The Fort

  “Are the men’s muskets loaded, Sergeant?” Moore asked McClure.

  “Aye, sir.”

  “Leave the muskets uncocked,” Moore ordered. He did not want a shot wasted by a careless man accidentally pulling the trigger.

  “Ensign Campbell, John Campbell!” Captain Campbell shouted, “run back to the fort and tell the brigadier the rascals are coming!”

  The kilted ensign left and Moore watched the approaching boats, noting that they were having a hard time in the rising wind. The bay’s waves were short and sharp, smacking hard against the big rowboats to smother their oarsmen and passengers with spray.

  “McLean had best send reinforcements,” Campbell said nervously.

  “We can see those fellows off,” Moore responded, surprised at how confident he felt. There were some eighty redcoats on the bluff and the enemy, he guessed, numbered at least two hundred men, but those two hundred had to clamber up the bluff and the first fifty or sixty feet were so steep that no man could climb and use a musket at the same time. After that the slope flattened somewhat, but it was still precipitous, and the redcoats, positioned at the summit, could fire down at men struggling up the hill. A last flurry of cannon-fire sounded from the south, the thunder echoing briefly, and Moore, without asking for orders from Campbell, leaped a few paces down the upper slope to a place where he could see the attackers more clearly.

  “We’ll wait for the brigadier’s reinforcements,” Campbell called reprovingly.

  “Of course, sir,” Moore said, hiding his disdain for the tall highlander. Campbell had sent the ensign back to the fort, but that was a journey of almost three quarters of a mile, much of it through tangling undergrowth, and McLean’s reinforcements had to make the same journey back. By the time they arrived the Yankees would long have landed. If the Americans were to be stopped then Campbell’s men must do the job, but Moore sensed his commander’s nervousness. “Bring the men down here, Sergeant,” he called to McClure and, ignoring Archibald Campbell’s plaintive inquiry as to what he thought he was doing, led McClure and the other Hamiltons north along the bluff’s shoulder. They were at the place where the easier upper slope ended, just above the steepest part of the hill, and Moore was positioning his men so that they would be directly above the beach to which the Americans rowed. He was feeling a sudden excitement. He had dreamed of battle for so long and now it was imminent, though it was nothing like his dreams. In those dreams he was on a wide-open field and the enemy was in dense ranks beneath their flags, and cavalry was on the flanks, and bands were playing and Moore had often imagined surviving the enemy volleys until he ordered his own men to fire back, but instead he was scrambling through bushes and watching a flotilla of large longboats pull hard for the shore.

  Those boats were close now, not more than a hundred paces from the narrow beach where the short, wind-driven waves broke white. Then a gun sounded. Moore saw a cloud of smoke appear amidships on one of the transport ships and realized it had been a small cannon aboard that ship. The round shot crashed noisily through the bluff’s trees, startling birds into the evening sky, and Moore thought the single shot must presage a bombardment, but no more guns fired. Instead two flags broke from the ship’s yardarm and the longboats suddenly rested their oars. The boats wallowed in the turbulent water, then began to turn around. They were going back.

  “God damn them,” Moore said. He watched the boats turn clumsily and realized the Americans had abandoned their plans. “Give them a volley,” he ordered McClure. The range was long, but Moore’s frustration seethed in him. “Fire!” he snapped at the Sergeant.

  The Hamiltons cocked their muskets, aimed, and let loose a ragged volley. The musket sound stuttered in the trees. Moore was standing to one side and was certain he saw a man in the nearest rowboat thrown violently forward. “Hold your fire!” Campbell shouted angrily from the summit.

  “We hit a man,” Moore told McClure.

  “We did?” the Sergeant sounded disbelieving.

  “One less rebel, Sergeant,” Moore said, “God damn their disloyal souls.”

  The wind carried the musket smoke away and the sun, which had momentarily been obscured by a ribbon of cloud above the bay’s western shore, suddenly flared bright and dazzling. There was a silence, except for the rush of wind and the fret of breaking waves.

  A cheer sounded as the sun set. Brigadier McLean had led his officers down to the shore and along the beach to a place just beyond the Half Moon Battery and there, within easy earshot of the three Royal Navy sloops, he saluted them. To McLean, watching from the low unfinished ramparts of Fort George, it had appeared that the Americans had tried to enter the harbor but had been repulsed by Mowat’s guns, and so McLean wanted to thank the navy. His officers faced the ships, raised their hats and McLean led them in three heartfelt cheers.

  The Union flag still flew above Fort George.

  * * *

  “An Indian named John,” Wadsworth said.

  “What was that? Who?” General Lovell had been whispering to his secretary and missed his deputy’s words.

  “The man who died, sir. He was an Indian named John.”

  “And then there were forty,” a man spoke from the cabin’s edge.

  “Not one of ours, then,” Saltonstall said.

  “A brave man,” Wadsworth said, frowning at both comments. The Indian had been struck by a musket-ball the previous evening, just after the assault boats had turned away from the shore. A small volley of musketry had crackled from the woods on the bluff and, though the range war far beyond any hope of accuracy, the British ball had struck the Indian in the chest, killing him in seconds. Wadsworth, on board the Sally, had seen the survivors climb aboard, their coats spattered with John’s blood.

  “Just why did we abandon last night’s landing?” Saltonstall asked dourly. The commodore had tipped his chair back so that he looked at the army officers down his long nose.

  “The wind was too strong,” Lovell explained, “and we discerned that we should have difficulties returning the boats to the transports to embark the second division.”

  The leaders of the expedition were meeting for a council of war in the commodore’s cabin on board the Warren. Twenty-one men crowded about the table, twelve of them captains of the warships while the rest were majors or colonels from the militia. It was Monday morning, the wind had dropped, there was no fog and the skies above Penobscot Bay were clear and blue. “The question,” Lovell opened the proceedings by tapping a long finger against the commodore’s polished table, “is whether we should exert our full force against the enemy today.”

  “What else?” Captain Hallet, who commanded the Massachusetts Navy brigantine Active, asked.

  “If the ships were to assault the enemy vessels,” Lovell suggested diffidently, “and we were to land the men, I think God would prosper our endeavors.”

  “He surely would,” the Reverend Murray said confidently.

  “You want me to enter the harbor?” Saltonstall asked, alarmed.

  “If that is necessary to destroy the enemy shipping?” Lovell responded with a question.

  “Let me remind you,” the commodore let his chair fall forward with a sharp bang, “that the enemy presents a line of guns supported by batteries and beneath the artillery of a fortress. To take ships into that damned hole without a reconnaissance would be the very height of madness.”

  “Fighting madness,” someone muttered from the after part of the cabin, and Saltonstall glared at the officers there, but made no comment.

  “You are suggesting, perhaps, that we have not reconnoitered sufficiently?” Lovell still spoke in questions.

  “We have not,” Saltonstall said firmly.

  “Yet we know where the enemy guns are situated,” Wadsworth said, just as firmly.

  Saltonstall glared at the younger brigadier. “I take my fleet into that damned hole,” he said, “and I get tangled with their damned ships and all you have is a mess of wreckage, maybe ablaze, and all
the while the damned enemy is pouring shot at us from their land batteries. You wish to explain to the Navy Board that I lost a precious frigate at the insistence of the Massachusetts Militia?”

  “God will watch over you,” the Reverend Murray assured the commodore.

  “God, sir, is not manning my guns!” Saltonstall snarled at the clergyman. “I wish to God He were, but instead I have a crew of pressed men! Half the bastards have never seen a gun fired!”

  “Let us not be heated,” Lovell put in hastily.

  “Would it help, Commodore, if the battery on Cross Island were to be removed?” Wadsworth asked.

  “Its removal is essential,” Saltonstall said.

  Lovell looked helplessly at Wadsworth who began to think what troops he could use to assault the island, but Captain Welch intervened. “We can do that, sir,” the tall marine said confidently.

  Lovell smiled in relief. “Then it seems we have a plan of action, gentlemen,” he said, and so they did. It took an hour of discussion to resolve the plan’s details, but when the hour was over it had been decided that Captain Welch would lead over two hundred marines to attack the British battery on Cross Island and while that operation was being conducted the warships would again engage the three sloops so that their guns could not be trained on Welch’s men. At the same time, to prevent the British from sending reinforcements south across the harbor, General Lovell would launch another attack on the peninsula. Lovell offered the plan for the Council’s approval and was rewarded with unanimous consent. “I feel confident,” Lovell said happily, “supremely confident, that Almighty God will shower blessings on this day’s endeavors.”

  “Amen,” the Reverend Murray said, “and amen.”

  Captain Michael Fielding sought out General McLean shortly after dawn. The general was seated in the new sunlight outside the large store-hut that had just been completed inside the fort. A servant was shaving McLean who smiled ruefully at Fielding. “Shaving’s difficult with a gimped right arm,” the general explained.

  “Lift your chin, sir,” the servant said, and there was no talking for a moment as the razor scraped up the general’s neck.

  “What’s on your mind, Captain?” McLean asked as the razor was rinsed.

  “An abatis, sir.”

  “An excellent thing to have on your mind,” McLean said lightly, then was silent again as the servant toweled his face. “Thank you, Laird,” he said as the cloth was taken from his neck. “Have you breakfasted, Captain?”

  “Thin commons, sir.”

  McLean smiled. “I’m told the hens have begun to lay. Can’t have you fellows starving. Laird? Be a good fellow and see if Graham can conjure up some poached eggs.”

  “Aye, sir,” the servant gathered his bowl, towel, razor, and strop, “and coffee, sir?”

  “I shall promote you to colonel if you can find me coffee, Laird.”

  “You promoted me to general yesterday, sir,” Laird said, grinning.

  “I did? Then give me cause to preserve your exalted rank.”

  “I shall do my best, sir.”

  McLean led Fielding to the fort’s western rampart, which faced towards the high wooded bluff. It was ridiculous to call it a rampart, for it was still unfinished and a fit man could leap it easily. The ditch beyond was shallow and the pointed stakes in its bed would hardly delay the enemy for a moment. McLean’s men had begun work to heighten the wall at dawn, but the general knew he needed another week’s uninterrupted labor simply to make the ramparts high enough to deter an attack. He used his stick to help himself up the mound of logs and hard-packed soil that formed the rampart and stared across the harbor, beyond Mowat’s flotilla, to where the enemy warships were anchored in the bay. “No fog this morning, Captain.”

  “None, sir.”

  “God smiles on us, eh?”

  “He is an Englishman, sir, remember?” Fielding suggested with a smile. Captain Michael Fielding was also an Englishman, an artilleryman in a dark blue coat. He was thirty years old, fair-haired, blue-eyed, and disconcertingly elegant, looking as if he would be far more at home in some London salon than in this American wilderness. He was the epitome of the kind of Englishman McLean instinctively disliked, he was too languid, too superior, and too handsome, but to McLean’s surprise Captain Fielding was also efficient, cooperative, and intelligent. He led fifty gunners and commanded a strange assortment of cannon: six-pounders, nine-pounders, and twelve-pounders; some on field carriages, a few on garrison carriages, and the rest on naval trucks. The guns had been scraped together from the depots in Halifax to form makeshift batteries, but then, McLean thought, everything about this expedition was makeshift. He did not have enough men, enough ships, or enough guns.

  “Aye,” McLean said wistfully, “I would like an abatis.”

  “If you can lend me forty men, sir?” Fielding suggested.

  McLean thought about the request. He had almost two hundred men scattered in a picquet line guarding those places where the Yankees might attempt a landing. He reckoned the enemy’s approach to the bluff the previous evening had been just that, a bluff. They wanted him to think they would assault the peninsula’s western end, but he was certain they would choose either the harbor or the neck, and the neck was by far the likeliest landing place. Yet he had to guard all the possible landing places, and the picquets watching the shore consumed almost a third of his men. The rest were laboring to deepen the fort’s well and raise the fort’s walls, but if he were to grant Fielding’s request then he must detach some of those men, which meant slower progress on the vital ramparts. Yet the abatis was a good idea. “Will forty men be enough?”

  “We’d need an ox team too, sir.”

  “Aye, you will,” McLean said, but his ox teams were busy hauling material from the harbor’s beach, where most of Fielding’s guns were still parked.

  McLean glanced at the twin bastions that flanked the fort’s western wall. So far he only had two guns mounted, which was a paltry defense. It would be easy enough to bring more guns into the fort, but the wall was now just at the height where those guns needed platforms, and platforms took time and men. “Where would you place the abatis?” he asked.

  Fielding nodded westwards. “I’d cover that approach, sir, and the northern side.”

  “Aye,” McLean agreed. An abatis curving around the west and north of the fort would obstruct any Yankee attack from either the bluff or the neck.

  “Much of the timber’s already cut, sir,” Fielding said, attempting to persuade McLean.

  “So it is, so it is,” McLean said distractedly. He beckoned the Englishman off the wall and across the ditch so they were out of earshot of the working parties that laid logs on top of the rampart. “Let me be frank with you, Captain,” McLean said heavily.

  “Of course, sir.”

  “There are thousands of the rebel rascals. If they come, Captain, and they will come, then I must suppose that two or three thousand will attack us. You know what that means?”

  Fielding was silent for a few seconds, then nodded. “I do, sir.”

  “I’ve seen enough war,” McLean said ruefully.

  “You mean, sir, we can’t stand against three thousand men?”

  “Oh, we can stand, Captain. We can give them a bloody nose, right enough, but can we defeat them?” McLean turned and gestured at the half-finished wall. “If that rampart was ten feet high I could die of old age inside the fort, and if we had a dozen guns mounted then I dare say we could defeat ten thousand men. But if they come today? Or tomorrow?”

  “They’ll overrun us, sir.”

  “Aye, they will. And that’s not cowardice speaking, Captain.”

  Fielding smiled. “No one, sir, can accuse General McLean of cowardice.”

  “I thank you, Captain,” McLean said, then stared west towards the high ground. The ridge rose gently, studded with the stumps of felled trees. “I’m being candid with you, Captain,” he went on. “The enemy is going to come, and we’re going to
show defiance, but I don’t want a massacre here. I’ve seen that happen. I’ve seen men enraged to fury and seen them slaughter a garrison, and I did not come here to lead good young Scotsmen to an early grave.”

  “I understand you, sir,” Fielding said.

  “I hope you do.” McLean turned to look north where the cleared ground dropped away to the woods that screened the wide neck. That was where he thought his enemy would appear. “We’ll do our duty, Captain,” he said, “but I’ll not fight to the last man unless I see a chance of defeating the rascals. Enough mothers in Scotland have lost their sons.” He paused, then gave the artillery officer a smile, “But I’ll not surrender too easily either, so this is what we’ll do. Make your abatis. Start on the northern side, Captain. How many field-mounted guns do you have?”

  “Three nine-pounders, sir.”

  “Put them just outside the fort on the northeastern corner. You have case-shot?”

  “Plenty, sir, and Captain Mowat’s sent some grape.”

  “Well and good. So if the enemy comes from the north, which I think they will, you can give them a warm welcome.”

  “And if they come this way, sir?” Fielding asked, pointing to the high western bluff.

  “We lose our gamble,” McLean admitted. He hoped he had judged the tall Englishman right. A foolish man might construe the conversation as cowardice, even treasonable cowardice, but McLean reckoned Fielding was subtle and sensible enough to understand what had just been said. Brigadier Francis McLean had seen enough war to know when fighting was pointless, and he did not want hundreds of needless deaths on his conscience, but nor did he want to hand the rebels an easy victory. He would fight, he would do his duty, and he would cease to fight when he saw that defeat was inevitable. McLean turned back towards the fort, then suddenly remembered a matter that needed to be aired. “Have your rogues been stealing potatoes from Doctor Calef’s garden?” he asked.