slope, and a musket-ball smacked into the spruce’s trunk and showered his face with splinters, but he was on easier ground now and he yelled at the men following to join him. He could see the enemy now, he could see they were a small group of men wearing black-faced red jackets who were stubbornly retreating across an open patch of ground. “Kill them!” he called to his men, and the muskets of the marines belched smoke and noise, and when the smoke thinned Welch could see he had hurt the enemy. Men were on the ground, but still the rest stood and still they fired back, and Welch heard their officer shout at them. That officer annoyed him. He was a slight and elegant figure in a coat that, even in the misted dawn, looked expensively tailored. The buttons glinted gold, there was lace at the officer’s throat, his breeches were snow-white, and his top boots gleamed. A puppy, Welch thought sourly, a sprig of privilege, a target. Welch, in his captivity, had met a handful of supercilious Britons and they had burned a hatred of the breed into his soul. It was such men who had taken Americans to be fools, who had thought they could lord it over a despised breed, and who must now be taught a bloody lesson. “Kill the officer,” he told his men, and the marines’ muskets crashed another volley. Men bit cartridges, skinned their knuckles on the fixed bayonets as they slammed ramrods down barrels, primed locks, shot again, but still the damned puppy lived. He was holding a musket, while his sword, which hung from silver chains, was in its scabbard. He wore a cocked hat, its brim edged with silver, and beneath it his shadowed face looked very young and, Welch thought, arrogant. Goddamned puppy, Welch thought, and the goddamned puppy shouted at his men to fire and the small volley slammed into the marines, then Lieutenant Dennis’s men shot from the north and that outflanking fire drove the puppy and his redcoats further back across the clearing. They left bodies behind, but the arrogant young officer still lived. He stopped his redcoats at the far trees and shouted at them to kill Americans and Welch had taken enough. He drew his heavy cutlass from its plain leather scabbard. The blade felt good in his hand. He saw the redcoats were reloading, tearing at cartridges while their muskets were butt-down on the ground. Another redcoat was struck down, his blood spattering the clean white breeches of the young officer whose men, because they were still reloading, were now defenseless. “Use your bayonets!” Welch shouted, “and charge!”
Welch led the charge across the clearing. He would cut the puppy down. He would slaughter these damned fools, he would take the guns behind them, then lead his green-coated killers along Majabigwaduce’s spine to take the fort. The marines had reached the bluff’s summit and, for Captain John Welch, that meant the battle was won.
* * *
General McLean had convinced himself that the rebel attack would be launched across the neck and so was surprised by the dawn’s assault on the bluff. At first he was pleased with their choice, reckoning that Archibald Campbell’s picquet was heavy enough to inflict real damage on the attackers, but the brevity of the fight told him that Campbell had achieved little. McLean could not see the fighting from Fort George because fog shrouded the ridge, but his ears told him all he needed to know, and his heart sank because he had readied the fort for an attack from the north. Instead the assault would come from the west, and the intensity of the musket-fire told McLean that the attack would come in overwhelming force. The fog was clearing quickly now, coalescing into tendrils of mist that blew like gunsmoke across the stumps of the ridge. Once the rebels gained the bluff’s summit, and McLean’s ears told him that was already happening, and once they reached the edge of the trees on that high western ground, they would see that Fort George was merely a name and not yet a stronghold. It had only two guns facing the bluff, its rampart was a risible obstacle and the abatis was a frail barricade to protect the unfinished work. The rebels would surely capture the fort and Francis McLean regretted that. “The fortunes of war,” he said.
“McLean?” Lieutenant-Colonel Campbell, the commanding officer of the highlanders, asked. Most of Campbell’s regiment, those who were not on the picquet line, now stood behind the rampart. Their two colors were at the center of their line and McLean felt a pang of sadness that those proud flags must become trophies to the rebels. “Did you speak, McLean?” Campbell asked.
“Nothing, Colonel, nothing,” McLean said, staring west through the thinning fog. He crossed the rampart and walked towards the abatis because he wanted to be closer to the fighting. The crackling noise of musketry still rose and fell, sounding like dry thorns burning and snapping. He sent one of his aides to recall Major Dunlop’s picquet, which had been guarding the isthmus, “and tell Major Dunlop I need Lieutenant Caffrae’s company! Quick now!” He leaned on his blackthorn stick and turned to see that Captain Fielding’s men had already moved a twelve-pounder from the fort’s northeastern corner to the northwestern bastion. Good, he thought, but he doubted any effort now would be sufficient. He looked back to the high ground where smoke and fog filtered through the trees, and from where the sound of musketry grew louder again and where the redcoats were appearing at the edge of the far trees. So his picquet, he thought regretfully, had not delayed the enemy long. He saw men fire, he saw a man fall, and then the redcoats were streaming back across the cleared land, running through the raw tree stumps as they fled an enemy whose coats made them invisible among the distant trees. The only evidence of the rebels was the smoke of their muskets, which blossomed and faded on the morning’s light breeze.
There was a small gap in the abatis, left there deliberately so the defenders could negotiate the tangled branches, and the fleeing redcoats filed through that gap where McLean met them. “Form ranks,” he greeted them. Men looked at him with startled expressions. “Form in your companies,” he said. “Sergeant? Dress the ranks!”
The fugitives made three ranks, and behind them, summoned from their picquet duty on the ground overlooking the neck, Major Dunlop and Lieutenant Caffrae’s company arrived. “Wait a moment, Major,” McLean said to Dunlop. “Captain Campbell!” he shouted, indicating with his stick that he meant Archibald Campbell, who had retreated just as precipitously as his men.
Campbell, nervous and lanky, fidgeted in front of McLean. “Sir?”
“You were driven back?” McLean asked.
“There are hundreds of them, sir,” Campbell said, not meeting McLean’s gaze, “hundreds!”
“And where is Lieutenant Moore?”
“Taken, sir,” Campbell said after a pause. His eyes met McLean’s and instantly looked away. “Or worse, sir.”
“Then what is that firing about?” McLean asked.
Campbell turned and stared at the far trees from where musketry still sounded. “I don’t know, sir,” the highlander said miserably.
McLean turned to Major Dunlop. “Quick as you can,” he said, “take Caffrae’s company and advance at the double, see if you can discover young Moore. Don’t tangle with too many rebels, just see if Moore can be found.” Major Dunlop, the temporary commander of the 82nd, was an officer of rare verve and ability and he wasted no time. He shouted orders and his company, with their muskets at the trail, started westwards. It would have been suicide to advance along the cleared spine of the ridge and thus straight towards the rebels who were now gathering at the edge of the trees, so instead the company used the low ground by the harbor where they were concealed by the scatter of houses and by small fields where the maize had grown taller than a man. McLean watched them disappear, heard the fighting continue, and prayed that Moore survived. The general reckoned that young John Moore had promise, but that was not sufficient reason to rescue him, nor was it reason enough that Moore was a friend of the regiment’s patron, the Duke of Hamilton, but rather it was because Moore had been given into McLean’s charge. McLean would not abandon him, nor any other man under his care, and so he had sent Dunlop and the single company into danger. Because it was his duty.
Solomon Lovell landed on the narrow beach an hour after Captain Welch’s marines had spearheaded the American attack. The general arrived with Lieutenant-Colonel Revere and his eighty artillerymen who, today, were armed with muskets and would serve as a reserve force to the nine hundred and fifty men who had already landed, most of whom were now at the top of the bluff. A few had never made it and their bodies lay on the steep slope, while others, the wounded, had been carried back to the beach where Eliphalet Downer, the surgeon general of the Massachusetts Militia, was organizing their treatment and evacuation. Lovell crouched beside a man whose eyes were bandaged. “Soldier?” Lovell said. “This is General Lovell.”
“We beat them, sir.”
“Of course we did! Are you in pain, soldier?”
“I’m blinded, sir,” the man said. A musket-ball had spattered razor-sharp splinters of beechwood into both eyes,
“But you will see your country at liberty,” Lovell said, “I promise.”
“And how do I feed my family?” the man asked. “I’m a farmer!”
“All will be well,” Lovell said and patted the man’s shoulder. “Your country will look after you.” He
