Ram; being the tale of one Ramillies Anstruther, 1704-55 ..
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"Ah, Christ, he's goin' to scalp me!" A private lay a few yards off, one leg doubled under him, his eyes riveted upon the left tree fringe. He began making the Sign of the Gross.
Ram stood up. This was worse than Fort Moosa! Where were the Virginians? He ran toward the man, musket ready. There! A brave appeared in the roadway; Ram's ball pulped his painted face.
Two! Ram felt in a dead man's pouch for more charges. Juan! he kept muttering. He can't have run, he's my son!
"Crawl behind the wagon," he bade the wounded man. "I'll—"
A sledgehammer hit him. Briefly everything went black, but then the sky reappeared above him, fringed by tree tops. He was lying on his back, a numbness in his chest. Raising his head, he saw that his blue coat was stained red.
His arms felt leaden as he strove to open the coat. Must stop the bleeding. Strange, the fight's over . . . there's no more firing.
An ochre-and-black daubed face was above him. He wanted to yell a Creek defiance at it, but he couldn't remember the word.
A tomahawk! He raised his arms to ward off the blow.
The Ojibway stooped and ripped something from Ram's neck, his silver gorget. Screeching, the savage waved it aloft. He bent again. Another tug and he had the chain and the amulet.
Ram tried to taunt him that the thing was worthless, but his mouth was filling with choking fluid.
"Father!" The cry came from a great distance. "Where are you?"
"Here, Juan!" he thought he answered, though he'd made no sound.
How was he to know that once, long, long ago, a redcoat officer had come riding around an overturned vehicle in time to save him from being brained.
The tomahawk rose again. There was a pistol shot and the brave staggered. But sheer momentum had completed his blow.
This time the redcoat rider had arrived too late.
HISTORICAL NOTE ON RAM
France's increasing strength in the half century before this story opei in 1706 had enabled her to displace Spain, her former bitterest enem as the principal European power. France's new position had also rais( up against her a series of alliances, each with the object of frustratii her aggressive plans—for the most part successfully. Self-interest dro^ Britain and Holland to lead these anti-French combinations.
In 1700, Louis XIV, the despotic King of France, seized a testamenta opportunity to place his grandson on the vacant throne of Spain, violation of two general European treaties regulating the future successic to the Spanish throne. France had herself assented to each. In cons quence, Britain and Holland (both at that time joined under a sing constitutional monarch, William, Prince of Orange, who had displacf his father-in-law, James II, on the British throne) alone with Austria ar Portugal, went to war against France in the War of the Spanish Successic (1701-1714).
In the end this war did not remove Louis' grandson from the throne > Spain. The later result, which had been dreaded by the other Europe; powers, a Franco-Spanish alliance, known generally as the Family Cor pact which was to aggravate the intensity of future eighteenth centu wars. The peace settlement, however, redistributed to Austria and to oth Powers European territories that had formerly belonged to the Spani; Crown.
Battles raged throughout Europe from 1701 to 1714, but the princip actions were mostly fought in the Spanish Netherlands (now Belgiun under the command of Winston Churchill's famous ancestor, the Du of Marlborough, ultimately Commander-in-Chief of the whole Alliani after the death of William, Prince of Orange (who had also been Willia III of England, Scotland and Ireland). The battle of Ramillies (170^ was probably, next to his victory at Blenheim in Austria (1704), tl most brilliant of Marlborough's splendid career and resulted in the co quest by the Allies of the Spanish Netherlands, then occupied by tl French.
Neither France nor Britain were, from 1685 on, completely unite
Louis XIV, in forcibly suppressing Protestantism in France, had driven out thousands upon thousands of Protestant Frenchmen, many of whom still served twenty years later as refugees in all the armies arrayed against France. Equally, when the Catholic King, James II, fled from Britain and William of Orange succeeded to the throne at the invitation of Parliament (the Revolution of 1689), William's successful suppression of the uprising of James II's supporters in Ireland drove Irishmen into exile to sen'e in the armies of France and Spain. In many of Marlborough's battles individuals and units found themselves advancing against their fellow countrymen—and enemies—upon the other side. The War of the Spanish Succession was, for many, an ideological war.
Before general peace was established during 1713-1714, the War Party in Britain was overthrown; Marlborough was dismissed and the Peace Party in 1712 withdrew Britain from the struggle. Marlborough's friend and comrade-in-arms, Eugene of Savoy, a French Prince and a relative of Louis XIV who had joined the Austrians to become a Marshal of the Austrian Empire, continued to command what remained of the Alliance until the general peace of 1714. Thereafter Eugene, as Marshal of Austria, fought against the Turks, longstanding allies of France and a perennial menace to Austria and to Hungary. Disbanded professional soldiers from the other armies of the Alliance sought service with Eugene in his eastern campaign which included the capture of Belgrade in 1717.
Europe was just beginning in the early eighteenth century to find, because of its far-flung maritime and trading interests, that every war became a global war. The sparks of many conflagrations occurred more often than not on the other side of the world—in India or on the American Continent. Austria, too, had for a time a trading company in India, the Ostend Company (1722-27), and to its military service in the East were recruited officers of many origins who had been under Eugene's command in Europe.
In the years from 1713 to 1763, although hot war sporadically broke out, a cold war of unofficial skirmishes was nearly continuous in the overseas outposts. Private citizens, like Oglethorpe, who felt that the next formal outbreak was imminent, were often concerned, however negligent their own governments, to secure better defensive positions before the next conflagration. And so, Georgia was established in the New World in quite genuine philanthropy by Oglethorpe and others as a refuge to give debtors a new chance. Georgia was, however, also intended, privately by the disbanded and field-service veterans, to prevent the Spaniards in the succeeding war from sweeping northwards through the English provinces on the eastern American seaboard, while the French, now since 1701-14 allies of the Spaniards, closed in upon them from the north and from
the Ohio-Mississippi valleys. From the beginning, Spain attempted to undermine the newly-established English colony in Georgia as part of her cold war manoeuvres. Irish refugee officers, who plotted everywhere for the destruction of England and the restoration of descendants of James II, were equally busily engaged in Spanish espionage and served with distinction in the frontier skirmishes.
An incident in 1754 near what is now Pittsburgh between Virginian militia and the French touched off the French and Indian War, which rapidly expanded into a European and indeed a global struggle. There were initial British reverses such as Braddock's disastrous march on Fort Duquesne (Pittsburg) in 1755. However, by 1763, Fort Duquesne, Louis-burg, Canada, Florida, the French posts in India, French Senegal in Africa, several West Indian Islands, Havana and the Philippines had been taken from the French and Spaniards. Many of these possessions remained in British hands although some were returned at the treaty of peace (1763)—a settlement remarkable for its gentility.
The stage was set for the American Revolution, in which France sought revenge—only herself to be contaminated by the spores of modem revolution.
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