could follow the whole tale by his pantomime gestures. Especially I enjoyed his stealing of the horses of the Wyandots: how after much waiting and watching he had crept up to the horses, stooped down to cut their hopples, mounted the finest, seized another by the forelock and galloped off with both. He rode his tomahawk during this account, as children do broomsticks, making use of an imaginary whip to indicate the necessity of rapid movement, and glancing continuously over his shoulder at the pursuing foe. When he had done, we all arose and joined in a hopping dance, leaping about and brandishing our weapons; I should have preferred a fiddle to the monotonous beating of the drums, but the exercise after so long waiting in the cold was grateful. The Indian war-drum was a piece of hollow tree over which a skin was stretched, with kettles formed of dried gourds filled with peas. We passed around the fire in a circle with our bodies bent uncouthly forward, and uttered the same low dismal sounds, without variation, being the words ‘blood, blood’, ‘kill, kill’; and ever and again raised the famous Indian war-whoop. This ferocious cry consisted in the sound whoo-oo-oop! which was continued so long as the breath lasted, and then broken off with a sudden lifting of the voice. A few modulated the cry with howling notes, placing the hand before the mouth to effect this. In either case, the whoop carried for an immense distance.
Thayendanegea was next, and he went through the same performance, though in a somewhat different manner. He told of his martial exploits, but also of his travels across the Great Water and threw a rich humour into his tale with imitations of the strutting lords, fashionable ladies, snuff-taking bishops and other London notables he had encountered, to the infinite delight of the gathering. He concluded with a passionate invective against the rebellious Yankees who had taken up arms against their long-suffering father, King George. He finished, and we all danced again. Two fat bucks had been put to roast at the great fire and whenever a man felt so disposed he would glide to the nearest carcass and cut off a great slice of meat for his own use. So the performance continued, Mohicans and Cayugans taking the floor alternately, until I thought it would never end. There was a person appointed to stand outside the circle and rouse any member of the audience who showed the least signs of sleep.
The celebration went on for no less than four whole days and nights. The speeches and dances persisted with unabated energy, fresh meat was continually put upon the spit, and the fire ever and again replenished. On the second day I was called upon to recount my own deeds of valour. I had not much to relate; but not wishing to lower myself in the estimation of my hosts and comrades I told resounding tales in English of the exploits of my regiment at the Battle of the Boyne and the assault of Athlone, and its service in many important fights in Spain during the War of the Spanish Succession, concluding with a dramatic recitation from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which I had by heart, in the course of which, in the character of the mad Prince, I was able to exhibit my skull at lunging and parrying with a small-sword, in contest with an imaginary foe. My performance was greeted with prolonged applause and Thayendanegea was good enough not to betray the cheat to the company.
It was February before we approached Montreal once more, and at each step I took my heart grew heavier. I had been living with Kate in a fantastic fairyland in which I would willingly have continued for the remainder of my life, so much did forest-life please me; but that the small insistent voice of Duty began to speak in my ear and to remind me of my service to my Sovereign. The parting from my new but well-tried friends would not have been so painful had it not meant equally a separation from my squaw (as I had affectionately named her); and my squaw, to judge from certain infallible signs, would before the summer was out seal her union with me by the birth of a child. We were at a loss what course to take. Kate could not return in my company to The Ninth, where she was well known, nor go to The Eighth without me, bringing her husband the gift of a bastard. We both felt with bitterness the irony of fate in condemning our separation, who loved each other so tenderly. And why must this be? Because I was but a sergeant, and she a soldier’s wife. That General Howe and General Burgoyne each openly consorted with the wife of one of his commissaries, was condoned as a fashionable peccadillo, but the same fault in us would be regarded as heinous and vulgar. We shed tears when we perceived to what a strait our thoughtlessness had brought us. Indian women have certain simples, such as the sumach flower, which they use to procure abortion, but Kate would have none of them, saying that she wished to abide by what she had done, nor add the crime of murder to what had but been loving folly.
Thayendanegea, seeing me sitting very pensively apart one day, asked me gently what trouble was eating at me, and I told him the whole story. He continued thoughtful for a while and then begged me not to despair: he would arrange the matter for us both without scandal. And so in the event he did.
I will never forget our last discourse together. Kate was not fretful or passionate, but spoke reasonably with me. I had the chance, she said, to remain with her and with the fruit of our love, either wandering through the forests in the company of these good friends of ours – whose ways, though savage, were gentlemanly and considerate – or settling in a cote which we might build for ourselves in the wilderness under their protection. Surely that was in every way better than to return alone to my military life? Did I choose the former case, she promised me as faithful duty in the capacity of wife as if the ceremony performed at Newton Breda had been between herself and me, and not between herself and Richard Harlowe. In the latter case, she would harbour no ill feelings against me; but I must clearly understand that, saying good-bye to her now, I would say a perpetual good-bye. If ever afterwards we happened to meet she would feign not to know me, and would not address a single affectionate word to me; and, as for the child, I must renounce my paternity of it – what became of it need not interest me. She would take full responsibility for its birth and upbringing.
What can I say? What could I say then to her? As we spoke together in the snow, under the shadow of a tall white-pine behind which the sunset shed a glorious dying glow over the wide St Lawrence valley, I heard the music of the bugles from the British camp and the boom of the evening gun, and I knew that I could never choose as she wished me to choose. My skin was white, not tawny; my weapon of assault the bayonet, not the tomahawk; my birth British, not Mohican. As I kissed Kate adieu, my heart was heavy as a stone and I told her that I could not ask her forgiveness, since I did not deserve it. But I begged her to accept, as a token to tie around the neck of the child, a pierced silver groat of King Charles II that my father had given me in my boyhood and that had ever since hung about my neck on a string. She accepted it; then, taking me solemnly by the hand, she made me swear, by the name of God, never so long as she lived to divulge to a soul what had passed between us. She went back to the camp-fire of the Indians without another word.
Chapter XVIII
ON MY return to barracks at the Isle of Jesus, I found it difficult to accommodate myself immediately to civilized customs, and was glad to be told that in ten days’ time I would be sent out in an officer’s party to train twenty non-commissioned officers in the arts that I had learned from the Indians. Meanwhile I detested the disorder and quarrelsomeness of barrack life. Since Majo
r Bolton went, there was little care shown for the well-being of the men: they were not regularly and usefully employed, and preferred idleness and drinking to that healthful indulgence in sport which kept the Canadians merry. A whimsical notion occurred to me: how salutary it would be if a Colonel, with a perfect indifference to precedent, were to put the men under his command to school during such periods of enforced idleness! It would be vain, of course, to hope for signs of genius in the pupils, but at least all could be taught to read and write a fair hand, and to state a plain matter intelligibly upon paper, which so few were able to do, even among the sergeants. Nor would it be ill for such an innovator also to instruct his young officers in the military science, in which on the whole they were dangerously deficient, especially in that of military engineering.
The quarrelsomeness of which I complained was not confined to the ranks, for officers frequently called one another out to avenge imagined affronts. One ludicrous case occurred. A Captain Montgomery of The Ninth, who had a very prominent nose, happened to leave his lodging to go to the Mess, not four doors away, when he met with Lieutenant Murray emerging from thence. ‘God bless me!’ cries the Lieutenant, ‘your nose is frost-bit.’
The Captain was very tender on the subject of his nose and because it was not half a minute since he had stepped into the street, believed that he was being bantered. ‘God damn you, sir, for your impertinence!’ he cried.
Lieutenant Murray could not let this pass, and says he: ‘Sir, let me repeat in all civility that you have a large nose that is frost-bit. Go, rub it in snow to make the blood circulate and keep away from a fire, else you will have but a short nose.’
Captain Montgomery very fiercely: ‘Mr Murray, my second will wait upon you tomorrow morning to arrange a rendezvous.’
Lieutenant Murray: ‘Sir, frostbite occasions no sort of pain, and you are therefore unaware that what I say is true. Rub your nose at once with snow, or mortification will ensue. Or, perhaps, get your second to perform the service for you.’
The Captain went blustering into the mess, and ‘God bless me!’ every one cried, ‘Your nose is frost-bit! Keep away from the fire in heaven’s name! Outside at once, and rub it well with snow, else you will lose it for sure.’
So out he went, to rub his nose with snow, and though a greedy man and sharp set with hunger missed a very good meal; exactly as Lieutenant Murray, that waggish Irishman, had intended when he had rehearsed the scene beforehand with his brother-officers. And the Captain that same evening made the Lieutenant a handsome apology.
It was remarkable to me that none of the men attempted to learn how to glide along the frozen river on skates. Perhaps they thought that to do so would be presumptuous, for several of the officers had provided themselves with skates and had instituted a skating club. I had myself learned the sport from the Indians, who could cover immense distances by this means of progression; it may not be credited but, for a wager, three Indians not long before had skated in a single day, between dawn and dusk, all the way from Montreal to Quebec – a distance of one hundred and eighty miles! However, this glory was purchased with death, for two instantly expired on reaching their goal and the third did not survive above a week. Contiguous to the frozen river’s sides, the ice supplied a flat and level ground to go on, but in the mid-current the passage was rugged and hilly. This was occasioned by the powerful force and rapidity of the water underneath, throwing up fragments of broken ice. Standing upon a rising ground of ice thus formed, you might perceive the most grotesque appearances and figures, sometimes of human beings, beasts and birds and of almost every object which the earth offers the eye.
My journey with the non-commissioned officers proved uneventful and pleasant; Lieutenant Kemmis conducted us. He was a gentleman who never affected, as many young coxcombs do, that the epaulettes upon his shoulders had given him the power of knowing better than his subordinates in rank upon every conceivable subject. While avoiding to appear publicly in the character of my pupil, he inquired beforehand from me how marching, cooking, sleeping, and other matters were regulated among the Indians, and gave his orders accordingly; whenever an occasion arose where he was at a loss, he had no false shame in asking my advice.
Our tour was to Three Rivers, through the woods on the northern side of the river and back through the woods on the opposing side. We stopped for a night at Three Rivers and drank with the Brunswick Grenadiers at the barrack. The Germans I found a very strange people, combining fortitude with superstitious panic, kindliness with brutality, mechanical skill with sheer stupidity, erudition with a plentiful lack of wit. Those with whom we spoke seemed to have no notion of the cause they were engaged in, or of the probable course of the campaign, nor had they any curiosity to inform themselves. Their thoughts ran on pay, plunder, their families in Germany, and God. They were for ever singing psalms and hymns, and had less idea of diverting themselves with sport even than our men. Their attention to religion had, in a manner of speaking, been their downfall, for the Duke of Brunswick’s press-gang had caught most of them as they emerged from their parish churches one fine Sunday morning.
I have heard it said that if one is acquainted with five Britons, one is acquainted merely with five several Britons; whereas to be acquainted with a similar number of Germans, from whatever principality or walk of life they might be taken, is to know all Germans. Their humours and character are said to vary but little between whole multitudes, and Lieutenant Kemmis informed us that a Roman historian who lived about the time of the Emperor Nero had remarked, even at that early date, that the German tribes known to him exhibited a remarkable sameness of behaviour. Thus it is that they are more subject to sympathetic infection by joy, fear, or any other emotion than any nation in the world: let ten men go weeping through a street in a German town and soon the entire countryside will be in tears; or let them dance, and a long procession will follow them of passionate dancers. At Three Rivers the emotion was melancholy and the words: ‘Werd ich meine armen Kinder nimmer wieder sehen?’, ‘Am I ne’er to see my poor children again?’ From this they proceeded to a conviction that, no, they would never live to revisit their homes. Parties of twenty or thirty men would relate to one another a conviction that death was soon coming to them; whereupon they moped and pined, obsessed with the notion, and nothing could cure them of it.
I endeavoured to argue a couple of them, who drank with me, out of this settled presentiment. It was to no purpose: the Rider upon the White Horse was close upon them, they said, and they could not escape the stroke of his scythe. Already scores of them were dead from no visible ailment, but merely from superstition. A sergeant took me miserably by the hand and led me into a long, unheated room appropriated as a morgue, the place where dead bodies were kept until the thawing of the frozen ground permitted them to be decently buried. ‘Alles meine guten Kameraden,’ he said wistfully, pointing about him.
It was a very strange and laughable sight that met my gaze, for the superintendent of the morgue, an apothecary, was evidently a very fanciful fellow. He had taken the bodies of these poor, pig-tailed, leather-breached Germans, while still warm, and placed them fully clothed in various lifelike postures where death and the weather preserved them stiffly. Some were kneeling with hymn-books in their hands, their jaws open as if singing; others seated in chairs with cold pipes in their mouths; many leaning against the wall with hands in pockets or one leg carelessly crossed over the other; one man standing balanced on his head and hands.
At first I could not imagine them dead, despite their ghastly countenances, but dead they were. Two big tears trickled down my Grenadier’s cheeks and wetted his great moustachios. ‘Ach,’ he sighed, ‘bald komm ich auch’, ‘Soon I too shall come hither.’ And he raised a hand at various heights from the ground to indicate the respective sizes of unfortunate children who soon would be left fatherless, by his decease, at Wolfenbuttel in Germany.
He told me the characters and professions of the dead men, as if he were a guide in a m
useum of wax-works. Most of them were ‘good comrades’ from Wolfenbuttel; but there were many strangers too. This was a fringe-maker from Hanover, a surly fellow; that, a whimsical creature, a discharged secretary from the post office at Gotha; that, a renegade monk from Wurzburg, but a good comrade; that, an upper steward from Meningen, a very pleasant man who could play the organ, but a thief; that, a cashiered Hessian major, very proud and evil; that, an unsuccessful playwright from Leipzig; that, a poor, bankrupt Bavarian pastry-cook; the one in the corner a retired Prussian sergeant of Hussars, who spoke no more in life than now in death.
As I came away I pondered a metaphysical question: whether in the same way as these Germans draw death upon themselves by the power of superstition, so a man might repel death by a contrary superstition of invulnerability – such as I myself had lately come to feel. ‘Aye,’ said I, ‘but only so long as this presentiment of life is vouchsafed. It will vanish suddenly one day when that bullet is run into the mould which is destined for my skull alone.’
I communicated to Lieutenant Kemmis a plan I had for rousing the spirits of our company when we returned to Montreal, namely of instructing them in the Indian ball-game, called by the French la crosse, which was a prime divertisement among the Mohicans. The ball was similar in materials and construction to that used by our Irish schoolboys in their ancient game of hurry, but was propelled with two sticks, or crosses, one in each hand, resembling large battledores. The field of play measured three hundred feet in length, with goal-posts at either end through which the contending parties sought to drive the ball with their sticks. The party that effected this twelve times in all was accounted victorious. The parties might trip, strike, grapple, wrestle, knock away each other’s sticks, or employ any stratagem whatsoever, provided that the ball were propelled only with the stick and that no man lost his temper and shed blood. These matches among the Indians, of which I witnessed several while in Buffalo settlement, were played with intense excitement. The greatest chiefs and most distinguished warriors took part in them, and important sums were staked upon the result by the spectators. The players, who were naked and slippery with bear’s grease, played with a furious hilarity that was perfectly indescribable and grew most desperate as the game advanced until but one more point remained to be notched by the winning side. The most remarkable circumstance was that no player was ever slain.