A Passionate Girl

by Thomas Fleming

  “What new captain of what Michigan?” Mike asked.

  “The revenue cutter Michigan. Come down from Erie last night. They took the captain off her last week. A good Irish-American named Malone. Put an Englishman in command. Captain Bryson. Should hear the bugger talk. Straight from St. James, so help me.”

  We rode back to the hotel in a state of shock. “An Englishman,” I said. “Why didn’t someone tell us?”

  “The Buffalonians think all can be managed by local politics. They don’t know the stakes,” Mike said.

  “I’ll put it in my dispatch,” said Pickens. “It may help if they print it.”

  There was no sleep that night. The next morning, feeling more dead than alive, I opened the press office and released to the newspapers the proclamation to the Canadian people. It was written by William Roberts in his most oratorical style. The main points of our policy were clear enough within the soaring rhetoric. We tried to assure the Canadians that we were not trying to steal their country. “Our work for Ireland accomplished, we leave to your own free ballots to determine your natural and political standing.” But we intimated strongly that we were anxious to “make these limitless colonies spring from the foot of a foreign throne, independent and as proud as New York, Massachusetts, and Illinois.”

  The heart of the proclamation and the heart of our hopes was the appeal to the Irish within Canada.

  To Irishmen throughout these provinces we appeal in the name of seven centuries of British iniquity and Irish misery and suffering, in the name of our murdered sires, our desolate homes, our desecrated altars, our millions of famine graves, our insulted name and race, to stretch forth the hand of brotherhood in the holy cause of fatherland and smite the tyrant where we can in his work of murdering our nation and exterminating our people. I conjure you, our countrymen who from misfortunes inflicted by the very tyranny you are serving or for any other reason have been forced to enter the ranks of the enemy, not to be an instrument of your country’s death or degradation. If Ireland still speaks to you in the truest impulses of your hearts, Irishmen, obey her voice. No uniform, surely not the blood-dyed coat of England, can emancipate you from the natural law that binds you to Ireland, to liberty, to right, to justice. Friends of Ireland, of humanity, we offer you the olive branch of peace, the grasp of friendship. Take it, Irishmen, Frenchmen, Americans, take it and trust it.

  The thought that those noble words, all that passion and hope, might be wasted made me heartsick. It could not happen! By pure force, I willed myself to believe in victory. That made it no easier to endure the press office, the stupid questions of smirking reporters like Colby.

  “How many leprechauns did you bring with you?”

  “What will the boyos do for whiskey over there?

  “When was the last time the Irish won a battle—the year 1200?”

  “Go to hell, the lot of you,” I said, and left them there drinking our whiskey. I rushed to my room, put on an old worn traveling dress, and took a hack to Black Rock. There I found Red Mike Hanrahan, Patrick O’Day, and other Buffalo Fenians before the wharf from which the army had departed the night before. It was, I saw by daylight, the dock for a steam ferry, which ran from the village of Black Rock to the village of Fort Erie, directly opposite it on the Canadian shore. The ferry was at the dock as I joined Mike. Just offshore, at anchor, was another vessel, flying the American flag. It was a small, squat craft with a single smokestack and sidewheels. Ugly black cannon peered from gunports on the side. It was close enough to read its name on the bow: U.S.S. Michigan.

  All but knowing the worst before I asked the question, I rushed to Mike. “Have they cut us off?”

  “From here,” he said grimly. “But we have hopes of getting something across from other points. They can’t cover the whole river with that pipsqueak boat. There’s a lower ferry where people cross by rowboat. We’ve sent over a good hundred men that way.”

  “When you need two thousand. Where are our tugs?”

  He pointed down the river. “At Pratt’s Wharf. Watch now. We’ll see what our lime-juicer captain does.”

  Following his finger; I saw the tugs, with wisps of steam coming from their stacks, beside this wharf, a half mile down the river. The four canal boats were beside them. Suddenly one of the tugs swung into the river and men appeared on the lead canal boat to heave a fat tow-line to seamen on the stern of the tug. Two canal boats left the dock and followed the tug toward the Canadian side.

  A tremendous shriek burst from the Michigan’s stack. Seamen raced along its decks to haul in the anchor. The Fenian tug ignored the warning and continued to plow straight for the opposite shore. “Are there men aboard them?” I asked.

  “No. Just ammunition and food. The farmers have stripped the countryside of their cattle for miles around,” Mike said.

  “Where are the reinforcements?”

  “In the fields behind the village,” Mike said, gesturing to the houses of Black Rock.

  Premonitions of disaster began to grow strong in me again. “Has Margaret O’Neil gone over there yet?”

  “No. John sent word forbidding it. But there’s two doctors going on this ferry.”

  “I’m going with them,” I said.

  “Why, for God’s sake?”

  “If they’re going to die over there, I want to die with them. With Dan.”

  “Jesus God.” Mike turned away from me and walked ten steps and back again. “Do you want to break my heart entirely?” he said, wiping his eyes.

  The Michigan’s anchor was up. Its sidewheels thrashed the river furiously as it headed downstream after the Fenian tug and her two barges. It was clear that the tug would be more than halfway over before the Michigan got close to her. Bells clanged aboard the revenue cutter, and her forward progress came to an abrupt halt. The captain had changed his mind.

  “There’s some tricky shoals on that side of the river,” Mike said. “He doesn’t have a pilot on board. Couldn’t hire one in the whole damned harbor. The Buffalonians have done what they could to help us. The ferry captain, for instance. Not a drop of Irish blood in him, but he said he’ll take as many of us over without guns as he can manage with them looking down his throat. Says he wants to teach the Canadians a lesson in patriotism.”

  The Michigan drifted with the swift current for a few minutes as the captain thought things over. Then he gave two hoots of his whistle and headed up the river toward Buffalo. In a moment we saw why. Forging toward him were three tugs, each flying the American flag. In a few minutes they clustered around the Michigan in the center of the river, and we could see sailors from the cutter boarding the tugs. Next, gleaming brass cannon were set up on the bow of each tug. In ten minutes the tugs were ready to operate as men-of-war. The U.S. government now had a flotilla to patrol the river.

  The steam ferry at the dock gave a warning hoot. Blind fatality consumed me. I ran for it. I had sent Dan, I had sent them all, into this monstrous trap. I would fight and die beside them. Behind me I heard Mike cry, “Bess—don’t.” I stepped aboard the ferry as it left the dock.

  In the cabin I found four or five reporters and two serious-looking men carrying black bags. “You must be the doctors,” I said, and introduced myself to them. The older of the two, a tall, dignified man with a short black beard, was Edward Donnelly. The shorter man, who had dark red hair and a rakish, reckless smile, was Thomas Gallaher.

  “I hope I might be of some help as a nurse,” I said.

  “A girl as pretty as you? said Dr. Gallaher. “I’ll be sawing off the wrong leg half the time.”

  “We may need all the help we can find,” said Dr. Donnelly, who I saw was as solemn as Dr. Gallaher was wild.

  “My fellow sawbones here was in the war. The heroes in his regiment let him get captured, and he did a tour in Richmond’s Libby Prison,” Dr. Gallaher said. “I was too busy making money in Brooklyn. I didn’t have that much enthusiasm for sewing up abolitionists, anyway.”

  “What attract
ed you to the Fenians?” I asked. “It can’t be making money.”

  “Pure impulse. I went to headquarters and volunteered when I heard about the invasion. Every man must do something idealistic at least once in his life. It’s good for the digestion. My father starved to death in the famine of ’47, but that has nothing to do with why I’m here.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Hungering for revenge is bad for the digestion. Taking it when it comes your way is best, I assure you.”

  He began discoursing on his philosophy of life. He did not believe in God, Jesus, the Virgin, or the Blessed Trinity. He was a man of science. He had his own blessed trinity—pain, pleasure, and digestion. It was necessary for a thinking man to maintain a proper balance between pain and pleasure and do nothing that might disturb his digestion. Once that was disturbed, he became morbid and lost his ability to balance pain and pleasure in nice proportion.

  “At least the weather is in our favor,” Dr. Donnelly said, looking out at the sunny river. “This reminds me of the day before Antietam.”

  “Wasn’t that the bloodiest battle of the war?” I asked.

  “Oh, some say so,” Dr. Gallaher said. “There were more killed at Gettysburg but more engaged. More wounded at Chickamauga and fewer killed. It’s the sort of thing people love to argue about. The world’s mad, don’t you know that?”

  “I’m beginning to think so,” I said.

  “It’s got to be. Here I am, sailing into the cannon’s mouth, talking to a pretty woman about the statistics of death, on my way to saw off mangled legs and arms, which she’s volunteered to dispose—”

  “Please,” I said, and bolted away from him, out on the open deck. I was trembling and half sick at the images and thoughts he had thrust in my face. Dr. Gallaher followed me.

  “Never been a nurse before, have you?”

  I shook my head.

  “There’s someone over there you love.”

  I nodded.

  “Damnation. I always meet a girl like you five minutes after she’s gone head and heels in love with someone else.”

  “Get on with you,” I said. “You’re just trying to make me feel better.”

  “And what’s wrong with that? Isn’t it a doctor’s job?”

  I gazed out at the Canadian shore, which was fast approaching. It looked utterly peaceful. Well-tilled fields and white farmhouses and groves of trees filled the landscape west of the village of Fort Erie. The village consisted of about a hundred frame houses, most of them facing the river on the west side of the road that paralleled the shore. A half dozen streets ran down at right angles to the main street. Behind the village rose a clay bluff about forty feet in height with a fine brick house on it. On the north side of the village, a railway embankment extended along the river for about a half mile. Railyards and a round house lay nearby. At the water’s edge was a dock, where a huge ferry, capable of carrying twenty railroad cars at a time, was moored.

  “We were supposed to have the use of that,” said Dr. Donnelly, joining us at the rail and pointing to the railroad ferry. “It could have put the whole army over in two trips. But they tied it up and shut down the boilers yesterday at sundown. Someone over there knew something.”

  I began to wonder if we had been teased into a trap, like so many mice. What better way to ruin the Fenians than to lure a detachment of them to Canada, slaughter them, and then laugh the rest of them out of existence?

  The ferry thumped against the wharf, and we debarked. The first man I saw was my young red-headed friend, Captain Hennessy. He was in command of a detachment of men guarding the riverfront. “General” O’Neil, as Hennessy called him, and the rest of the army were at a farm west of the village. “When are the rest of the lads coming over?” he asked.

  “Soon,” I said, and left them hastily before they could ask more questions.

  Twenty minutes of hard walking carried us to the farm, which was owned by a justice of the peace named Newbigging. The men were camped in the fields around the neat white house. Inside we found Dan and John O’Neil and the colonels of the other regiments studying maps spread on the dining room table.

  Dan was aghast at the sight of me. “What in hell are you doin’ here?” he growled.

  “I came with the doctors, to be of some service.”

  “You’re goin’ right back,” he said.

  “That will take some doing,” I said. “It’s a long walk to that ferry, and you’ll have to carry me every inch.”

  “As a physician, I would advise against such strenuous exercise on a hot day in June,” Tom Gallaher said.

  “Didn’t you know I forbade Margaret to come?” John O’Neil said.

  “No,” I said. “I’m also here to tell you the bad news. The river is shut tight.”

  I described the tugs being manned by seamen from the Michigan. Their faces fell. They forgot about sending me back. Dan strode up and down, cursing under his breath for a full minute. The colonels looked equally undone.

  “We must do something with the men we have,” John O’Neil said. “Let’s consider our best move.”

  He called them back to a study of the map. “There’s one enemy column moving up from Port Colborne,” he said, pointing to that city on the shore of Lake Erie. “And another moving up from Chippewa on our other flank. The maxim for us is to fight them separately before they can meet and overwhelm us with sheer numbers.”

  “Colborne is the lighter column, and they don’t have artillery,” Dan said.

  “Let that be our first opponent,” O’Neil said.

  In that moment, I glimpsed the inner secret of the art of war, the steady calm of a born soldier. Panic and hysteria ebbed from me, and from everyone else in the room. No matter what else happened, with John O’Neil in command our expedition would not end in shameful surrender.

  He turned to the doctors and me. “Where will you set up your hospital?” he asked.

  “I would prefer to use a building in town, near the ferry,” Dr. Donnelly said. “Perhaps the post office. I paid a visit to Fort Erie last week and made a pretty careful survey of the place.”

  “Fine,” O’Neil said. He scribbled an order to Captain Hennessy, instructing him to detach a dozen men to help Donnelly set up an operating room and commandeer cots and mattresses from nearby houses.

  “Have any of our medical supplies gotten over?” Dr. Donnelly asked.

  O’Neil sent for another officer, Major John Canty, a fat, perspiring man. Canty shook his head. “Not so much as a swallow of opium,” he said.

  “We’ll imitate your example, General,” Dr. Donnelly said, “and do the best with what we have.”

  “Good. Say nothing about the river being closed. It might panic the men.”

  We nodded our acquiescence and returned to town, where Captain Hennessy quickly obeyed O’Neil’s order. We soon had a half dozen strapping fellows clearing counters and tables from the post office. Another set went with me along the main street in search of bedding and sheets for bandages. The items were usually surrendered without opposition, although glares of enmity often accompanied the process. The size of my escorts and the guns in their hands were very conducive to cooperation. Only at one house—where I least expected it—did I get backtalk.

  Fat, red-faced Teresa O’Brien, wife of James O’Brien, according to the name on the door, exploded when I asked her to surrender her mattresses and sheets. “Isn’t it enough that you’ve taken me husband prisoner to hunt up food for yez, now y’want me furniture?” she bawled.

  “It’s for the cause of Ireland and to ease the suffering of wounded men,” I said.

  “You’re daft, the whole lot of you,” she yelled. “Ireland’s three thousand miles away across the ocean. We’ve left the whole bloody mess behind us with the help of God, and now you’ve brought it to our very door. You’ll ruin us all. When the regulars are finished thrashin’ yez they’ll hang poor Jimmy, and him the father of two babes.”

  She slammed th
e door in our faces. The men were for smashing in and taking what we pleased, but I decided to let her go unpunished. Though I said nothing to the men, and scarcely admitted it to myself then, there was truth in her bawling.

  The doctors and I dined that night in the house of the mayor of Fort Erie, Dr. Kempson. He and Dr. Donnelly were well acquainted. They discussed the pros and cons of our expedition with the polite demeanor of professional men. Dr. Kempson maintained that our foray made no sense, because Canada was only nominally part of England. It was as much a separate country as America; British rule was more theoretical than actual. Because men had been wronged in their own country by a powerful enemy, it gave them no right in invade a third country, which had had nothing to do with inflicting the wrongs. Dr. Donnelly maintained that Canada was as much a part of England as Scotland and Wales, and we had every right to be where we were.

  After supper, I walked out to Newbigging’s farm to see Dan. I wanted to put my arms around him at least, before tomorrow’s day of battle dawned. But I was dismayed to discover that the fields where the Fenians had been so numerous were empty. The army had already begun its march toward Port Colborne. John O’Neil had decided it was wiser to go part of the way in the coolness of the night, rather than in the morning heat. Only Lieutenant Colonel Bailey of the Buffalo regiment and about fifty men were still there. They were engaged in a sad business. They were taking the surplus rifles—a thousand of them—from wagons and smashing them against the trees. The men had deadly faces. They knew what it meant—there was no hope of reinforcements. John O’Neil had ordered them to do the destruction after the army left, to keep the secret.

  I watched, heartsick, until the last gun was flung to the ground, its stock splintered, its barrel bent. Bailey took a letter from his inner pocket. “I was going to leave this with Mr. Newbigging, but he’s no friend of our cause. It has some sentiments in it that might be misinterpreted. Give it to my wife, if it comes to the worst for me.”