Flashman and Madison's War

by Robert Brightwell

  Soon I was feeling my way across the top of the hill in the darkness. I could hardly see a yard or two in front of me but I could hear a rumble of voices not far away and so headed towards them.

  “God damn it,” I cursed as I barked my shin on a jagged lump of stone sticking up from the ground. Reaching down I realised that it was a tombstone; I was in the graveyard on the hilltop.

  “Who goes there? Friend or foe?” called out a voice ahead, accompanied by the ominous sound of a weapon being cocked.

  “Friend,” I called back shaking my head in bemusement. This challenge worked well in Spain as there were different languages and accents. But here there was very little difference between the accent of the British, Americans or Canadians.

  “Friend to who?” called out the voice suspiciously.

  “King George,” I replied. “It’s Major Flashman.”

  “Flashman,” Fforbes’ voice rang out from the darkness. “What are you doing here? You were supposed to be taking General Riall to Queenston.”

  Walking towards the direction he seemed to be speaking from I replied, “I regret to advise that General Riall has been captured by the enemy. We were ambushed near the crossroads and his wound prevented him from making an escape.” I had been expecting some admonishment at this, but instead of exclamations of dismay there was just silence.

  “Don’t worry, Major,” called out another voice as I approached the huddle of men I could now see in the gloom. “We have lost two of my staff officers who were trying to report on the state of that track too.” I saw a glint of gold braid on the uniform of the speaker and deduced it was General Drummond. The man did not seem at all concerned at losing the second in command, who he had argued heatedly with when he had arrived at Lundy’s Lane.

  “Is the battle over, sir?” I asked.

  “I think so, replied the general. “The first of our reinforcements arrived a while ago and the men cheered them as they joined the line. That has probably deterred the Americans from starting another attack.” The words were barely out of his mouth when there was a shout of alarm to our front, followed by a crackle of small arms fire. “What the devil is that?” shouted Drummond irritably staring forward. He was answered by the rolling discharge of our cannon. It was not the fact that they were firing that answered his enquiry, but what was revealed in the flashes of light from their muzzles. Lines of American troops could be seen charging towards our guns.

  “Good God,” shouted Drummond as he realised that the Americans had not gone away after all. “Forward, drive our line forward to meet them, we cannot lose the guns.” I was just starting to back away into the darkness when his hand shot out and grabbed me by the shoulder. “Flashman, isn’t it.” Without waiting for an answer he yelled at me over the increasing noise of battle, “Go forward with the men in front of us, man.” Then he was yelling at Fforbes to take forward the men on our left while I staggered away cursing my luck. How the devil was I supposed to command a force I could not even see? And I was damned if I was going to put myself at risk when I was so close to going home and seeing my wife and son. “Flashman, hold your men steady to advance with the rest,” shouted Drummond over my shoulder.

  “Yes sir,” I shouted back realising forlornly that I would have to make at least a show of effort or my careful work of earlier in the evening would be undone. Drummond could still countermand my release if he chose.

  I stumbled forward, blundering and cursing over another damn gravestone before a voice called out from just yards away, “Over here, sir.”

  “Who are you?” I asked of the looming figure just ahead of me.

  “Sergeant Dawson, second battalion, 89th regiment, sir. The men are just in front of you, sir.” I took two steps forward and nearly walked into one of them. Now I could make out a line of tall men with their shakoes blocking out some of the few stars in the night sky.

  The sound of fighting was still centred on our guns to our left, but I could hear shouts and movement from not too far away in front of us too. “How far ahead are the enemy?” I found myself whispering to the sergeant as though the Americans could be close enough to listen in on our conversation.

  “I don’t know, sir,” Dawson replied

  I looked along the line as I heard a commotion to our left. There was the whinny of a horse and for a second I wondered if the Americans had cavalry, but a series of crashes and curses told me that it was an artillery horse with a limber attached fleeing through our line.

  “Here they come, sir,” shouted out one of the soldiers in front. Without orders, the few soldiers I could see in the gloom were raising their muskets to their shoulders and preparing to fire.

  “Don’t shoot,” called out a voice from not more than ten yards away. “We are gunners, we are on your side,” added another voice.

  “Advance with your hands raised,” shouted the sergeant as he stepped forward to meet three dark shadows that I saw emerging just in front of us. A moment later Dawson called out, “They are British, sir, I can feel the crowns on their buttons.”

  “What the hell, Sergeant, this is madness!” I exploded. “We are not going to get close enough to the enemy to feel their damn buttons.” But before I could say any more I heard Drummond’s voice behind me.

  “Advance, the British line is to advance.”

  The sergeant repeated the order and the line of men in front of me began to move. To our front I heard an order given for other men to halt – it seemed horribly close. I started to follow behind my men. I had to stay close with them but I was sick with fear. I could see no more than a yard or two in any direction, there was sporadic fire from left and right and I knew that the enemy lay in wait, probably just yards away.

  “Take aim,” the voice came again from our front. It was so close that several of my men began to obey before they realised that they were listening to an enemy command. I looked behind us to check we were not silhouetted against the night sky, but it was pitch dark. The Americans would not see us before we could see them, which meant we would literally have to walk right up to the enemy to find them. You must have wandered into an unlit room and had to feel your way around the furniture; imagine walking through an unlit ballroom with a line of infantry waiting at the end to shoot you on sight.

  We had only taken a dozen paces when my nerve failed me. At every step I had stared ahead expecting to see a line of flashes as the Americans fired their volley at what could have been point blank range.

  “Halt,” I shouted. The men in front of me stopped but I had no means of knowing if those further down the line had heard my orders. I put my hand on the shoulder of the soldier in front of me. “Raise your musket and fire straight ahead,” I whispered. “Let’s see if you hit anyone.”

  As the soldier moved to obey the sergeant murmured, “This is irregular, sir, the rest of the line is still marching forwards.”

  “I don’t care,” I started but then I was interrupted by a single shot and a scream of pain that seemed to come from just a few yards in front of us. “Oh God, I thought they will be firing back at any second. “All of the 89th,” I shouted, “take aim…. Fire!”

  The volley crashed out to be met with a chorus of screams and cries of agony from what sounded like a very short distance away. I stared into the darkness trying to gauge how far ahead the enemy were as the musket smoke stung my eyes reducing visibility even further. I could hear the rattle of ramrods along the British line as men fell automatically into the drill of reloading, something that they could all do blindfolded. Surely, I thought, firing first we must have annihilated the men standing against us. At that range nearly every ball would have found a target. But then a voice called out from the darkness in front of me.

  “Steady, my boys, take aim….”

  “Get down!” I shouted and led by example, throwing myself to the ground just before the command to fire was given. God knows how many of the devils there were out there, but suddenly a hail of lead was passing through our ranks.
Judging from the shrieks and yells all about me, many had been slow to react to my command.

  The next few minutes were complete and utter chaos. Volleys disintegrated into independent fire, lines of men became clusters. Through it all was the distant rumble of the falls on the Niagara overlaid with the shouts, screams and yells of the wounded. I stayed pressed into the ground behind a cluster of men that had formed just in front of me. I doubt that they could have seen me and I served no useful purpose standing up, armed with just a sword and pistol.

  Sergeant Dawson kept giving orders to reload but we could hear equally clearly the American sergeant giving identical commands. When Dawson gave the order to fire, more often than not there was a crackle of fire from the enemy too as their soldiers obeyed our sergeant instead of their own. I dare say further down the line, our soldiers were following the drill commands of the Americans.

  It was hard to gauge in the darkness but as I listened to the firing I guessed that the Americans were no more than thirty yards away and probably closer. I could hear British soldiers lying on the ground and groaning right in front of me and they gave me some cover as the Americans were firing up the hill. I kept an ear to the ground, listening for any sign that the Americans were about to charge, but they showed no sign of movement.

  In the end it was the British that withdrew. Bugles sounded and then the call went out. “Retreat to the road but no further.” My men were so keen to get back that two tripped over me before I could get to my feet. I was forced to hurry back up the slope behind them. I literally ran into General Drummond at the summit of the hill as he loomed out of the darkness. He gave a gasp of pain as I blundered into his side and I saw that he had a wound in his neck that was bleeding profusely.

  “Ah, Flashman, isn’t it?” he said squinting at me in the gloom. “Gather your men on the road so that we can reform a straight line and then we will advance again. We must recapture those guns.”

  “Yes sir,” I replied hurrying on to the rough track that made up Lundy’s Lane. I easily found my command in the darkness; there was a babble of voices as men called out for friends and tried to work out who was missing.

  “We have quite a few men missing, sir.” Sergeant Dawson was at my elbow. “Possibly as many as half the company although some of them could be lost in the dark.” He lowered his voice even further and added, “I saw at least two running on into the camp to hide out from the battle in the dark.”

  “Disgraceful,” I agreed, trying to sound scandalised although it seemed like an excellent idea to me. But before I had any opportunity to do the same, bugles were sounding the advance and the sergeant looked expectantly at me to take forward the men.

  Knowing the general was nearby and listening I thought a rousing speech was in order. “Men, this is Major Flashman. We must retake those guns and restore honour to British arms. I know I can rely on the men of the er…”

  “Eighty ninth regiment, sir,” offered Dawson helpfully.

  “Indeed, the eighty ninth,” I continued, “to ensure that our comrades have not fallen in vain. Come on, men, follow me to glory!” With that I waved my sword in the air, an act that could only be seen by the half dozen men around me, and stepped off into the darkness.

  Apart from a sycophantic cheer from the dutiful sergeant and a “Well done, Major” from the unseen general, my efforts received little acclaim from the men. They did, though, move forward, I heard their boot steps marching over the ground either side of me. Those brave men may have been a little less dutiful if they could have seen their commanding officer as he felt his way around the graveyard, hunting for a good place to hide. I found three tombstones all together, presumably a family grave, and ducked down on the enemy side of them, just in time before my men trudged past on either side.

  The stones, crosses and other memorials stuck in the ground every few yards, soon broke up the advance of my men. They started to call out to each other as they lost touch with the men on either side, which gave the Americans plenty of warning of their approach. This time our opponents did not wait to let us fire first. A crackle of fire opened up in front of us as pin pricks of light from muzzle flashes gave away their position. Deadly balls of lead soon buzzed over the graveyard. I moved forward, but only to try to find something substantial to put between me and the enemy fire. The family grave markers had been made of wood, but I knew from walking into some before that there were also ones of stone.

  The man’s name was Elias – I traced that much out with my finger. He must have done well for himself as his family had been able to afford a substantial gravestone. It was at least three inches thick and chest height. I slumped gratefully behind it as I heard the battle rage on around me. I have no idea how close we came to recapturing those guns, all I could see was some three yards around that stone. I crouched there reading the markings on the stone with my fingertips and listening to the shouts and yells from the soldiers. The noise indicated that neither side was pressing forward or giving way. Further down the line, nearer the guns, occasionally there would be crashes of volleys and more noise to indicate that one side or another was attacking, but my men stayed where they were among grave markers and the enemy did the same.

  The battle must have raged for at least another two hours. At one point Drummond tried to reform his line for a third attack but most of my men stayed put. At times it was hard to believe that the battle was real. I am sure that I heard Drummond talking to the regiment to the right of ours, the 103rd, and during a lull in the fighting he asked them if they would charge rather than order them to do so. They turned him down flat too. In the end the battle just gradually stopped, there were no victories or defeats, the crackle of fire just slowly stopped as men were too exhausted to continue. Perhaps some ran out of ammunition or tired of firing blindly into the dark, but gradually an eerie quiet grew over the battlefield.

  I could hear men whispering and moving about near me and we could even hear the Americans talking among themselves and tending to their wounded. Judging it safe, I emerged from behind my stone and moved among the men. I congratulated them for their good work and gave the impression that I had been fighting just a few yards away. Eventually we heard the jingle of equipment and movement from the enemy lines but instead of coming towards us, they were moving away. We listened until there was silence in front of us, broken only by the whimper or cry of a wounded man that had been left behind.

  Then came word that we too were retiring back to our camp. Tired men pulled themselves to their feet and taking their walking wounded with them, they started to make their way back over Lundy’s Lane to the British camp.

  It all seemed surreal, like no other battle I had been in. I stared blindly to where I knew the guns must be. Thousands of men had been fighting and dying to capture those lumps of metal for the last few hours. Now they had been abandoned by both armies and were guarded by just the dead and dying. Suddenly I did not want to blunder around looking for my tent. I went back to where I had spent most of the battle, to lie down on top of Elias. There I stretched out with my hands behind my head, staring up at a handful of stars and listening to the distant rumble of the falls and the occasional shout from the men left behind. I tried to make sense of what it had all been for, but I was damned if I could.

  Epilogue

  Anyone who tells you that they know how the battle of Lundy’s Lane was fought is a damn liar. I was there and I have no idea how half of it went because most of it was fought at night. As I write this memoir Winfield Scott is head of the American army and I got to meet him again a few years back. Naturally we fell to jawing about the war and it was only then that I discovered that part way through the battle he had launched his men towards the British line in a column to punch through our ranks. Until that moment I had thought that the generals on both sides had shown little imagination, relying just on frontal attacks in line.

  When I said this to Winfield Scott he just laughed. “I have not told you what became of my attack yet,”
he replied. Then he proceeded to recount how as they advanced into the centre of the battle, his soldiers were fired on not just by the British but also by American troops who had seen a column of men loom out of the darkness beside them. Despite shouting out their allegiance, Winfield Scott’s troops were caught in a withering crossfire and were eventually forced to withdraw.

  I remember walking across that bloody hillside on the morning after the battle with Black Eagle, who was appalled at the slaughter.

  “You once told me that the Iroquois way of fighting was savage,” he reminded me. “But this is much worse than anything we have done.” As I looked at row upon row of corpses that had been marched towards their enemies at virtually point blank range in the darkness, I struggled to disagree with him. In fact I never saw such short range slaughter like it, not in the peninsula or India, and I say that taking into account that I found myself near a little Belgian village called Waterloo the following year.

  Lundy’s Lane was to be the bloodiest battle of the whole war and for me it seems to summarise the whole conflict: huge numbers of men killed for no good purpose. At the end of the fighting, both sides returned exhausted to the camps in which they had started the battle. In the morning the Americans sent some men to try to carry the guns off, but as they were British guns and nearer the British camp, we had our men there first. The Americans withdrew without any shots fired and then sent men under a flag of truce to help with their wounded.