by James McGee
Not ever, he thought.
Indecision showed on Lawrence’s face. He stared about him wildly as if some clue to their whereabouts might manifest itself.
“I don’t know where they’re being held,” Hawkwood said. “It’s a big camp, the alarm’s sounded and we don’t have time to search the place. I’m sorry.”
Lawrence looked him in the eye, then nodded. “You’re right. Forgive me.”
“Up there! Come on!” Hawkwood, pointed towards the pine trees.
As the guardhouse alarm started up again, followed by a ferocious yell:
“Prisoners escaping! STOP THEM!”
Sergeant Dunbar – doubled over and apparently still suffering the effects of the blow to his stomach – had made it out on to the porch and was running the striker around the inside of the metal triangle. Pointing and gesticulating frantically, he yelled again. “STOP THOSE MEN!”
Hawkwood glanced to one side and saw that the sergeant was gesturing in his direction. Two men had responded to his call for help; one of them carrying a pistol, the other carrying what looked like …
Hawkwood stared.
A pike?
“Should’ve locked the bugger in the cells!” Lawrence swore. “Where are those damned horses? No wait, I see them!”
“Stop them, God damn it!” Sergeant Dunbar had abandoned the alarm and was stumbling after them.
“He’s a game sod, though,” Lawrence muttered. “I’ll give him that!”
“You men! Halt!” The order came from the pikeman who, along with his companion, was running hard now.
The man with the pistol paused and took aim. A crack sounded, accompanied by a bright powder flash. Hawkwood ducked and felt the wind from the ball as it tugged at his collar. There were only the two pursuers, as far as he could see. Three, including the sergeant. Everyone else was mesmerized by the fire.
Lawrence had reached the horses. Untying them, he hooked the musket strap over his shoulder, grabbed the reins of the nearest one and vaulted into the saddle. “Hurry!” he called.
The pikeman had made up ground and drawn ahead of the second trooper. As his attacker ran in, it struck Hawkwood that the pike looked ridiculously long and unwieldy and not the ideal weapon to grab in the heat of the moment. Presumably this was one of Colonel Pike’s men, and he’d been trained to reach for his pike the same way a rifleman was drilled: when reveille or the alarm sounded, it wasn’t your breeches or your boots or even your cock you reached for. It was your “BLOODY RIFLE, you idle bugger!”
That would certainly explain why this particular trooper had on his breeches and his boots and an under-vest, but no shirt or tunic. Not that his attire was of any interest to Hawkwood, who had his hands full trying to avoid being spitted like a hog on boar hunt.
In a three-rank advance and as a defence against cavalry, the pike was moderately effective. But when it came to close combat, if you didn’t incapacitate your target with your first thrust, you might as well be armed with a warming pan. As his enemy rushed at him, pike held in both hands, Hawkwood did the one thing his opponent didn’t expect. He attacked.
The trooper was already committed and it was the pike’s length that was his undoing; that and the fact that Hawkwood had reached the trees. The closeness of the trunks left no space to manoeuvre such a cumbersome weapon. As the pike-head jabbed towards him, Hawkwood darted inside his attacker’s reach, clasped the weapon with two hands – one either side of the trooper’s leading grip – and rotated the shaft downwards, away from his opponent’s hips. Caught off balance, the pikeman’s only recourse was for his left hand to let go, allowing Hawkwood to gain control of the weapon, twist the shaft out of the pikeman’s right hand and drive it back up into the trooper’s throat.
As the pikeman went down, Hawkwood heard Lawrence yell. He turned to see the second man had caught up and was charging in, his pistol raised as a club.
He was less than ten paces away when Hawkwood hurled the pike.
It had been an instinctive act, but the consequences proved catastrophic for his attacker. The length of the pike meant it did not have far to travel. The running man stopped dead, his face frozen into a mask of disbelief as the steel tip sank into his chest. Dropping the pistol, he fell to the ground, hands clasped around the wooden shaft protruding from his body.
There was a scream of rage as Sergeant Dunbar saw his men dealt with so comprehensively. And then Lawrence was there with the horses.
“Move your arse, Captain!”
Grabbing the dead man’s pistol and thrusting it into his coat pocket, Hawkwood threw himself into the saddle.
Behind them, Dunbar, fighting for breath after his exertions, had fallen to his knees.
Lawrence turned as Hawkwood found the stirrups and brought his mount under control. “Which way?”
Hawkwood quickly surveyed the bodies of the two troopers and the dark figures running about the parade ground like demented termites. The cantonment appeared to be in total disarray.
“North. We head north.”
Lawrence grinned. “Excellent! After you!”
“Yes, sir, Major!”
As they dug their heels into the horses’ sides, Hawkwood couldn’t help but grin in return. Relief at having accomplished what he had set out to do was surging through him. And the only cost had been a hat. A more than fair exchange for the freedom of one British officer, in anyone’s book.
Especially as he’d hated wearing the bloody thing anyway.
4
May 1780
From his vantage point at the head of the column, Sir John Johnson turned to view the ranks of uniformed men marching in file behind him. They were a formidable fighting force, as good as any he’d served alongside; tough, fearless and loyal, he was proud of each and every one of them. When the right men fought for a cause, he thought as he gazed at their gritty, determined faces, they were well nigh unstoppable.
It was approaching midday and though the forest canopy provided a welcome shade, it was still oppressively warm. Ignoring the sweat trickling down the inside of his tunic, he addressed the man riding by his side. “How are they faring, Thomas?”
Captain Thomas Scott turned and looked over his shoulder, beyond the first phalanx of troops, to where a string of tired-looking civilians could be seen emerging slowly from around a bend in the trail.
“A few more blisters, a sprained ankle or two; nothing too calamitous.”
“The surgeon’s taken a look?”
Scott turned back. “He has. He tells me we won’t have to put any of them out of their misery just yet.”
“And the prisoners?”
“Cursing your name with every breath, sir.”
Johnson smiled. He’d become used to his second-in-command’s dry sense of humour. Scott, a former lieutenant in the Company of Select Marksmen, had been assigned to the expedition by Governor Haldimand. Even though their time together had been short, the two officers had formed a strong bond.
“Splendid! I’d feel insulted if they weren’t.”
Scott returned the smile, shifted in his saddle and winced. The colonel and he were the only officers on horseback; their mounts had been donated by a Loyalist sympathizer whose farm lay adjacent to the invasion route. Neither of the animals had taken kindly to having a new rider and it showed in their skittishness. To add to his discomfort, Scott, unlike his colonel, was not a natural horseman.
“We’ll take a rest,” Johnson said, reining in. “Thirty minutes. It’ll give the stragglers a chance to catch up. Pass the word. Deploy piquets. The men may smoke if they wish.”
“Yes, sir.” Hoping his relief didn’t show, Scott turned his horse about and trotted back down the column to relay the order.
The colonel rested his hands on the pommel. Taking a deep lungful of air, he let it out slowly and gazed about him, first at the forest and then at the trail running through the trees ahead of them. Though it was referred to as a road, the description was a misnomer. In reali
ty it was no more than a rough dirt track; for the most part wide enough to accommodate a heavy wagon or half a dozen men marching abreast, but here and there, in short stretches where the path had become overgrown, there was hardly room for two men to walk side by side.
Every four or five miles the trail would open on to a clearing where two or more paths converged. Usually, the wider trail was the correct one, but in some instances it was only by referring to the compass that the column had been able to maintain its course. That and by following ancient wheel ruts which, although worn shallow with age and crumbling at the edges, were still visible beneath the layer of pine needles and the animal tracks that decorated the forest floor.
Often, the indentations would give a clue as to who and what might have gone before, with some of the deeper impressions hinting at army ordnance, further proof that the roads were of military manufacture or had been utilized by troops over the years. A quarter of a century before, Johnson’s own father would have made use of such pathways to move soldiers and equipment against the armies of the French general, Montcalm.
The plaintive call of a whip-poor-will rang out from the woods to Johnson’s right. His gaze switched as he attempted to trace the bird’s location, but with the shadows among the trees constantly shifting, it was an impossible task.
As he looked away he caught sight of a broken trunk at the edge of the track. Carved into the bark was a single letter: “H”. It signified “Highway”, a sign that the road had been widened by army engineers. They had passed several similar markers during the time they had been travelling and at each one Johnson had sensed the ghost of his father peering over his shoulder.
The column had come to a halt. Soldiers and civilians alike had taken up temporary residence along the wayside. Canteens had been broached and pipes lit and plumes of tobacco smoke began to drift into the air.
Consigning thoughts of his father to the back of his mind, Johnson walked his horse slowly down the line. From what he could see and from the grins and respectful nods he was getting, all the men appeared to be in good spirits. With just cause, he thought to himself. Having visited the wrath of God upon a succession of rebel homesteads and Continental supply lines, not to mention escaping without suffering a single casualty, a celebratory pipe was the very least they were owed.
The calibre of Johnson’s men was not the only factor in the raid’s success; good intelligence and forward planning had played their part too. The colonel had chosen harvest time to strike because the bulk of the local militia regiments were made up of farmers who would be released from duty to attend their crops at this time of year. Long before the raiders landed at Crown Point they had been confident that their presence would go unhindered.
And so it had proved. As a result, a substantial number of Loyalists had been rescued and prisoners taken without opposition, and a not inconsiderable amount of damage had been inflicted upon an unsuspecting enemy. By his officers’ reckoning, some one hundred and twenty rebel-owned barns, mills and houses had been destroyed on the north side of the Mohawk River, put to the torch by the colonel’s soldiers and their native allies.
Inevitably, blood had been spilled along the way; mostly from livestock, slaughtered during the coordinated attacks, though there had been human fatalities as well. Not that any sleep had been lost over either the cattle or the rebel corpses that had been left on the ground. Every one of them was another nail in Congress’s coffin.
As far as could be calculated, the rebels had suffered between fifteen and twenty dead. Not many, considering the acreage and the number of properties that had been laid to waste. Nevertheless, a sufficient quotient to have sent a resounding message to all concerned.
The majority had not died easily, most notably those who’d fallen victim to patrols that had included Mohawks. Despite Johnson’s orders, there had been at least half a dozen scalpings, with the mutilated bodies left in full view so as to spread terror among the enemy; the argument being that it was time they had a taste of what it was like to suffer intimidation and the destruction of livelihood.
Disciplinary action had not been taken against those who had carried out the mutilations; nor would it be. Johnson was aware, as were his superiors, that the support of the Six Nations was vital if the Crown forces were to have any chance of defeating the Continental army. To chastise warriors too harshly for engaging in what they considered to be a legitimate form of warfare would be to risk breaking the alliance, and that could not be allowed to happen.
For their part, those tribes of the Six Nations that had allied themselves to the Crown had done so not because they were fiercely loyal to a distant monarch but for more prosaic reasons. Chief among these was Britain’s promise to support the Iroquois in their battle to prevent American seizure of their tribal lands.
There were other inducements on offer; plunder being high on the list. By far the most persuasive, however, was the opportunity it gave the tribes to wreak bloody revenge upon the Yan-kees. The previous year, under the personal orders of General George Washington, Continental troops had launched a massive raid against the Iroquois’ homeland, in reprisal for joint Indian and Loyalist attacks along the Pennsylvanian and New York frontier. More than forty Iroquois villages had been brutally destroyed. The Iroquois might have had only a nodding acquaintance with the scriptures but they were perfectly familiar with the concept of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.
Which was why, Johnson knew, that pursuit in one form or another was inevitable. Had the roles been reversed, no power on earth would have prevented him from tracking down the men who had visited such devastation upon his valley.
As a further precaution, therefore, he had split his force. Following his earlier orders, an advance party – one company of Royal Yorkers and the warriors from the Lake of the Two Mountains – had been dispatched to Bulwagga Bay at Crown Point to secure the embarkation site. With half the irregulars and the remaining Mohawks assigned as scouts and outriders, that had left the rest of the irregulars and Yorkers, along with the men of the 29th, 34th and 53rd Regiments, to protect the column.
As yet, there had been no noticeable signs of pursuit. The scouts who had reported in had noted some enemy activity to the south, but Johnson’s men far outnumbered any mustered force that was likely to be sent after them. For the moment, therefore, the column was safe, but that didn’t mean there was room for complacency. Until they boarded the Marine vessels, they would remain at risk.
It was curious, he noted as he made his way down the line, how, after four days on the road, convention within the civilian ranks was being stripped away. With everyone united in flight from a common enemy, the gap between the privileged and the not-so-privileged, that had been so marked before the evacuation had become less defined. The sobering realization that each and every one of them, irrespective of status, was now subject to the same privations – fatigue, hunger, the risk of injury and lack of privacy – had begun to peel back the layers like skin from an onion.
Adversity, the colonel mused, always was the great leveller.
That said, it was clear from the way they were carrying themselves that some civilians were feeling the strain of the trek more than others, which was only to be expected. The colonel knew he’d been pressing them all hard, without fear or favour, and had no qualms about doing so. He’d warned them that was how it was going to be; how it had to be if they were to survive.
The hardier souls were those whose forefathers had cleared the land, built their farms and cultivated the soil. They had found little difficulty in coping with the hazards of the march, secure in the knowledge that every mile traversed brought them ever closer to the rendezvous point and the boats that were waiting to transport them to freedom.
The ones showing less fortitude were those from the more prosperous families; estate owners who’d never needed to swing an axe or push a plough along a muddy furrow. They had workers and slaves to perform those tasks for them. A handful had been heard grumb
ling at the pace at which they were being shepherded, or, as some put it, herded along.
Not that comfort had ever been a consideration. The day was taken up with marching. With the exception of intermittent rest stops, only at dusk would a complete halt be called, at which point lean-to shelters would be constructed for the women and children and boughs cut for bedding. After snatching a meal and a few hours’ sleep the fugitives would rise an hour before first light to dismantle the camp and pick up where they had left off.
The colonel had anticipated a degree of protest, knowing it would be an inevitable consequence of the requirement to put as much distance as possible between the column and its pursuers. And if that meant that some of them had to suffer sore feet and bloody blisters, then so be it. The alternative would be far worse.
Of all of them, it was the children, curiously, who’d proved to be the most adaptable. There were no babes in arms, a fact for which Johnson was exceedingly grateful, and to the dozen or so youngsters who were on the trail – the youngest being eight, the oldest fourteen – it had become a thrilling escapade; keeping pace with the soldiers, listening wide-eyed to their tall stories and their coarse banter, and camping out with them in the woods beneath the stars.
Just as uncomplaining were the Negro servants. Indentured into a life of domestic servitude and therefore no strangers to hardship, they had proved themselves resilient travellers, stoically accepting the rigours of the journey as a price worth paying for their escorted passage north.
The column, now comprising some three hundred troops, nearly two hundred assorted civilians and more than sixty pack animals, stretched for several hundred yards. As he rode the line, the colonel offered another silent prayer to the men who’d carved out the road. Had it not been there, it would have been impossible for the fugitives to have cut their own path through the woods and maintain the pace, though in this part of the state any witnesses to their presence were more likely to be of the four- rather than the two-legged variety. The mountainous hinterland that stretched between the Hudson and the Great Lakes could not be termed virgin territory, as indicated by the trail they were currently following, but, save for the military and fur trappers, few white men had ventured beyond the forest’s eastern rim.