The Fort: A Novel of the Revolutionary War

by Bernard Cornwell

  They charged.

  They were highlanders from the hard country on Scotland’s west coast. War was in their blood, they had suckled tales of battle with their mother’s milk, and now, they believed, a MacDonald was waiting for them and they charged with all their clan’s ferocity. They screamed as they charged, they raced to be first among the enemy and they had the advantage of surprise.

  Yet even so Iain Campbell could not believe how quickly the enemy broke. As he neared the battery and could see more through the dark fog he had a moment of alarm because there seemed to be hundreds of rebels, they were far more numerous than his company, and he thought what a ridiculous place this was to meet his death. Most of the rebels were in the battery itself, which was as crowded as a Methodist meeting. Only about twenty men were working on the entrenchments and it was evident they had set no sentries or, if they had placed picquets, those sentries were asleep. Astonished faces turned to stare at the shrieking highlanders. Too many faces, Campbell thought. There would be a marble plaque in the kirk with his name and this day’s date and a dignified epitaph, then that vision vanished because the enemy was already running. “Kill!” Campbell heard himself shout. “Kill!” And the shout spurred even more of the enemy to flee westwards. They dropped their picks and spades, they scrambled over the west-facing rampart and they ran. A few, very few, fired at the approaching highlanders, but most forgot they were carrying muskets and just abandoned the battery to run towards the heights.

  One group of men was dressed in dark uniforms crossed by white belts and those men did not run. They tried to form a line and they presented muskets and they fired a ragged volley at Campbell’s men as the highlanders leaped the newly dug scratch of a ditch. Iain Campbell felt the wind of a ball whip past his cheek, then he was swinging his heavy blade at a smoking musket, knocking it aside as he brought the sword back to stab low and fast. The steel punctured cloth, skin, flesh, and muscle, and then his Campbells were all around him, screaming hatred and lunging with bayonets, and the outnumbered enemy broke. “Give them a volley!” Campbell shouted. He twisted his blade in the enemy’s belly and thumped his left fist into the man’s face. Corporal Campbell added his bayonet and the rebel went down. Captain Campbell kicked the musket from the enemy’s grasp and dragged his blade free of the clinging flesh. Musket flashes cast sudden stark light on blood, chaos, and Campbell fury.

  A lone American officer tried to rally his men. He slashed his sword at Campbell, but the laird’s son had learned his fencing at Major Teague’s Academy on Edinburgh’s Grassmarket and he parried the swing effortlessly, reversed, turned his wrist and lunged the blade into the American officer’s chest. He felt the sword scrape on a rib, he grimaced and lunged harder. The man choked, gasped, spewed blood, and fell. “Give them a volley!” Campbell shouted again. He had hardly needed to think to defeat the rebel officer, it had all been instinctive. He dragged his sword free and saw an American sergeant in a green uniform coat stagger and fall. The sergeant was not wounded, but a highlander had thumped the side of his head with a musket stock and he was half-dazed. “Take his musket!” Campbell called sharply. “Don’t kill him! Just take him prisoner!”

  “He could be a MacDonald,” a Campbell private said, quite ready to thrust his bayonet into the sergeant’s belly.

  “Take him prisoner!” Campbell snapped. He turned and looked towards the heights where the dawn was lighting the slope, but the fog hid the fleeing rebels. Scottish muskets coughed smoke, stabbed flame into the fog, and shot balls uphill to where the Americans retreated. “Sergeant MacKellan!” Campbell called. “You’ll set a picquet! Smartly now!”

  “You sure this bastard’s not a MacDonald?” the private standing above the dazed rebel sergeant asked.

  “He’s called Sykes,” a voice said, and Campbell turned to see it was the wounded rebel officer who had spoken. The man had propped himself on an elbow. His face, very white in the dawn’s wan light, was streaked with blood that had spilled from his mouth. He looked towards the green-coated sergeant. “He’s not called MacDonald,” he managed to say, “he’s called Sykes.”

  Campbell was impressed that the young officer, despite his chest wound, was trying to save his sergeant’s life. That sergeant was sitting now, guarded by Jamie Campbell, the youngest son of Ballaculish’s blacksmith. The wounded officer spat more blood. “He’s called Sykes,” he said yet again, “and they were drunk.”

  Campbell crouched beside the injured officer. “Who was drunk?” he asked.

  “They found barrels of rum,” the man said, “and I couldn’t stop them. The militia.” The highlanders were still shooting into the fog, hastening the retreat of the rebels who had now vanished into the fog that spread inexorably up the long slope. “I told McCobb,” the wounded officer said, “but he said they deserved the rum.”

  “Rest,” Campbell said to the man. There were two great hogsheads at the back of the battery and they had evidently been full of naval rum, and the rebels, celebrating their victory, had celebrated too hard. Campbell found a discarded knapsack that he put beneath the wounded officer’s head. “Rest,” he said again. “What’s your name?”

  “Lieutenant Dennis.”

  The blood on Dennis’s coat looked black and Campbell would not even have known it was blood except that it reflected a sheen in the weak light. “You’re a marine?”

  “Yes,” Dennis choked on the word and blood welled at his lips and ran down his cheek. His breath rasped. “We changed sentries,” he said, and whimpered with sudden pain. He wanted to explain that the defeat was not his fault, that his marines had done their job, but the militia picquet that had replaced his marine sentries had failed.

  “Don’t speak.” Campbell said. He saw the fallen sword nearby and slid the blade into Dennis’s scabbard. Captured officers were allowed to keep their swords, and Campbell reckoned Lieutenant Dennis deserved it as a reward for his bravery. He patted Dennis’s blood-wet shoulder and stood. Robbie Campbell, a corporal, and almost as great a fool as his father, who was a drunken drover, had found a drum that was painted with an eagle and the word “Liberty” and he was beating it with his fists and capering like the fool he was. “Stop that noise, Robbie Campbell!” Campbell shouted, and was rewarded with silence. The drummer boy’s corpse was lying beside a newly dug grave. “Jamie Campbell! You and your brother will make a stretcher. Two muskets, two jackets!” The quickest way to fashion a stretcher was to thread the sleeves of two jackets onto a pair of muskets. “Carry Lieutenant Dennis to the hospital.”

  “Did we kill the MacDonald, sir?”

  “The MacDonald ran away,” Campbell said dismissively. “What do you expect of a MacDonald?”

  “The yon bastards!” a private said angrily and Campbell turned to see the bloodied heads of the Royal Marine corpses, their scalps cut and torn away. “Bloody heathen savage god-damned bastards,” the man growled.

  “Take Lieutenant Dennis to the surgeons,” Campbell ordered, “and the prisoner to the fort.” He found a rag in a corner of the battery and wiped his broadsword’s long blade clean. It was almost full light now. Rain began to fall, heavy rain that splashed on the battery’s wreckage and diluted the blood.

  The Half Moon Battery was back in British hands, and on the high ground Peleg Wadsworth despaired.

  “They’re patriots!” General Lovell complained. “They must fight for their liberty!”

  “They’re farmers,” Wadsworth said wearily, “and carpenters and laborers and they’re the men who didn’t volunteer for the Continental Army, and half of them didn’t want to fight anyway. They were forced to fight by press gangs.”

  “The Massachusetts Militia,” Lovell said in a hurt voice. He was standing beneath the cover of a sail that had been strung and pegged between two trees to make a headquarter’s tent. The rain pattered on the canvas and hissed in the camp-fire just outside the tent.

  “They’re not the same militia who fought at Lexington,” Wadsworth said, “or who st
ormed Breed’s Hill. Those men are all gone into the army,” or their graves, he thought, “and we have the leavings.”

  “Another eighteen deserted last night,” Lovell said despairingly. He had set a picquet on the neck, but that post did little to stop men sneaking away in the darkness. Some, he supposed, deserted to the British, but most went north into the wild woods and hoped to find their way home. Those who were caught were condemned to the Horse, a brutal punishment whereby a man was sat astride a narrow beam with muskets tied to his legs, but the punishment was evidently not brutal enough, because still the militiamen deserted. “I am ashamed,” Lovell said.

  “We still have enough men to assult the fort,” Wadsworth said, not sure he believed the words.

  Lovell ignored them anyway. “What can we do?” he asked helplessly.

  Wadsworth wanted to kick the man. You can lead us, he thought, you can take command, but in fairness, and Peleg Wadsworth was a man given to honesty about himself, he did not think he was showing great leadership either. He sighed. The dawn’s fog had cleared to reveal that the British had abandoned the recaptured Half Moon Battery, leaving the earthwork empty, and there was something insulting in that abandonment. They seemed to be saying that they could retake the battery whenever they wished, though Lovell showed no desire to accept the challenge. “We can’t hold the battery,” the general said despairingly.

  “Of course we can, sir,” Wadsworth insisted.

  “You saw what happened! They ran! The rascals ran! You want me to attack the fort with such men?”

  “I think we must, sir,” Wadsworth said, but Lovell said nothing in return. The rain was coming down harder, forcing Wadsworth to raise his voice. “And, sir,” he continued, “at least we’ve rid ourselves of the enemy battery. The commodore might sail into the harbor.”

  “He might,” Lovell said in a tone that suggested pigs might take wings and circle the heights of Majabigwaduce singing hallelujahs. “But I fear . . .” he began, and stopped.

  “Fear, sir?”

  “We need disciplined troops, Wadsworth. We need General Washington’s men.”

  Praise the Lord, Wadsworth thought, but did not betray his reaction. He knew how hard it had been for Lovell to make that admission. Lovell wanted the glory of this expedition to shine on Massachusetts, but the general must now share that renown with the other rebellious states by calling in troops from the Continental Army. That army had real soldiers, disciplined men, trained men.

  “A single regiment would be enough,” Lovell said.

  “Let me convey the request to Boston,” the Reverened Jonathan Murray suggested.

  “Would you?” Lovell asked eagerly. He had become more than slightly tired of the Reverend Murray’s pious con- fidence. God might indeed wish the Americans to conquer here, but even the Almighty had so far failed to move the commodore’s ships past Dyce’s Head. The clergyman was no military man, but he possessed persuasive powers and Boston would surely listen to his pleas. “What will you tell them?”

  “That the enemy is too powerful,” Murray said, “and that our men, though filled with zeal and imbued with a love of liberty, nevertheless lack the discipline to bring down the walls of Jericho.”

  “And ask for mortars,” Wadsworth said.

  “Mortars?” Lovell asked.

  “We don’t have trumpets,” Wadsworth said, “but we can rain fire and brimstone on their heads.”

  “Yes, mortars,” Lovell said. A mortar was even more deadly for siege work than an howitzer and, anyway, Lovell possessed only one howitzer. The mortars would fire their shells high in the sky so that they fell vertically into the fort and, as the fort’s walls grew higher, so those walls would contain the explosions and spread death among the redcoats. “I shall write the letter,” Lovell said heavily.

  Because the rebels needed reinforcements.

  Next day Peleg Wadsworth tied a large piece of white cloth to a long stick and walked towards the enemy fort. Colonel Revere’s guns had already fallen silent and, soon after, the British guns went quiet too.

  Wadsworth went alone. He had asked James Fletcher to accompany him, but Fletcher had begged off. “They know me, sir.”

  “And you like some of them?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then stay here,” Wadsworth had said, and now he walked down the ridge’s gentle slope, between the shattered tree stumps, and he saw two red-coated officers leave the fort and come towards him. He thought that they would not want him to get too close in case he saw the state of the fort’s walls, but he was evidently wrong because the two men waited for him inside the abatis. It seemed they did not care if he had a good view of the ramparts. Those ramparts were under constant bombardment from Revere’s guns, yet to Wadsworth’s eyes, they looked remarkably undamaged. Maybe that was why the British officers did not mind him seeing the walls. They were mocking him.

  It had rained again that morning. The rain had stopped, but the wind felt damp and the clouds were still low and threatening. The wet weather had soaked the men encamped on the heights, it had drenched the stored cartridges and increased the militia’s misery. Some men had hissed at Lovell as the general accompanied Wadsworth to the tree line and Lovell had pretended not to hear the sound.

  The abatis had been knocked about by gunfire and it was not difficult to find a way through the tangled branches. Wadsworth felt foolish holding the flag of truce above his head so he lowered it as he approached the two enemy officers. One of them, the shortest, had gray hair beneath his cocked hat. He leaned on a stick and smiled as Wadsworth approached. “Good morning,” he called genially.

  “Good morning,” Wadsworth responded.

  “Not really a good morning, though, is it?” the man said. His right arm was held unnaturally. “It’s a chill and wet morning. It’s raw! I am Brigadier-General McLean, and you are?”

  “Brigadier-General Wadsworth,” Wadsworth said, and felt entirely fraudulent in claiming the rank.

  “Allow me to name Lieutenant Moore to you, General,” McLean said, indicating the good-looking young man who accompanied him.

  “Sir,” Moore greeted Wadsworth by standing briefly to attention and bowing his head.

  “Lieutenant,” Wadsworth acknowledged the politeness.

  “Lieutenant Moore insisted on keeping me company in case you planned to kill me,” McLean said.

  “Under a flag of truce?” Wadsworth asked sternly.

  “Forgive me, General,” McLean said, “I jest. I would not think you capable of such perfidy. Might I ask what brings you to see us?”

  “There was a young man,” Wadsworth said, “a marine officer called Dennis. I have a connection with his family,” he paused, “I taught him his letters. I believe he is your prisoner?”

  “I believe he is,” McLean said gently.

  “And I hear he was wounded yesterday. I was hoping . . .” Wadsworth paused because he had been about to call McLean “sir,” but managed to check that foolish impulse just in time, “I was hoping you could reassure me of his condition.”

  “Of course,” McLean said and turned to Moore. “Lieutenant, be a good fellow and run to the hospital, would you?”

  Moore left and McLean gestured at two tree stumps. “We might as well be comfortable while we wait,” he said. “I trust you’ll forgive me if I don’t invite you inside the fort?”

  “I wouldn’t expect it,” Wadsworth said.

  “Then please sit,” McLean said, and sat himself. “Tell me about young Dennis.”

  Wadsworth perched on the adjacent stump. He talked awkwardly at first, merely saying how he had known the Dennis family, but his voice became warmer as he spoke of William Dennis’s cheerful and honest character. “He was always a fine boy,” Wadsworth said, “and he’s become a fine man. A good young man,” he stressed the “good,” “and he hopes to be a lawyer when this is all over.”

  “I’ve heard there are honest lawyers,” McLean said with a smile.

  “He w
ill be an honest lawyer,” Wadsworth said firmly.

  “Then he will do much good in the world,” McLean said. “And yourself, General? I surmise you were a schoolteacher?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you have done much good in the world,” McLean said. “As for me? I went to be a soldier forty years ago and twenty battles later here I still am.”

  “Not doing good for the world?” Wadsworth could not resist inquiring.

  McLean took no offense. “I commanded troops for the King of Portugal,” he said, smiling, “and every year there was a great procession on All Saint’s Day. It was magnificent! Camels and horses! Well, two camels, and they were poor mangy beasts,” he paused, remembering, “and afterwards there was always dung on the square the king needed to cross to reach the cathedral, so a group of men and women were detailed to clean it up with brooms and shovels. They swept up the dung. That’s the soldier’s job, General, to sweep up the dung the politicians make.”

  “Is that what you’re doing here?”

  “Of course it is,” McLean said. He had taken a clay pipe from a pocket of his coat and put it between his teeth. He held a tinderbox awkwardly in his maimed right hand and struck the steel with his left. The linen flared up and McLean lit the pipe, then snapped the box closed to extinguish the flame. “You people,” he said when the pipe was drawing, “had a disagreement with my people, and you or I, General, might well have talked our way to an accord, but our lords and masters failed to agree so now you and I must decide their arguments a different way.”

  “No,” Wadsworth said. “To my mind, General, you’re the camel, not the sweeper.”

  McLean laughed at that. “I’m mangy enough, God knows. No, General, I didn’t cause this dung, but I am loyal to my king and this is his land, and he wants me to keep it for him.”

  “The king might have kept it for himself,” Wadsworth said, “if he had chosen any rule except tyranny.”