1812: The Rivers of War

by Eric Flint

  “He was polite enough to you when you reported for duty,” McParland pointed out. “Even if he did tell you there was no suitable military housing in Washington, and that you’d have to come up here to Baltimore.”

  “I didn’t say he was an impolite bastard. I said he was an incompetent ass. The fact that a man may be a gentleman does not qualify him to be a commanding general.

  “As a colonel, Winder undermined Smyth at Black Rock—no great accomplishment, though, seeing as Smyth was an incompetent ass himself. For that, the powers that be made Winder a brigadier. Then, he and Chandler botched the campaign at Stoney Creek. Even managed to get themselves captured while wandering around in the dark. Whereupon, after Winder was returned in a prisoner exchange, the War Department rewarded him again, placing the silly dolt in charge of the capital’s defenses.”

  Driscol surveyed the mob milling below, noting the firm purpose in what easily could have degenerated into chaos.

  “On the other hand, I’ve got to give credit here to the mayor of the town, who rallied its citizens. And to their own trust in Lieutenant Colonel Armistead and his regular troops and sailors manning Fort McHenry. Confidence, lad, that’s the key. Even with militiamen and civilian volunteers, you can accomplish wonders so long as you are confident. Baltimore will stand, watch and see if I’m not right. Whereas Washington . . .”

  He shook his head gloomily. “Winder is the sort of man who frets every morning over which boot to put on first. He’ll dilly and dally and charge back and forth, issuing orders which contradict the orders he gave an hour before—and, all the while, preventing anyone more capable from taking charge.”

  McParland stared to the south, toward Washington. “Good thing we’re here in Baltimore, then.”

  Driscol started to say something, but he was interrupted by a knock on the door. He recognized the knock as that of their elderly landlady. Mrs. Young was a timid woman, and she never presumed to enter the room without knocking at least three times, each knock more hesitant than the last.

  So it was a surprise to see that the door suddenly flew open before either he or McParland had a chance to move toward it. A beefy and imposing man came bursting through, almost pushing Mrs. Young aside.

  “There you are!” the fellow boomed, half cheerfully and half accusingly. He placed a large valise on the table by the door. Judging from the clump it made coming down, the thing was heavy. “The merry chase you’ve led me!”

  Driscol didn’t say anything, peering back and forth between the man and his valise. That thing looked suspiciously familiar.

  His worst fears were confirmed. The voice continued to boom.

  “Winfield made me promise him I’d take you under my care! I daren’t do otherwise, you know, now that word’s come down that he’ll survive his own wounds! So let’s be at it!”

  Driscol stared at him in horror. The lofty brow. The blue eyes, gleaming with certainties. The firm mouth—no hesitations there—and the chin, which was firmer still.

  “Dr., ah, Boulder?” he croaked. “Jeremy Boulder?”

  “The very same!” boomed the doctor. Then he saw the dismay so apparent on Driscol’s face. “Oh, you needn’t worry about the expense, my good fellow! Winfield assured me that he’d cover the bill, even if the War Department reneged.”

  Boulder opened the valise and began rummaging within. “You’re a very fortunate man, you know. I studied under Benjamin Rush himself.”

  Driscol, always calm in battle, felt light-headed and dizzy. Benjamin Rush was the most famous doctor in the United States, a towering figure in American medicine. It was also said of him that he’d drained more blood than all the generals in North America.

  Sure enough . . .

  “We’ll start with the leeches, of course. Then put you on a rigid regimen of daily puking and purging. Plenty of dosages of calomel, it goes without saying. A wondrous drug! ‘The Sampson of Materia Medica,’ Dr. Rush calls it.”

  Driscol didn’t doubt it. Like Samson, calomel had slain its thousands.

  Benjamin Rush was nothing if not a theoretical man. One of his many theories, Driscol had been told, was that Negroes were caused by a peculiar form of leprosy. No telling what the great doctor might prescribe as the remedy for that condition. Skin the poor black bastards alive, probably, and smear calomel over the bodies. After bleeding them with leeches.

  It was time for Driscol to demonstrate his own command qualities, now that he stared certain death in the face. He reached out his remaining hand, seized McParland’s arm in a grip of iron, and propelled the youngster toward the door.

  “I’m afraid that’ll all have to wait, Doctor. Just got our orders. We’re commanded—at once—to Washington, to join in the capital’s defense. We’ll face a firing squad if we dally.”

  He shouldered the doctor aside as he passed through the door. With his left shoulder, having no choice in the matter, which produced a spike of agony. The stump still hadn’t completely healed.

  But Driscol ignored the pain resolutely. Wounds, even great ones like the loss of an arm, could be dealt with. Death was absolute.

  Boulder boomed protests behind them as Driscol hurried his young companion down the steep and rickety staircase. All water off Driscol’s back. Far better to face the Sassenach in all their fury than a proper doctor.

  At the foot of the stairs, he paused just long enough to retrieve their weapons from the closet where Mrs. Young had insisted they be kept. Then he located their landlady and paid her the rent due.

  “Will you be back?” she asked in a quavering voice. She glanced nervously toward the stairs. The door at the top shut with a bang.

  “May as well rent out the room to someone else,” Driscoll gruffed. He could see the doctor’s thick legs coming down the staircase. Each step, naturally, boomed. “Who knows when we’ll be back, if at all?”

  He hustled McParland through the front door before the doctor could make his way down. “The vagaries of a soldier’s life, I’m afraid! S’been a pleasure staying in your house, Mrs. Young.”

  “You sure, Sergeant?” McParland asked, once they reached the safety of the street, and put some distance between themselves and the doctor. “Uh, Lieutenant, I mean. I guess.”

  Technically, the promotion still hadn’t gone through. Neither had the pay increase. The wheels of the War Department turned very slowly.

  “Am I sure?” Driscol snorted. “You must be joking. If I’m to be bled any further, thank you, I’ll have it be done by bullets and bayonets. I’ll have a much better chance of surviving.”

  Driscol continued to exercise his talent for decisive command by sequestering a wagon, three blocks away. This wagon, unlike most of the ones that were crowding the streets of Baltimore, wasn’t heading toward the fortifications, laden with tools. Instead it was heading inward, toward the city center, loaded with foodstuffs.

  Best of all, the driver was a black man. Driscol didn’t have much experience with the Negroes of America, but he was reasonably certain that it would be easier to browbeat this fellow than it would a white man.

  “And we’ll need you to drive it, too,” he finished. He lifted the stump of his arm. “Afraid my wagon-driving days are over, and . . .”

  He left off the rest. There was no point in publicly humiliating McParland. His family was too poor to afford a wagon, so McParland had no experience driving one. The same had been true of Driscol’s family, but he’d learned to drive a wagon as he had learned most everything except his personal beliefs and blacksmithing, during his years in Napoleon’s service.

  The lieutenant’s tone addressing the Negro was firm but pleasant enough, as if he was unaware of the pistol and sword belted to his waist or the musket that McParland wasn’t quite pointing up at the black man.

  The wagon driver was relatively young, not more than thirty, and very powerfully built. At the moment, however, despite his Herculean physique, he bore a close resemblance to a rabbit paralyzed by the sight of a snake. The o
nly thing that seemed firm about him was his grip on the reins.

  “I’m a freedman, sir,” he protested. “Was born free, too.”

  “All the better!” Driscol stated forcefully. “You won’t need an explanation to keep your master from whipping you, after he finds out that you’ve gone.”

  Despite the assuredness of his words, however, Driscol was taken aback. He had assumed that the man was a slave. His clothing was shabby, but the wagon he was guiding was well built, and obviously well maintained. From the look of the thing, Driscol had thought it belonged to a prosperous farmer. The sort of vehicle that could serve to haul produce on weekdays, and the farmer and his family to church on Sunday.

  The black man’s dark eyes flicked back and forth from Driscol to the wagon. The lovingly maintained wagon, Driscol now realized.

  The soldier from County Antrim felt a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. He was no stranger to poverty himself, and he knew how thin the shield could be that kept destitution at bay. He’d intended to write the man a note, providing him with an official excuse to deflect the wrath of his master. Now that he understood the driver was a freedman . . .

  He sighed and reached for his purse. With only one hand, the task was a bit awkward. But recent experience had taught him how to manage it, well enough.

  “It’s all I own, sir,” pleaded the Negro. “Took me eight years working in the foundry to save up enough to buy it. Spend most every half cent I can raise to keep it up proper.”

  The purse now open, Driscol sighed again and dug deeply into it. That wasn’t hard to do, alas.

  At least the few coins he came up with were good Spanish currency. Unfortunately, most of those were reales, what New Englanders called ninepence and Pennsylvanians called elevenpence, but most Americans usually referred to simply as a “bit.” A reale was worth approximately one-eighth of a dollar. “Two bits” was the standard slang for a quarter dollar, since, in normal exchange, Spanish coinage was a lot more common than American.

  Still, as modest as it was, a reale was real money, and nobody doubted it. So were the two American half-eagles nestled among them. Those were genuine gold, not paper issued from a state or wildcat bank somewhere.

  The driver was still looking forlorn, although the sheer desperation that had been on his face earlier was gone. Driscol examined the wagon for a moment, estimating its worth, and then sighed again.

  “Look, my man,” he said, “the chances are that you’ll earn more money selling your produce in Washington than you will here—and you’ll probably pick up a princely payment from people desperate to be taken out of the capital.”

  “And if I don’t? What if the Sassenach burn my wagon, too?”

  Driscol was startled, hearing that term issue so unexpectedly from the lips of a black man. He’d thought most Negroes in America were rather partial to the British, since one of the favored British tactics in the war was to free slaves and try to use them against their former masters. So, at least, claimed the shrill accounts in the newspapers.

  The startled look he shot the Negro brought, for the first time, something other than fear and anxiety to the black man’s face. Amusement, or something close.

  “They’re mostly Irishmen in Foxall’s Foundry, sir,” the driver said quietly. “I got along well with some of them.”

  The emphasis was on the word some. Driscol wasn’t surprised. Plenty of his countrymen—even former United Irishmen—had begun acting like Sassenach themselves, once they arrived in America. They did so, not because they were any richer than they’d been in Ireland, but simply because they now had Negroes they could lord it over. It was a side of human nature that Driscol had seen many times. Give some men, be they never so wretched, a different breed of men they can sneer at and feel superior to, and they will often enough become the willing lickspittle of the rich and mighty.

  The fact that Driscol understood the phenomenon did not make him despise it any the less. The Sassenach had left his father dying on an iron tripod, but that Scots-Irish blacksmith’s ideals had not soaked into the ground along with his blood. Not so long as his son was still alive, anyway.

  “Some colored folk can believe the promises of Englishmen,” the driver continued, “but not me. I can read, sir. Not too well, but well enough to figure out that slaves ‘freed’ by Sassenach are just cannon fodder for ’em.”

  “And isn’t that the truth?” Driscol growled. “Stupid bastards. Just as stupid as all the Irishmen and Scotsmen who choose to wear English colors.”

  For the first time, he studied the black driver as he might study any man. And found himself feeling slightly ashamed that it was the first time he’d done so, since he’d arrived in the New World.

  “Not so ‘new’ after all, I guess,” he chided himself under his breath. “Da would whup me good.”

  “I didn’t catch that, sir.”

  “Never mind,” Driscol muttered. He reached into the special pocket of the purse and drew out his prize. Four years, now, he’d hoarded the thing. A genuine Portuguese joe, a gold coin worth about eight dollars.

  “Look here. You get us to Washington, and if anything happens to the wagon, I’ll give you this. I know it won’t replace the wagon, but it’ll go a ways toward it. And . . . well, it’s all I have.

  “But one way or the other, I am going to Washington.”

  By the time they’d reached Baltimore’s limits, the driver seemed to have relaxed. Enough to have exchanged names with Driscol—his own name was Henry Crowell—and even swap a jest.

  “Never seen a man so eager to head toward trouble. You must be running away from a woman, Lieutenant.”

  “Worse!” barked Driscol. “I’m running away from a doctor. Did you know you have leprosy, by the way?”

  Crowell’s eyes widened. He glanced at Driscol, who was sitting right beside him on the driver’s bench, and making no apparent effort to keep his distance. “If that’s so, Lieutenant, you must be crazy.”

  “It’s a special kind of leprosy,” Driscol countered. “Only Negroes have it. That’s why you’re black. Not contagious to white people, not even Irishmen.”

  Crowell looked down at his dark hands, holding the reins in a sure and powerful grip. “Do tell. Where did you learn that, Lieutenant?”

  “From the same doctor I’m running from.”

  “Oh.” Crowell clucked and flipped the reins. The carriage sped up just that little bit.

  The closer they got to the capital, the more they were slowed on their journey by refugee-laden carriages coming up the road. Fortunately, Crowell’s wagon was a lot more substantial than most of the fancy carriages headed away from Washington, so the evacuees more often made way for him, rather than the other way around. As was generally the case, in Driscol’s experience, only people of means could afford to flee a city that was coming under attack—and people like that typically owned carriages designed for elegance rather than endurance. Pound for pound and horse for horse, they were simply no match for Crowell’s vehicle.

  Had Crowell been alone, of course, he wouldn’t have dared to bully his way through such a flood of gentility. But Driscol didn’t hesitate to use his uniform to indicate his authority—or, for that matter, the threat of McParland’s musket, on the one occasion when an offended party made a vehement protest.

  Halfway to Washington, they even picked up an escort. Several dozen armed and mounted men were milling around outside a roadway tavern, appearing more confused than inebriated.

  Driscol recognized the look of leaderless soldiers. Militiamen of some sort, going by the flamboyant nature of their uniforms. Cavalrymen, presumably, given that some of the men were on horseback, and most of the others had their horses by the reins.

  “And who’re you?” he barked, as soon as the wagon reached them. He stood up, giving them a full view of his uniform and sword, and the lieutenant’s epaulet that sat on his shoulder. If the sight of his left sleeve, tied up just a few inches below the epaulet, detracted
from the impression, he could see no sign of it.

  “Answer me, blast you!” he bellowed.

  One of the mounted men—they were all youngsters, most of them still teenagers—gave him a salute that was so awkwardly exaggerated that Driscol almost burst into laughter.

  “I’m Corporal John Pendleton, sir. We’re part of the United Volunteers. From Baltimore. Uh, we’re supposed to be attached to General Tobias Stansbury’s Fifth Regiment, but . . . uh, well.”

  Plaintively, another one of the would-be soldiers piped up: “Do you know where we might find the Fifth Regiment, sir? We haven’t seen hide nor hair of General Stansbury.”

  Driscol snorted. “Threatening to level cannon fire against newspapermen, I should imagine.”

  He made no effort to disguise the contempt in his voice. General Stansbury’s principal claim to fame in the war had been his refusal to protect the antiwar Baltimore newspaper, the Federal Republican and Commercial Intelligencer, when it came under attack at the outset of the conflict, from a prowar mob. When asked for his assistance by the sheriff, Stansbury had proclaimed that the newspaper deserved to be blown up, and that he was rather inclined to level it with his cannons than protect it.

  The fact that, politically speaking, Driscol shared the general’s attitude toward the Federalist newspaper in question was beside the point. He had no more liking for lynch mobs than he did for Sassenach.

  “Ah, yes, Stansbury,” Driscol sneered. “I can well imagine you’re having difficulty finding the fine general, what with an actual armed enemy to face.”

  That bordered on gross insubordination, but he didn’t really care. If there was any advantage to losing an arm, it was that it tended to put everything else into a certain perspective.

  Still, there was no point in letting the youngsters stew on his words. Best to put them to good use.

  “Since you’re unattached, I’m assigning you to my unit. I’m on my way to special duty in Washington.” That sounded better than on medical leave, fleeing a doctor, he thought. “As of this moment, you are attached to General Winfield Scott’s First Brigade.”