The Fort: A Novel of the Revolutionary War

by Bernard Cornwell

  “Not that I know of, sir.”

  “Well someone has, and the doctor’s not happy!”

  “Isn’t it early for potatoes, sir?”

  “That won’t stop them! And doubtless they taste well enough, so tell your fellows I’ll be flogging the next man caught stealing the doctor’s potatoes. Or anyone else’s vegetables for that matter. Dear me, I do despair of soldiers. You could march them through heaven and they’d steal every last harp.” McLean gestured towards the fort. “Now let’s see if those eggs are cooked.”

  There was a chance, McLean thought, just a slender chance that a rebel attack could be repulsed and Fielding’s proposed abatis would increase that chance a little. An abatis was simply an obstacle of rough timber; a line of big branches and untrimmed trunks. An abatis could not stop an assault, but it would slow an enemy attack as men sought a way through the tangle of timber and, as the Yankees bunched behind the web of branches, Fielding’s guns could hammer them with case-shot like giant shotguns. McLean would place the three nine-pounders on his right flank so that as the enemy came round the open space at the end of the abatis they would advance straight into the cannon-fire, and raw troops, inexperienced in war, would be cowed by such concentrated artillery fire. Maybe, just maybe, the abatis would give the guns time enough to persuade the enemy not to press home their attack. That was a slim chance, but if the Yankees came from the west, from the bluff, then McLean reckoned there was no chance at all. He simply did not have enough artillery and so he would greet them with shots from the two guns emplaced on the western ramparts and then submit to the inevitable.

  Laird had poached eggs waiting on a table set in the open air. “And you have fried potatoes, sir,” he said happily.

  “Potatoes, Laird?”

  “New little potatoes, sir, fresh as daisies. And coffee, sir.”

  “You’re a rogue, Laird, you’re an unprincipled damned rogue.”

  “Yes, sir, I am, sir, and thank you, sir.”

  McLean sat to his breakfast. He looked up at the flag that flew so bright in the day’s new light and wondered what flag would fly there as the sun set. “We must do our best,” he told Fielding, “and that’s all we can do. Our best.”

  The marines would be attacking the British battery on Cross Island, which meant General Wadsworth could not use them in the assault on the bluff. “That really doesn’t signify,” Solomon Lovell had declared. “I’m sure the marines are very fine fellows,” he had told Wadsworth, “but we Massachusetts men must do the work! And we can do the work, upon my soul, we can!”

  “Under your inspired leadership, General,” the Reverend Murray chimed in.

  “Under God’s leadership,” Lovell had said reprovingly.

  “The good Lord chooses His instruments,” Murray said.

  “So this will be a victory for the militia alone,” Lovell had told Wadsworth.

  And Wadsworth thought that perhaps Lovell was right. He felt that hope as he stood on the afterdeck of the sloop Bethaiah and listened to Major Daniel Littlefield talk to the men of the York County militia. “The redcoats are just boys!” Littlefield told his men. “And they’re not trained to fight the way we fight. Remember all those evenings on the training field? Some of you groused about that, you’d rather have been drinking Ichibod Flander’s spruce beer, but you’ll thank me when we’re ashore. You’re trained! And you’re better than any damned redcoat! They’re not cunning like you are, they don’t shoot as straight as you do, and they’re frightened! Remember that! They’re frightened young boys a long way from home.” Littlefield grinned at his men, then pointed at a bearded giant who crouched in the front row of his assembled troops. “Isaac Whitney, you tell me this. Why do British soldiers wear red?”

  Whitney frowned. “Maybe so the blood don’t show?”

  “No!” Littlefield cried. “They wear red to make themselves easy targets!” The men laughed. “And you’re all good shooters,” Littlefield went on, “and today you shoot for liberty, for your homes, for your wives, for your sweethearts, and so that none of us has to live under a foreign tyranny!”

  “Amen to that,” a man called.

  “No more taxes!” another man shouted.

  “Amen to that!” Littlefield said. The York County captain exuded confidence, and Wadsworth, watching and listening, felt immensely cheered. The militia was understrength and too many of its men were graybeards or else hardly men at all, yet Daniel Littlefield was inspiring them. “We’re going ashore,” Littlefield said, “and we have to climb that rare steep slope. See it, boys?” He pointed to the bluff. “It’ll be a hard enough climb, but you’ll be among trees. The redcoats can’t see you among the trees. Oh, they’ll shoot, but they won’t be aiming, and you just climb, boys. If you don’t know where to go, follow me. I’ll be going straight up that slope and at the top I’m going to shoot some of those red-coated boys all the way back across the ocean. And remember,” he paused, looking earnestly at his men one by one, “remember! They’re much more frightened of you than you are of them. Oh, I know they look very fine and fancy on parade, but it’s when you’re in the woods and the guns begin to speak that a soldier earns his pay, and we’re the better soldiers. You hear that? We’re the better soldiers, and we’re going to kick their royal backsides from here to kingdom come!” The men cheered that sentiment. Littlefield waited for the cheer to stop. “Now, boys, go clean your guns, oil your locks, and sharpen your bayonets. We have God’s great work to do.”

  “A fine speech,” Wadsworth congratulated the major.

  Littlefield smiled. “A true speech, sir.”

  “I never doubted it.”

  “Those redcoats are just frightened boys,” Littlefield said, looking towards the bluff where, he assumed, the British infantry was waiting among the trees. “We magnify the enemy, sir. We think because they wear red coats that they must be ogres, but they’re just boys. They march very prettily, and they know how to stand in a straight line, but that doesn’t make them soldiers! We’ll beat them. You were at Lexington, I think?”

  “I was.”

  “Then you saw the redcoats run!”

  “I saw them retreat, yes.”

  “Oh, I don’t deny they’re disciplined, sir, but you still beat them back. They’re not trained for this sort of fight. They’re trained to fight big battles in open land, not to be murdered in the undergrowth, so don’t you have any doubts, sir. We shall win.”

  And the major was right, Wadsworth reflected, the redcoats were trained to fight great battles where men had to stand in the open and exchange musket volleys. Wadsworth had seen that at Long Island and he had reluctantly admired the enemy’s iron discipline, but here? Here among Majabigwaduce’s dark trees? The discipline would surely be eroded by fear.

  The British battery atop the bluff bellowed noise and smoke. It was invisible from the Bethaiah because the redcoats had positioned it to fire south towards the harbor entrance rather than west towards the anchored transports. The guns were shooting towards the Hampden, which was again cannonading the British sloops. The Tyrannicide and Black Prince sailed behind the New Hampshire ship, their job to distract the British and keep the Royal Marines on board the sloops. Wadsworth wondered how well the guns on the heights of Dyce’s Head were protected. “Your task,” he said to Littlefield, “is merely to threaten the enemy. You understand that?”

  “A demonstration, sir, to dissuade the enemy from reinforcing Cross Island?”

  “Precisely.”

  “But if we perceive an opportunity?” Littlefield asked with a smile.

  “It would certainly be a blessing to the commodore if we could destroy those guns,” Wadsworth said, nodding towards the fog of powder smoke lingering around the bluff.

  “I make no promises, sir,” Littlefield said, “but I reckon my men will feel happier with God’s good earth under their feet. Let me sniff the enemy, sir. If they’re few, then we’ll make them fewer still.”

  “But no undue ri
sks, Major,” Wadsworth said sternly. “We’ll land in force tomorrow. I don’t want to lose you this evening!”

  “Oh, you won’t lose me!” Littlefield said with amusement. “I intend to watch the very last redcoat leave America, and I’ll help him on his way with a boot up his royal backside.” He turned back to his men. “Right, you rogues! Into the boats! We’ve got redcoats to kill!”

  “Be careful, Major,” Wadsworth said, and immediately regretted the words because, to his ears, they sounded weak.

  “Don’t you worry, sir,” Littlefield said, “we’re going to win!”

  And Wadsworth believed him.

  That afternoon as the American ships again closed on the harbor mouth and opened fire against the three British vessels, Marine Captain Welch was on board the Continental sloop Providence, which was leading the two Massachusetts Navy brigs, the Pallas and Defence. The wind was light and the three small ships were all under oars. “We call it the white ash wind,” Hoysteed Hacker, the captain of the Providence, told Welch.

  The ash oars were monstrously long and very awkward to pull, but the navy crew worked enthusiastically to drive the sloop southwards against the flooding tide. They were rowing towards the channel which ran south of Cross Island. “There’s a rock right in the damned center of the channel,” Hacker said, “and no one knows how deep it lies. But the tide will help us once we’re in the channel.”

  Welch nodded, but said nothing. He was gazing back north. The American ships were again bombarding the three British sloops who were now firing back, blanketing their hulls in gray-white smoke. More smoke shrouded the northern side of Cross Island where the British battery was hammering its shot at the attacking Americans. Further north Welch could see the longboats pulling away from the transport ships. Good. The British must know why the Providence, Pallas, and Defence were working their way around Cross Island, but they dared not send reinforcements across the harbor, not while a major attack threatened the bluff. “We land soon,” Welch growled at his men as the oarsmen turned the sloop into the narrow channel, “and we fix bayonets, and we go fast! You understand? We go fast!”

  But just then a grinding noise sounded deep in the Providence’s hull and the sloop jarred to an instant stop. “Rock,” Hoysteed Hacker explained laconically.

  So the marines, over two hundred of them, could not go fast, because they had to wait while the tide lifted the Providence’s hull over the sunken rock. Welch simmered. He wanted to kill, he wanted to fight, and instead he was stranded in the channel and all he could see now was the wooded hump of Cross Island with the smoke discoloring the sky above. The sound of the guns was incessant, a melding thunder, and sometimes amidst that devil’s drumroll would come the crunch of a shot striking timber. Welch fidgeted. He imagined redcoats being ferried across the harbor, and still the Providence could make no headway.

  “Damn it!” Welch burst out.

  “Tide’s rising,” Hoysteed Hacker said. He was a large man, as tall as Welch, whose broad shoulders strained the seams of his naval uniform. He had a heavy face, thick-browed and lantern-jawed, with a ragged scar on the left cheek. The scar had been caused by a boarding pike wielded by a British sailor on HMS Diligent, the brig Hacker had captured. That sailor had died, gutted by Hacker’s heavy cutlass, and the Diligent was now anchored in Penobscot Bay and flying the ensign of the Continental Navy. Hoysteed Hacker was not going to be intimidated by Welch’s impatience. “Can’t hurry the tide,” he said.

  “How long, for God’s sake?”

  “Long as it takes.”

  They had to wait half an hour, but at last the Providence’s keel cleared the sunken rock and the sloop pulled on towards a small stony beach. Her bows touched the land and were held there by the light wind. The two smaller brigs grounded on either side and green-coated marines leaped into the water and waded ashore, carrying cartridge cases and muskets above their heads. Welch was leading one company while Captain Davis, who still wore the blue coat of the Continental Army rather than marine green, led the other. “Let’s go,” Welch said.

  The marines fixed bayonets. The trees muffled the sound of the battery’s guns only three hundred yards to the north. The British had posted no sentinels on the island’s southern side, but Welch knew they would have seen the masts above the trees and he supposed they would be turning a cannon to face the expected attack. “Make it quick!” Welch shouted as he led the way.

  Two hundred and twenty marines went into the trees. They advanced in rough order, their bayonets glinting in the lowering sun that flickered through the thick pines. They climbed the island’s slope, breasted the summit, and there, below them and just visible through the thick trunks, was a small encampment on the beach. There were four tents, a flagpole, and the battery where blue and red coats showed, and Welch, seeing the enemy close, felt the rage of battle rise in him, a rage fed by his hatred of the British. No gun faced him. The damned enemy was still firing at the American ships. He would teach them to kill Americans! He slid the naval cutlass from its scabbard, screamed a war shout, and led the charge down the hill.

  Twenty-two artillerymen manned the battery and twenty Royal Marines guarded them. They heard the enemy marines shouting, they saw the reflected sunlight glinting from the long blades, and the artillerymen ran. They had longboats beached close to the battery, and they abandoned the guns, abandoned everything, and sprinted for their boats. They shoved the three boats off the shingle and scrambled aboard just as the American marines burst from the trees. One boat was slow. It was afloat, but when the two men who had been pushing its bows tumbled over the gunwale, the boat grounded again. A gunner sergeant jumped out and heaved at the boat afresh, and a voice shouted a warning as a tall marine ran into the shallows. The sergeant heaved again at the boat’s bows, then his coat was seized and he was flung back towards the beach. The longboat floated free and its oarsmen pulled desperately, turning and driving the boat towards the Nautilus, the nearest British sloop. The green-coated marines fired at the rowers. Musket-balls thumped into the gunwales, an oarsman let go of his loom to clap a hand on an arm suddenly bright with blood, then a volley of musketry banged from the Nautilus’s forecastle and the balls whistled about the marines’ heads.

  The blue-coated artillery sergeant took a swing at Welch who blocked the fist with his left hand and, in a rage, slashed his cutlass at the sergeant’s neck. The blade hit home, Welch sawed it, and blood sprayed high. Welch was still screaming. Red misted his vision as he grabbed the wounded man’s hair and pulled him onto the newly sharpened blade, and there was still more blood jetting now, and the gunner sergeant was making a choking, gurgling noise and Welch, his green coat darkened with spatters of British blood, was grunting as he tried to slice the blade deeper still. The tide diluted the blood, and then the sergeant fell and the shallow water momentarily clouded around his twitching body. Welch put a boot on the man’s head and forced him underwater. He held the dying man there until the body was still

  More muskets fired from the Nautilus, though the Royal Marines on the sloop’s forecastle were shooting at long musket range and none of the Americans on Cross Island’s beach was hit. The Nautilus’s broadside faced west, and no guns could be levered round to face the beach and so the Royal Marines shot muskets instead. “Into the battery!” Captain Davis called. The captured battery faced northwest and a low hump of rocky land protected it from the Nautilus so that the rebels were safe enough when they were within its low breastworks. They discovered four guns in the emplacement. Two still had barrels too hot to touch from firing at the American ships, but the other pair had yet to be mounted on their carriages, which stood forlorn beside a rough pit that had been dug as a ready magazine. Captain Davis traced a finger over the royal cipher on one of the unmounted barrels and thought it was kind of King George to provide guns for liberty. Men plundered the tents. There were blankets, bone-handled knives, a fragment of mirror, and a walnut case which held three ivory-handled razors. There was a Bible, e
vidently much-thumbed, two packs of playing cards, and a set of scrimshaw dice. There was an open barrel of salt pork, a box of ship’s biscuits, and two small casks of rum. Beside the guns were the mallets and iron spikes that should have been used to make the cannon useless, but the speed of the attack had driven the British off before the guns could be spiked.

  The British flag still flew. Welch hauled it down and, for the first time that day, a smile showed on his blood-streaked face. He folded the flag carefully, then beckoned to one of his sergeants. “Take this rag back to the Providence,” he ordered, “and ask Captain Hacker for the loan of a boat and crew. He expects to be asked. Then take the flag to General Lovell.”

  “To General Lovell?” the sergeant asked, surprised. “Not to the commodore, sir?” Commodore Saltonstall was the marine’s commander, not the brigadier.

  “Take it to General Lovell,” Welch said. “That flag,” he pointed over the rocky hump of land where, in the evening light, the flag above Fort George just showed, “that flag will belong to the marines.” He looked down at the folds of sun-faded cloth in his big hands, then, with a shudder, spat on the flag. “Tell General Lovell this is a gift.” He thrust the flag into the sergeant’s hands. “You got that? Tell him it’s a gift from the marines.”

  Because Welch reckoned Brigadier-General Goddamned Solomon Lovell needed to know who was going to win this campaign. Not Lovell’s militia, but the marines. The marines, the best, the winners. And Welch would lead them to victory.

  From a Petition signed by thirty-two officers belonging to the American warships in Penobscot Bay and sent to Commodore Saltonstall, July 27th, 1779: