The smaller marmot appears to look into my eyes and I have the horrible insight that my dead Highlander’s soul has roamed the plains, has leapt into this animal and now beseeches me through its eyes. Who is this departed boy and why can I not settle on his name?
“Ned—”
But in this body gape wounds my brother, Ned, did not suffer.
Ronnie? Ronnie of the drum, the Highlander I knew in Culloden!
Or did Ronnie drum for me here? Certainly Ronnie was one of the Highlanders who followed me through more than one battle….
This body is certainly not Elwyn’s, is it?
I hate that I can barely picture Elwyn anymore, his face, the sickening mutilation after the pounding he got in that shithole—not here—did I not lose Elwyn here? Surely it’s in fact Elwyn I see lying here, on the plains….
I have seen so many dead boys.
It occurs to me that the younger marmot is trying to communicate with me: “Yes but no,” say its eyes. “You have it right that I hold this young soldier’s soul for safekeeping. Come back tonight when no one else is here, and I’ll divulge to you his name.”
The marmot is real and warm and I know the boy is not. Or I’m fairly certain he is not….I am seeing a figment and not a man. Still…The other animal, the larger of the marmots and—I think—the older, concentrates on an apple at the entrance to its burrow and gives me no word, only a calm gaze that I also feel in some part of me I am meant to recognize. A marmot, I remember from my biology and Latin classes, is a mountain mouse.
Listen to your own goddamn animals, Sophie said.
—
I HARDLY SLEPT LAST NIGHT—I need rest and shade.
I climb the plains to the trees, which reach in a swath of loveliness all the way toward my Foulon. I know where to rest, where to dream a cooling dream that’ll take me out of this fever of the plains with their tour buses, soccer players, and the red-and-orange kite that sways loud as a blood moon, loud as my Redcoats. The modern sky hangs lurid and cruel as the palette of George Townshend, that worm among my brigadiers, the one who mocked me hardest.
Historians have not divined my army’s most potent weapon.
Generals of losing armies have never known it.
I search here under the sacred shade of ash and maple for that spot on the plains where I bade my men do the thing that won our battle. I bade them obey me, yes. I bade them each take a mouthful of smashed snails for their dysentery. I bade them carry gear by the hundredweight over the Foulon: muskets and cannon, more poundage than a man can carry unless he’s possessed. I bade them move silent as phantoms. Did I threaten deserters with scalping by my own hand? Yes to all of it. Did I forbid them to pray in my presence, invoking instead a supra-divine cunning? I did. But none of these things gave us our edge that slew the French.
No one knew we were here.
We were so exhausted we hardly knew it ourselves.
I timed our ascent so that in dawn’s glimmer no Englishman would err and shoot the red coat of his brother. But dawn was not my secret.
When we attained the Foulon cliff—after we deceived the sparse sentries with our very good French, after we sweated under our loads and tricked the owls of New France into not shrieking our presence—we got to the edge of the plains, a mile and a half from where the battle would explode. Then I drew my secret sword.
I have said inferior commanders do not read Xenophon or other philosophers of war, but had they done so, such studies would have failed to tell them what I know from my blessed country of poetry, realm of genius, divine part of man I have found nowhere near a church.
I commanded my men to lie down on the plains and go to sleep…
…the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast…
I locate that blessed hollow now! Under a family of new willows I lie. Just as I bade my men lie down in 1759, before our enemy woke.
I sensed then, and I feel it even now, that these new trees on the plains are far lighter in spirit than the oak and wych elm that surrounded our Scots camps at Culloden. Culloden’s assault on my reason began with tortured roots and waterlogged bark.
Owls screamed as they gathered loot. I was eighteen. I hid from men so as to recover from the horror of Culloden’s slaughter but I hadn’t bargained that a kestrel would sail toward me, murderous. Pewter light etched the creature’s beak, its all-knowing eyes, its wing-parts and talons. I discerned how mechanical a falcon is, how fiercely it zeroes in on its bloody intent, its flight never joyful as men imagine flight.
As soon as Scotland knew me for a warrior, that land unsheathed its brutal genius; faces appeared in its every root and in all the moss, conniving where to suck rainwater, where to lay the next silt layer. Unlike this place, Scotland leaves nothing to leisure—land in highlands and lowlands alike is not given to ease. It gathers freshness and a kinetic clarity that has no kindness in it, only eerie attention, greedy to suck a man’s marrow, and his brain as well should he recline in the moss too long.
A soldier need not be slaughtered for the moss of Scotland to invade him. Simply lying down for a rest turns him into occupied territory all the rest of his days.
When I was eighteen I never confessed to my mother what befell me in Scotland—I hid the haunted dereliction of my mind from her, and with my father I stuck to military news: how he loved comparing my situation with campaigns of his own though the two bore no resemblance, his mind and mine being like the minds of two men who are wholly unrelated.
If I wrote to my mother of ancestral presences I called them evanescent as the sheen on a pigeon, and never told her how phantasms loitered shy until I’d slept weeks amid ruins and standing stones far from English conversation.
I’ve pretended never to anguish. I mocked any man among my soldiers who became afraid of the spectral realm, accusing him of weak conscience and an overblown imagination. To no one did I admit the outlandish presence of malevolent enchantments whether we bunked in roofless chapels or in shattered coal cellars—the whole of Scotland is laid bare to rain, frost and mischief. From its rocks and roots rises the green man enwreathed with oak leaves. Half man and half animal, he guards Scotland from soldiers like myself not through cannon or grapeshot but through driving madness into our intellect.
In Scotland I kept seeing the green man’s face not only over pub doors but in the woods. Any time I asked a local about him I was met with a blank unknowing, a secret stare. To sleep in the Highlands for a fortnight with no roof was to forever dread the green man’s influence over my mind.
Culloden! That’s where my regiment had the drummer named Ronnie. And I did bring him here with me, to Quebec—I’m not remembering incorrectly….Ronnie did not use a regulation stick but tore a branch from whatever tree would yield him one. He told me such a stick spoke for the land and meant the land would not treat us as invaders. After Culloden he formed a habit of finding a stone seat with a vantage of many miles, and he drummed with his naked hand and cocked an ear to the drum as if it were talking to him.
I sat with Ronnie in the Highlands, lured by that drum. I was used to thinking of a drummer as practical: a way to keep men apprised of one another’s coordinates in fog or in artillery smoke—his drumming an audible sign to keep us from scattering.
The first thing Ronnie did when we arrived in the New World was make his own drum out of the skin of a deer he’d shot, and wood from a cedar he cut after lightning struck it. He let me sniff the wood and it emanated deep sugar. On Île d’Orléans he lifted the drum to my ear as he hit it and I became aware that its vibrations were more than sound: they reverberated and entered my body as a man enters a woman. The reverberations dislodged my own bad vapours. Warmth suffused me where all along had dwelt my old remorse. And I realized the function of drums in bat
tle is this: to infect soldiers’ blood with the fleetness of the wild animal and strength of the tree that fashioned the drum.
“Sound it to me through this temporary slumber,” I asked Ronnie as we lay on these plains to rest before our battle, and he laid me down to sleep better than any apothecary’s concoction. It’s a wonder I woke in time.
But wake I did.
I never woke up on any day better or with more courage than I did from that half-hour sleep on the thirteenth of this month in 1759, my men slumbering round me like maidens before we rose to slay Montcalm. I’ll never forget the thrum of Ronnie’s drum in my sacrum.
I wish it sounded in me now.
23 The Foulon
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 12.
MORNING.
Quebec City, Quebec
MY DESCENT OF THE FOULON path feels strangely gradual and I realize some sort of machinery must have been employed by the parks people to gentle what was far steeper of old. The gentleness irritates me, and I can hardly believe my eyes when I come to a juncture where earth gives way to sinuous pavement that inclines by such tiny degrees anyone at all might ascend or descend without becoming out of breath. I halt at a lookout equipped with a guardrail over massive riverside tanks, noisy cranes, transport trucks, and endless traffic speeding along Boulevard Champlain.
A woman in a business suit appears to instruct a gaggle of well-dressed men on some point about the scene below and I inquire, “What’s in those great round containers down there below the boulevard?”
“Those are the grain silos of the Old Port of Quebec.”
The silos possess the imposing dereliction of industrial edifices from the early twentieth century and I feel the strange dislocation of time wash over me again—the sensation has become familiar though I do not love it. I expected this old port to be modern yet it looks outdated, while this—my old climbing-route up the Foulon—has become spanking new. It was my place, the scene of my feat of imagination and risk. But it is unrecognizable, utterly modern: a serpentine beast rising in a fashion alien to me. It no longer belongs to my memory, but to a strange, collective understanding shared by this official and her entourage in their impeccable clothes. These are men I have seen paying to have their shoes rendered agleam at shoeshine stations between gates at airports.
“I see the silos are old,” I tell the woman, “but this…” I fling my hand toward the sinuous trail, “the path, the guardrails, the little plantations of seedlings…”
Brave tufts of leaf glow new and alive, too baby-green for an autumn day. The greenery forms small islands among mounds of raw and unnerving rubble—wounds in the landscape, made by backhoes and specialized incline-busting front-end loaders.
A placard stands near us with the figure of Montcalm painted on it, and a quotation, apparently uttered by him though I never heard him say it: Defeat is the ordinary price of being the weaker party, but being taken by surprise—that is truly woeful.
“The placard,” I say, “the path itself…” The woman waits, and I sense I’ve interrupted an important information session. “How new is it?”
“Very new,” she says. “If you go over to that bend and look down, you’ll see the best part. Yes—just over there…”
A feeling of desolation engulfs me.
I silently name the doll-like cut-outs tied to chicken-wire that has been stretched over the escarpment: effigies of my soldiers cut with a jig-saw from some sort of space-age shining board designed to withstand weather: Gunner Wendell Macpherson, eighteen, out of Bonnyrigg. Stanley Black from Coldstream. Bramwell Taylor, seventeen, his fingers previously blown off by a bottle rocket the French filled with tar and lit, yet Bramwell climbs the bank faster than I ever could because he has lashed his wrist to tines he hacked off his bully-beef prong.
My men glitter flat on the escarpment, faceless silhouettes, clambering dolls without the third dimension even dolls should possess. Those not sunlit gape dark like holes cut in the landscape where I positioned them. Is that Ronnie, clambering with his silent drum…a scrap of two-dimensional puppetry!
I flee the woman and her entourage and descend the new Foulon.
A crone in a covered ruby scooter decorated with a silver balloon slobbers an ice cream cone as she retraces my glorious ascent. A cyclist hurtles down, his helmet the carapace of some exotic fly, pink zigzags emblazoning his tights. The asphalt is harder through my soles than the root and shale I climbed to defeat Montcalm.
I come to billboards bearing artists’ renditions of my battle. They depict me as Brigadier Townshend did—a cartoon—a poncey, wispy, tiptoeing lightweight, my pointy little nose in the air like that of an insect or a hummingbird. My nose and my sword vie for status as silliest proboscis. Here on these boards, as in Townshend’s sketchbooks, which I know have been preserved, I am ineffectual, effeminate, inept—not to be seen for a moment as anything remotely resembling a war hero. My spindly limbs akimbo, a face that simpers, “Mother, ready me a dish of tea and a currant bun—my battle was a dizzying dance and I fancy something sweet.”
Should I care that the woman with the silver balloon must believe Townshend’s cartoon?
I was never vain. I don’t waste time reacting to pettiness in others and my own failings are big, not small. Pettiness on my part is not the reason Townshend hated me.
The letter he concocted our night of the Foulon, minutes before we made our move, was nine lines long but can be paraphrased in two:
Sir—
Why haven’t you told me what the hell we’re doing?
The truth is, I confided in no one.
It is astounding how a seed-speck of insight flies straight into the heart of one’s enemy if you let a spark slip to the wrong man.
But the Foulon was my only chance. It was a crazy chance. It combined sheer impossibility with hope’s sole glint. It was a plan too desperate to entrust to anyone save myself.
That is the difference between myself and a man like Townshend. I am a man who can keep my own counsel and bear the resulting murderous loneliness, and face every consequence, whether success or failure. Risking failure has never been, for me, a problem. I look on it as life’s consummate thrill—wagering all for the sake of one doomed chance.
I grabbed the only chance I had. It was perfect. It was a point of precise illumination, a flash of clarity in a world of imperfection, a world sad and disorganized, broken and incomplete, as I am. What small-minded cartoon by Townshend, however long-lived, can obscure such an instant?
Now, as I descend the new Foulon, I resist any temptation to dismantle or deface his cartoons.
I stand on the riverbank, its pack of industrial cranes and containers groaning and crashing between myself and Point-Levis from where my army levelled Quebec to rubble. I walk the edge of the horrendous industrial zone in the traffic-din on the road named after Champlain until I spot the tip of Île d’Orléans, and next to it the white cataract of Montmorency Falls whose waters have been crashing down those rocks incessantly every minute and second over the two and a half centuries since I last saw them. It was a mystery to me as a boy to think how waterfalls did not run out of water: surely they must run dry even if they came from some mountain pond fathoms deep. I used to ask my father about this, but he never answered me directly or satisfactorily, and I don’t think he knew the answer, for he was not a man I could imagine ever, out of mere curiosity, following a mountain stream to its source.
But I have done it.
I followed the waterfall behind our house in Westerham—up its chute and along its thin stream into the hills. The stream widened but not very much, then narrowed to a trickle that ran for miles. I followed it thinking that at any moment it would dip and widen into the lake that must surely be wide and deep. But instead of widening into a lake, my childhood stream thinned to a needle of silver and then, under ferns and peat and shale, disappeared in the ground. I had not known underground springs existed, invisible yet apparently inexhaustible, unnamed and awarded no cr
edit for having fed the waterfalls below.
Now, at the bottom of my Foulon, I am weary. Here is another billboard bearing a caricature of myself: I read a portion of its caption, written to explain my Foulon victory, but can read no more once I ascertain its tone: I won not through any virtue or discipline of mine, but through accident, par hasard—sheer good fortune that overshadowed Montcalm’s misfortune and his abandonment by a France that cared nothing for her colony but left it orphaned, neglected and unprotected, able to be taken by even an ungainly fool such as myself.
Now Quebec sees me as ridiculous and who am I to argue?
How graceful she is, the City of Quebec—like Paris. Its heights and low areas stack atop one another like a city in an intricate dream.
Dear Mother, I want to write—but where have I put my pen and paper?
I want to describe that jet-black bust of Louis XIV in the square, unlike any English monument, hardly a monument at all—more a curl of night-ocean scooped with loving hands and bestowed on the street. You can glide past it as a bird over the wave.
Dear Mother, J’adore all things French!
—
THERE WAS A NIGHT IN New France when I foolishly forgot to guard the distinction between myself as a general and as a man. I let my personal longings get the better of my actions, which is something I hardly ever do. Whenever I do it, I come to regret it bitterly.
It was July 1759, and I couldn’t stand the mosquitoes another second. The bogwater with its carnivorous jug-leafed plants. The stink of my men. The relentless stringy beef, bowel chaos and toe fungus. The cloying incense of Canada’s sticky fir buds. The goad of her white-throated sparrow’s song sharp as spruce pins.
I’d imprisoned the French, not anticipating how inhospitable their land would become without them in it. The lonely quiet became unbearable. There is nothing of comfort to me in a Canadian wood and I cannot live in it. I know this now beyond doubt, and it might be my only certainty regarding my Quebec fantasy. But at that time I was still under the colonizer’s spell.
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