The Fort: A Novel of the Revolutionary War

by Bernard Cornwell

  “Marine Fifer Trask now, sir,” the boy said in his unbroken voice.

  “You joined the marines!” Wadsworth said, smiling. The lad had been provided with a uniform, the dark green coat cut down to his diminutive size, while at his waist hung a sword-bayonet. He lacked the marine’s distinctive leather collar and instead had a black scarf wound tight round his scrawny neck.

  “We kidnapped the little bastard, General,” a marine spoke from the dark.

  “Then make sure you look after him,” Wadsworth said, “and play well, Israel Trask.”

  A rowboat banged against the Centurion’s side and a harried militia lieutenant scrambled over the gunwale with a message from Colonel McCobb. “Sorry, sir, it’ll be a while yet, the Colonel says he’s sorry, sir.”

  “God damn it!” Wadsworth could not help exclaiming.

  “There still aren’t enough boats, sir,” the lieutenant explained.

  “Use what boats you have,” Wadsworth said, “and send them back for the rest of the men. Send me word when you’re ready!”

  “Yes, sir.” The lieutenant, abashed, backed away to his boat.

  “They call them minutemen?” Captain Welch appeared beside Wadsworth and asked with a hint of amusement.

  Wadsworth was taken aback that the dour marine captain had even spoken. Welch was such a grim presence, so baleful, that his customary silence was welcome, yet he had sounded friendly enough in the darkness. “Your men have food?” Wadsworth asked. It was an unnecessary question, but the tall marine made him nervous.

  “They have their morsel,” Welch said, still sounding amused. General Lovell had sent a message that every man must take “a morsel ashore to alleviate hunger,” and Wadsworth had dutifully passed the order on, though he suspected hunger would be the least of their problems. “Have you ever been to England, General?” Welch suddenly asked.

  “No, no. Never.”

  “Pretty place, some of it.”

  “You visited it?”

  Welch nodded. “Didn’t plan on it. Our ship was captured and I was taken there as a prisoner.”

  “You were exchanged?”

  Welch grinned, his teeth very white in the dark. “Hell, no. I strolled out of the prison and walked all the damn way to Bristol. I signed as a deckhand on a merchantman sailing for New York. Got home.”

  “And no one suspected you?”

  “Not a soul. I begged and stole food. Met a widow who fed me.” He smiled at the memory. “Glad I seen the place, but I won’t ever go back.”

  “I’d like to see Oxford one day,” Wadsworth said wistfully, “and maybe London.”

  “We’ll build London and Oxford here,” Welch said.

  Wadsworth wondered if the usually laconic Welch was talkative because he was nervous, and then, with a start, he realized that the marine was talking because Welch had divined Wadsworth’s own nervousness. The general stared at the dark bluff, which, in the thickening mist, was being limned by a dull lightening of the eastern sky, just a hint of gray in the black. “Dawn’s coming,” Wadsworth said.

  And then, suddenly, there were no more delays. Colonel McCobb and the Lincoln County militia were ready, and so the men clambered down into the boats and Wadsworth took his place in a longboat’s stern. The marines were gray-faced in the wan light, but to Wadsworth they looked reassuringly resolute, determined, and frightening. Their bayonets were fixed. The Centurion’s sailors gave a low cheer as the boats pulled away from the transport.

  A louder cheer sounded from the Sky Rocket, and then Wadsworth plainly heard Captain William Burke shout at his crew, “For God and for America! Fire!”

  The Sky Rocket split the dawn with its eight-gun broadside. Flame leaped and curled, smoke spread on the water and the first missiles crashed ashore.

  The rebels were coming.

  Excerpt from a letter sent by the Massachusetts Council to Brigadier-General Solomon Lovell, July 23rd, 1779:

  It is the Expression of the Council . . . that you will push your Operations with all possible Vigor and dispatch and accomplish the business of the Expedition before any reinforcement can get to the enemy at Penobscot. It is also reported here and believed by many that, a Forty Gun ship and the Delaware Frigate sailed from Sandy Hook on Sixteenth Current and Stood to the Eastward; their destination was not known.

  Excerpt from an Order by the State of Massachusetts Bay Council, July 27th, 1779:

  Ordered that the Board of War be and they are hereby directed to furnish the two Indians of the Penobscott Tribe, now in the Town of Boston with Two Hats one of them laced two Blankets and two Shirts.

  Excerpt from Brigadier-General Solomon Lovell’s daily orders, Majabigwaduce, July 27th, 1779:

  All Officers and Soldiers in the Army are strictly enjoin’d not to give or sell any rum to the Indians, except those who have the immediate command of them, under pain of the greatest displeasure. . . . The Officers are desired to pay particular Attention that the men do not waste their Ammunition and that they keep their Arms in good Order.

  Chapter Seven

  The first shots crashed into the trees, exploding twigs, pine needles, and leaves. Birds screeched and flapped into the dawn. The rebels were using chain and bar shot that whirled and slashed through branches to punch gouts of earth and shards of stone where they struck the bluff’s face. “Dear God alive,” Captain Archibald Campbell said. He was the highlander who commanded the picquets on the bluff and he stared aghast at the scores of longboats that were now emerging from the fog and pulling towards his position. In their center, clumsily rowed by men wielding extra-long sweeps, a schooner crept towards the beach, her deck crowded with men. Two enemy warships had anchored close to the shore and those ships, still just dark shapes in the smoke and fog, were now shooting into the bluff. The Hunter had nine four-pounders bearing on the redcoats, while the Sky Rocket had eight of the small cannon in her broadside, but though the guns were small their scything missiles struck home with mind-numbing brutality. Campbell seemed frozen. He had eighty men under command, most of them scattered along the face of the bluff where the steep slope gave way to the gentler rise. “Tell the men to lie down, sir?” a sergeant suggested.

  “Yes,” Campbell said, scarcely aware that he was speaking. The ships’ guns were firing more raggedly now as the faster gun crews outpaced the slower. Each gunshot was a percussive blow to the ears, and each illuminated the bluff with a sudden flash of light that was smothered almost instantly by powder smoke. Campbell was shaking. His belly was sour, his mouth dry, and his right leg quivering uncontrollably. There were hundreds of rebels coming! The fog-smothered sea was shadowed dark by the bluff, but he could make out the glimmer of oar blades beneath the gunsmoke and see the gray light reflecting from bayonets. Twigs, shattered bark, leaves, pinecones, and needles showered on the picquet as the shots tore through the bluff’s trees. A chain shot shattered a rotted and fallen trunk. The highlanders closest to Campbell looked nervously towards their officer.

  “Send word to General McLean, sir?” the sergeant suggested stoically.

  “Go,” Campbell blurted out the command, “yes, go, go!”

  The sergeant turned and a bar shot struck his neck. It severed his powdered pigtail, cut head from bod, and, in the gray gloom and darkness of the dawn, the spray of blood was extraordinarily bright, like ruby drops given extra brilliance by the fog-diffused sunlight that filtered through the eastern trees. A jet of blood spurted upwards and appeared to lift the head, which turned so that the sergeant seemed to be staring reproachfully at Campbell who gave a small cry of horror, then involuntarily bent double and vomited. The head, soaked in blood, thumped to earth and rolled a few feet down the slope. Another chain shot slashed overhead, scattering twigs. Birds shrieked. A redcoat fired his musket down into the cannon-smoke and fog. “Hold your fire!” Campbell shouted too shrilly. “Hold your fire! Wait till they’re on the beach!” He spat. His mouth was sour and his right hand was twitching. There was blood on his j
acket and vomit on his shoes. The sergeant’s headless body was shuddering, but at last went still.

  “Why in God’s name hold our fire?” Lieutenant John Moore, posted on the Scottish left, wondered aloud. He led twenty-two Hamiltons positioned at Dyce’s Head where the slope was the steepest. His picquet lay directly between the approaching boats and the small British battery at the bluff’s top and Moore was determined to protect that battery. He watched the enemy approaching and also watched himself with a critical inward eye. An enemy chain shot slammed into a tree not five paces away and slivers of bark spattered Moore like the devil’s hail, and he knew he was supposed to be frightened, yet in all truth he did not notice that fear. He sensed apprehension, yes, for no man wants to die or be wounded, but instead of a debilitating fear Moore was feeling a rising exhilaration. Let the bastards come, he thought, and then he realized that his self-examination was consuming him so that he was standing in silent absorption while his men looked to him for reassurance. Forcing himself to walk slowly along the break of the bluff, he drew his sword and flicked the slender blade at the thick undergrowth. “Nice of the enemy to trim the trees for us,” he said. “It improves the view, don’t you think?”

  “Buggers want to trim more than the trees,” Private Neill muttered.

  “I don’t know if you’ve noticed something, sir,” Sergeant McClure said quietly.

  “Tell me, Sergeant. Brighten my morning.”

  McClure pointed at the approaching boats that were clarifying as they emerged from the smoke-thickened fog. “Yon bastards are in uniform, sir. I reckon they’re sending their best against us. While the scoundrels up yonder, he pointed at the more northerly longboats, “are in any old clothes. Bunch of vagabonds, they look like.”

  Moore peered westwards, then looked at the northern boats. “You’re right, Sergeant,” he said. In the nearer boats he could see the white crossbelts against the dark green coats of the marines and he assumed that the uniforms belonged to a regiment of General Washington’s Continental Army. “They’re sending their best troops right here,” he said loudly, “and you can’t blame them.”

  “You can’t?”

  “They’re up against the most formidable regiment in the British Army,” Moore said cheerfully.

  “Oh, aye, all twenty-two of us,” McClure said.

  “If they knew what they faced,” Moore said, “they’d turn right around and row away.”

  “Permission to let them know, sir?” McClure asked, appalled at his young officer’s bravado.

  “Let’s kill them instead, Sergeant,” Moore said, though his words were lost as a chain shot drove noisily through the branches overhead to shower the picquet with pinecones and needles.

  “Don’t fire yet!” Captain Archibald Campbell shouted from the bluff’s center. “Wait till they’re on the beach!”

  “Bloody fool,” Moore said. And so, with drawn sword, and under the bombardment of the rebel broadsides, he walked the bluff and watched the enemy draw nearer. Battle, he thought, had come to him at last and in all his eighteen years John Moore had never felt so alive.

  Wadsworth winced as the oars threw up droplets of water that splashed on his face. It might be July, but the air was cold and the water even colder. He was shivering in his Continental Army jacket and he prayed that none of the marines would mistake that shivering for fear. Captain Welch, beside him, looked entirely unconcerned, as if the boat was merely carrying him on some mundane errand. Israel Trask, the boy fifer, was grinning in the longboat’s bows, where he kept twisting around to stare at the bluff where no enemy showed. The bluff climbed two hundred feet from the beach, much of that slope almost perpendicular, but in the fog it looked much higher. Trees thrashed under the impact of bar and chain shot, and birds circled over the high ground, but Wadsworth could see no redcoats and no puffs of smoke betraying musket-fire. Fog sifted through the high branches. The leading boats were well within musket range now, but still no enemy fired.

  “You stay on the beach, boy,” Welch told Israel Trask.

  “Can’t I’” the boy began.

  “You stay on the beach,” Welch said again, then gave a sly glance at Wadsworth, “with the general.”

  “Is that an order?” Wadsworth asked, amused.

  “Your job is to send the boats back for more men, and send those men where they’re needed,” Welch said, seemingly unabashed at telling Wadsworth what he should do. “Our job is to kill whatever bastards we find at the top of the slope.”

  “If there are any there at all,” Wadsworth said. The boat was almost at the beach where small waves broke feebly, and still the enemy offered no resistance.

  “Maybe they’re sleeping,” Welch said, “maybe.”

  Then, as the bows of the boat grounded on the shingle, the bluff’s face exploded with noise and smoke. Wadsworth saw a stab of flame high above, heard the musket-balls whip past, saw splashes of water where they struck the sea, and then the marines were shouting as they leaped ashore. Other boats scraped onto the narrow beach, which rapidly filled with green-coated men looking for a way up the bluff. A marine staggered backwards, his white crossbelt suddenly red. He fell to his knees in the small surf and coughed violently, each cough bringing more dark blood.

  James Fletcher, his musket unslung, had run to a vast granite boulder that half-blocked the beach. “There’s a path here!” he shouted.

  “You heard him!” Welch bellowed. “So follow me! Come on, you rogues!”

  “Start playing, boy,” Wadsworth told Israel Trask, “give us a good tune!”

  Marines were scrambling up the slope, which was steep enough to demand that they slung their muskets and used both hands to haul themselves up by gripping on saplings or rocks. A musket-ball struck a stone and ricocheted high above Wadsworth’s head. A marine staggered backwards, his face a mask of red. A musket-ball had slashed though his cheekbone and the cheek’s flesh now dangled over his leather collar. Wadsworth could see the man’s teeth through the ragged wound, but the marine recovered and kept climbing, making an incoherent noise as a chain shot sighed overhead to explode a larch into splinters. Wadsworth heard a clear, high voice shouting at men to aim low and, with a start, he realized he must be hearing an enemy officer. He drew his pistol and aimed it up the steep bluff, but he could see no target, only gray-white drifts of smoke revealing that the enemy was about halfway up the slope. He shouted at the longboat crews to get back to the transports where more men waited, then he walked northwards along the beach, his boots scrunching the low ridge of dried seaweed and small flotsam that marked the high-tide line. He found a dozen militiamen crouching under a shelf of rock and urged them up the slope. They stared at him as if dazed, then one of them abruptly nodded and ran out of his shelter and the others followed.

  More boats scraped their bows ashore and more men piled over the gunwales. The whole length of the bluff’s narrow beach was now filled with men who ran into the trees and began to climb. The musket-balls buzzed, splashed, or struck stone, and still the cannons of Hunter and Sky Rocket crashed and boomed and dizzied the air with their vicious missiles. The noise of cannons and muskets was deafening the foggy shore, but Israel Trask played a descant to the gun’s percussion. He was trilling the jaunty “Rogue’s March” and standing exposed on the beach where, as he played, he gazed wide-eyed up the bluff. Wadsworth took hold of the boy’s collar, causing a sudden hiccup in the music, and dragged him to the seaward side of the vast boulder. “Stay there, Israel,” Wadsworth ordered, reckoning the boy would be safe in the granite’s shelter.

  A body, facedown, was floating just by the rock. The man wore a deerskin jacket and a hole in the jacket’s back showed where the killing ball had left his body. The corpse surged in on the small waves, then was sucked out. In and out it moved, relentlessly. The dead man was Benjamin Goldthwait, who had elected to abandon his father’s loyalties and fight for the rebels.

  A militia captain had scrambled to the boulder’s top and was shout
ing at his men to get on up the bluff. The enemy must have seen him because musket-balls crackled on the stone. “Get up the bluff yourself” Wadsworth shouted at the captain, and just then a ball struck the militia officer in the belly and his shout turned into a groan as he bent double and the blood seethed down his trousers. He fell slowly backwards, blood suddenly arcing above him. He slid down the boulder’s side and thumped into the surf just beside Ben Goldthwait’s corpse. Israel Trask’s eyes widened. “Don’t mind the bodies, boy,” Wadsworth said, “just keep playing.”

  James Fletcher, ordered to stay close to Wadsworth, waded into the small waves to pull the wounded officer out of the water, but the moment he took hold of the man’s shoulders a pulse of blood spurted into James’s face and the injured captain writhed in agony.

  “You!” Wadsworth was pointing at some sailors about to row their boat back to the transports. “Take that wounded man back with you! There’s a surgeon on the Hunter! Take him there.”

  “I think he’s dead,” James said, shuddering at the blood which had splashed on his face and spread in the small waves.

  “With me, Fletcher,” Wadsworth said, “come on!” He followed the path by the boulder. To his left the militia were struggling through the thick undergrowth that choked the bluff, but Wadsworth sensed the marines to his right were far higher up the slope. The path slanted southwards along the bluff’s face. It was not much of a path, more a vague track interrupted by roots, scrub, and fallen trees and Wadsworth had to use his hands to haul himself over the most difficult parts. The track zigzagged back north and at the turn a wounded marine was tying a strip of cloth round his bloodied thigh while just beyond him another marine lay as if asleep, his mouth open, but with no sign of a wound. Wadsworth felt a pang as he looked at the young man’s face; so good-looking, so wasteful. “He’s dead, sir,” the injured marine said.