Fort Amity

by Arthur Quiller-Couch

  CHAPTER I.

  MALBROUCK S'EN VA-T'EN GUERRE.

  "So adieu, Jack, until we meet in Quebec! You have the start of us, report says, and this may even find you drinking his Majesty's health in Fort Carillon. Why not? You carry Howe, and who carries Howe carries the eagles on his standards; or so you announce in your last. Well, but have we, on our part, no _vexillum?_ Brother Romulus presents his compliments to Brother Remus, and begs leave to answer 'Wolfe!' 'Tis scarce forty-eight hours since Wry-necked Dick brought his ships into harbour with the Brigadier on board, and already I have seen him and--what is more--fallen in love. 'What like is he?' says you. 'Just a sandy-haired slip of a man,' says I, 'with a cock nose': but I love him, Jack, for he knows his business. We've a professional at last. No more Pall Mall promenaders--no more Braddocks. Loudons, Webbs! We live in the consulship of Pitt, my lad--_deprome Caecubum_--we'll tap a cask to it in Quebec. And if Abercromby's your Caesar--"

  Here a bugle sounded, and Ensign John a Cleeve of the 46th Regimentof Foot (Murray's) crushed his friend's letter into his pocket andsprang off the woodpile where he had seated himself with theregimental colours across his knees. He unfolded them from theirstaff, assured himself that they hung becomingly--gilt tassels andyellow silken folds--and stepped down to the lake-side where thebateaux waited.

  The scene is known to-day for one of the fairest in the world.Populous cities lie near it and pour their holiday-makers upon itthrough the summer season. Trains whistle along the shore under itsforests; pleasure-steamers, with music on their decks, shoot acrossbays churned of old by the paddles of war-canoes; from wildernesseswhere Indians lurked in ambush smile neat hotels, white-walled, withgreen shutters and deep verandas; and lovers, wandering among thehemlocks, happen on a clearing with a few turfed mounds, and seatthemselves on these last ruins of an ancient fort, nor care toremember even its name. Behind them--behind the Adirondacks and theGreen Mountains--and pushed but a little way back in these hundredand fifty years, lies the primeval forest, trodden no longer now bythe wasting redman, but untamed yet, almost unhandselled. And still,as the holidaymakers leave it, winter closes down on the lake-sideand wraps it in silence, broken by the loon's cry or the crash of asnow-laden tree deep in the forest--the same sounds, the same achingsilence, endured by French and English garrisons watching each otherand the winter through in Fort Carillon or Fort William Henry.

  "The world's great age begins anew." . . . It begins anew, andhourly, wherever hearts are high and youth sets out with bright eyesto meet his fate. It began anew for Ensign John a Cleeve on thismorning of July 5, 1758; it was sounded up by bugles, shattering theforest silence; it breathed in the wind of the boat's speed shakingthe silken flag above him. His was one of twelve hundred boatsspreading like brilliant water-fowl across the lake which stretchedfor thirty miles ahead, gay with British uniforms, scarlet and gold,with Highland tartans, with the blue jackets of the Provincials;flash of oars, innumerable glints of steel, of epaulettes, of belt,cross-belt and badge; gilt knops and tassels and sheen of flags.Yonder went Blakeney's 27th Regiment, and yonder the Highlanders ofthe Black Watch; Abercromby's 44th, Howe's 55th with their idolisedyoung commander, the 60th or Royal Americans in two battalions;Gage's Light Infantry, Bradstreet's axemen and bateau-men, Starke'srangers; a few friendly Indians--but the great Johnson was hurryingup with more, maybe with five hundred; in all fifteen thousand menand over. Never had America seen such an armament; and it went totake a fort from three thousand Frenchmen.

  No need to cover so triumphant an advance in silence! Why should notthe regimental bands strike up? For what else had we dragged them upthe Hudson from Albany and across the fourteen-mile portage to thelake? Weary work with a big drum in so much brushwood! And playthey did, as the flotilla pushed forth and spread and left thestockades far behind; stockades planted on the scene of last year'smassacre. Though for weeks before our arrival Bradstreet and his menhad been clearing and building, sights remained to nerve our arms andset our blood boiling to the cry "Remember Fort William Henry!"Its shores fade, and somewhere at the foot of the lake three thousandFrenchmen are waiting for us (if indeed they dare to wait). Let thebands play "Britons strike home!"

  Play they did: drums tunding and bagpipes skirling as though FortCarillon (or Ticonderoga, as the Indians called it) would succumblike another Jericho to their clamour. The Green Mountains tossedits echoes to the Adirondacks, and the Adirondacks flung it back; andunder it, down the blue waterway toward the Narrows, went Ensign Johna Cleeve, canopied by the golden flag of the 46th.

  The lake smiled at all his expectations and surpassed them.He had imagined it a sepulchral sheet of water, sunk betweencavernous woods. And lo! it lay high in the light of day,broad-rimmed, with the forests diminishing as they shelved down toits waters. The mountains rimmed it, amethystine, remote, delicateas carving, as vapours almost transparent; and within the rim ittwinkled like a great cup of champagne held high in a god's hand--sohigh that John a Cleeve, who had been climbing ever since hisregiment left Albany, seemed lifted with all these flashing boats anduniforms upon a platform where men were heroes, and all great deedspossible, and the mere air laughed in the veins like wine.

  Two heavy flat-boats ploughed alongside of his; deep in the bows andyawing their sterns ludicrously. They carried a gun apiece, and theartillerymen had laded them too far forward. To the 46th they were asufficiently good joke to last for miles. "Look at them up-tailedducks a-searching for worms! Guns? Who wants guns on this trip?Take 'em home before they sink and the General loses his temper."The crews grinned back and sweated and tugged, at every third drivedrenching the bowmen with spray, although not a breath of windrippled the lake's surface.

  The boat ahead of John's carried Elliott the Senior Ensign of the46th, with the King's colours--the flag of Union, drooping in stripesof scarlet, white, and blue. On his right strained a boat's crew ofthe New York regiment, with the great patroon, Philip Schuylerhimself, erect in the stern sheets and steering, in blue uniform andthree-cornered hat; too grand a gentleman to recognise our Ensign,although John had danced the night through in the Schuylers' famouswhite ball-room on the eve of marching from Albany, and had flungpackets of sweetmeats into the nursery windows at dawn and awakenedthree night-gowned little girls to blow kisses after him as he tookhis way down the hill from the Schuyler mansion. That was a monthago. To John it seemed years since he had left Albany and itsstraight sidewalks dappled with maple shade: but the patroon's facewas the same, sedately cheerful now as then when he had moved amonghis guests with a gracious word for each and a brow unclouded by themorrow.

  Men like Philip Schuyler do not suffer to-morrows to perturb them,since to them every morrow dawns big with duties, responsibilities,risks. John caught himself wondering to what that calm face lookedforward, at the lake-end, where the forests slept upon their shadowsand the mountains descended and closed like fairy gates! For Johnhimself Fame waited beyond those gates. Although in the last threeor four weeks he had endured more actual hardships than in all hislife before, he had enjoyed them thoroughly and felt that they werehardening him into a man. He understood now why the tales he hadread at school in his Homer and Ovid--tales of Ulysses, of Herculesand Perseus--were never sorrowful, however severe the heroes'labours. For were they not undergone in just such a shiningatmosphere as this?

  His mind ran on these ancient tales, and so, memory revertingto Douai and the seminary class-room in which he had firstconstrued them, he began unconsciously to set the lines of an oldrepetition-lesson to the stroke of the oars.

  Angustam amice pauperiem pati robustus acri militia puer condiscat et Parthos feroces vexet eques metuendus hasta:

  Vitamque sub divo et trepidis agat in rebus . . .

  --And so on, with halts and breaks where memory failed him._Parthos_--these would be the Indians--Abenakis, Algonquins, Hurons,whomsoever Montcalm might
have gathered yonder in the woods with him._Dulce et decorum est_--yes, to be sure; in a little while he wouldbe facing death for his country; but he did not feel in the leastlike dying. A sight of Philip Schuyler's face sent him sliding intothe next ode--_Justum et tenacem_ . . . _non voltus instantistyranni_. . . . John a Cleeve would have started had the futureopened for an instant and revealed the face of the tyrant PhilipSchuyler was soon to defy: and Schuyler would have started too.

  Then John remembered his cousin's letter, and pulled it from hispocket again. . . .

  "And if Abercromby's your Caesar--which is as much as I'll risk saying in a letter which may be opened before it reaches you-- why, you have Howe to clip his parade wig as he's already docked the men's coat-tails. So here's five pounds on it, and let it be a match--Wolfe against Howe, and shall J. a C. or R. M. be first in Quebec? And another five pounds, if you will, on our epaulettes: for I repeat to you, this is Pitt's consulship, and promotion henceforth comes to men as they deserve it. Look at Wolfe, sir--a man barely thirty-two--and the ball but just set rolling! Wherefore I too am resolved to enter Quebec a Brigadier-General, who now go carrying the colours of the 17th to Louisbourg. We but wait Genl. Amherst, who is expected daily, and then yeo-heave-ho for the nor'ard! Farewell, dearest Jack! Given in this our camp at Halifax, the twelfth of May, 1758, in the middle of a plaguy fog, by your affect. cousin-- R. Montgomery."

  John smiled as he folded up the letter, so characteristic of Dick.Dick was always in perfect spirits, always confident in himself.It was characteristic of Dick, too, to call himself Romulus and hisfriend Remus, meaning no slight, simply because he always tookhimself for granted as the leading spirit. It had always been soeven in the days when they had gone birds'-nesting or rook-shootingtogether in the woods around John's Devonshire home. Always John hadyielded the lead to this freckled Irish cousin (the kinship was, infact, a remote one and lay on their mother's side through theRanelagh family); and years had but seemed to widen the three months'gap in their ages.

  Dick's parents were Protestant; and Dick had gone to Trinity College,Dublin, passing thence to an ensigncy in the 17th (Forbes') Regiment.The a Cleeves, on the other hand, had always been Roman Catholics,and by consequence had lived for generations somewhat isolated amongthe Devon gentry, their neighbours. When John looked back on hisboyhood, his prevailing impressions were of a large house set low ina valley, belted with sombre dripping elms and haunted by RomanCatholic priests--some fat and rosy--some lean and cadaverous--butall soft-footed; of an insufficiency of light in the rooms; and of asad lack of fellow-creatures willing to play with him. His parentswere old, and he had been born late to them--twelve years afterPhilip, his only brother and the heir. From the first his mother haddestined him for the priesthood, and a succession of priests had beenhis tutors: but--What instinct is there in the sacerdotal mind whichwarns it off some cases as hopeless from the first? Here was achild, docile, affectionate, moody at times, but eager to please andglad to be rewarded by a smile; bred among priests and designed to bea priest; yet amid a thousand admonishments, chastisements,encouragements, blandishments, the child--with a child's sureinstinct for sincerity--could not remember having been spoken tosincerely, with heart open to heart. Years later, when in theseminary at Douai the little worm of scepticism began to stir in hisbrain and grow, feeding on the books of M. Voltaire and otherforbidden writings, he wondered if his many tutors had been, one andall, unconsciously prescient. But he was an honest lad. He threw upthe seminary, returned to Cleeve Court, and announced with tears tohis mother (his father had died two years before) that he could notbe a priest. She told him, stonily, that he had disappointed herdearest hopes and broken her heart. His brother--the Squire now, anda prig from his cradle--took him out for a long walk, argued with himas with a fractious child, and, without attending to his answers,finally gave him up as a bad job. So an ensigncy was procured, andJohn a Cleeve shipped from Cork to Halifax, to fight the French inAmerica. At Cork he had met and renewed acquaintance with his Irishcousin, Dick Montgomery. They had met again in Halifax, which theyreached in separate transports, and had passed the winter there incompany. Dick clapped his cousin on the back and laughed impartiallyat his doubts and the family distress. Dick had no doubts; alwayssaw clearly and made up his mind at once; was, moreover, very littleconcerned with religion (beyond damning the Pope), and a great dealconcerned with soldiering. He fascinated John, as the practical manusually fascinates the speculative. So Remus listened to Romulus andbegan to be less contrite in his home-letters. To the smallest loveat home (of the kind that understands, or tries to understand) hewould have responded religiously; but he had found such nowhere savein Dick--who, besides, was a gallant young gentleman, and scrupulouson all points of honour. He took fire from Dick; almost worshippedhim; and wished now, as the flotilla swept on and the bands wokelouder echoes from the narrowing shore, that Dick were here to seehow the last few weeks had tanned and hardened him.

  The troops came to land before nightfall at Sabbath Day Point,twenty-five miles down the lake; stretched themselves to doze for awhile in the dry undergrowth; re-embarked under the stars and, rowingon through the dawn, reached the lake-end at ten in the morning.Here they found the first trace of the enemy--a bridge broken in twoover the river which drains into Lake Champlain. A small Frenchrear-guard loitered here; but two companies of riflemen were landedand drove it back into the woods, without loss. The boats dischargedthe British unopposed, who now set forward afoot through the forestto follow the left bank of the stream, which, leaving the laketranquilly, is broken presently by stony rapids and grows smoothagain only as it nears its new reservoir. Smooth, rapid, and smoothagain, it sweeps round a long bend; and this bend the Britishprepared to follow, leaving a force to guard the boats.

  Howe led, feeling forward with his light infantry; and the armyfollowed in much the same disposition they had held down the lake;regulars in the centre, provincials on either flank; a long scarletbody creeping with broad blue wings--or so it might have appeared toa bird with sight able to pierce the overlacing boughs. To John aCleeve, warily testing the thickets with the butt of his staff andpulling the thorns aside lest they should rip its precious silkenfolds, the advance, after the first ten minutes, seemed to keep nomore order than a gang of children pressing after blackberries.Somewhere on his right the rapids murmured; men struggled besidehim--now a dozen redcoats, now a few knowing Provincials who had losttheir regiments, but were cocksure of the right path. And always--before, behind and all around him--sounded the calls of theparade-ground:--"Sub-divisions--left front--mark time! Left, halfturn! Three files on the left--left turn--wheel!--files to thefront!" Singular instructions for men grappling with a virginforest!

  If the standing trees were bad, the fallen ones--and there seemed tobe a diabolical number of them--were ten times worse. John wasstraddling the trunk of one and cursing vehemently when a soundstruck on his ears, more intelligible than any parade-call. It cameback to him from the front: the sharp sound of musketry--two volleys.

  The parade-calls ceased suddenly all around him. He listened, stillsitting astride the trunk. One or two redcoats leaped it, shoutingas they leaped, and followed the sound, which crackled now as thoughthe whole green forest were on fire. By and by, as he listened, amustachioed man in a short jacket--one of Gage's light infantry--camebursting through the undergrowth, capless, shouting for a surgeon.

  "What's wrong in front?" asked John, as the man--scarcely regardinghim--laid his hands on the trunk to vault it.

  "Faith, and I don't know, redcoat; except that they've killed him.Whereabouts is the General?"

  "Who's killed?"

  "The best man amongst us: Lord Howe!"

  A second runner, following, shouted the same news; and the two passedon together in search of the General. But already the tidings hadspread along the front of the main body, as thoug
h wafted by a suddenwind through the undergrowth. Already, as John sat astride his logendeavouring to measure up the loss, to right and left of him bugleswere sounding the halt. It seemed that as yet the mass of troopsscarcely took in the meaning of the rumour, but awoke under the shockonly to find themselves astray and without bearings.

  John's first sense was of a day made dark at a stroke. If this thinghad happened, then the glory had gone out of the campaign. The armywould by and by be marching on, and would march again to-morrow; thedrill cries would begin again, the dull wrestle through swamps andthickets; and in due time the men would press down upon the Frenchforts and take them. But where would be the morning's cheerfulness,the spirit of youth which had carried the boats down the lake amidlaughter and challenges to race, and at the landing-place set the menromping like schoolboys? The longer John considered, the more hemarvelled at the hopes he and all the army had been building on thisyoung soldier--and not the army only, but every colony. Messengerseven now would be heading up the lake as fast as paddles could drivethem, to take horse and gallop smoking to the Hudson, to bear thetidings to Albany, and from Albany ride south with it to New York, toPhiladelphia, to Richmond. "Lord Howe killed!" From that long trackof dismay John called his thoughts back to himself and the army.Howe--dead? He, that up to an hour ago had been the pivot of so manyactivities, the centre on which veterans rested their confidence, andfrom which young soldiers drew their high spirits, the one commanderwhom the Provincials trusted and liked because he understood them;for whom and for their faith in him the regulars would march tilltheir legs failed them! Wonderful how youth and looks and gallantryand brains together will grip hold of men and sway theirimaginations! But how rare the alliance, and on how brittle a hazardresting! An unaimed bullet--a stop in the heart's pulsation--and thestar we followed has gone out, God knows whither. The hope offifteen thousand men lies broken and sightless, dead of purpose, farfrom home. They assure us that nothing in this world perishes, norin the firmament above it: but we look up at the black space where astar has been quenched and know that something has failed us whichto-morrow will not bring again.

  It was learnt afterwards that he had been killed by the first shot inthe campaign. Montcalm had thrown out three hundred rangersovernight under Langy to feel the British advance: but so dense wasthe tangle that even these experienced woodmen went astray during thenight and, in hunting for tracks, blundered upon Howe's lightinfantry at unawares. In the moment of surprise each side let flywith a volley, and Howe fell instantly, shot through the heart.

  The British bivouacked in the woods that night. Toward dawn John aCleeve stretched himself, felt for his arms, and lay for a whilestaring up at a solitary star visible through the overhanging boughs.He was wondering what had awakened him, when his ears grew aware of avoice in the distance, singing--either deep in the forest or on somehillside to the northward: a clear tenor voice shaken out on thestill air with a _tremolo_ such as the Provencals love. It sang tothe army and to him:--

  Malbrouck s'en-va-t'en guerre: Mironton, mironton, mirontaine! Malbrouck s'en va-t'en guerre: --Ne sais quand reviendra!