to the line of sloops because, in their new position, the British were trying to blockade a much greater width of water. The transport ship, which was anchored at the southern end of the line, looked much bigger than the three sloops, but Carnes, who had used a telescope to examine the ship in daylight, reckoned it carried only six small cannon. “It looks big and bad,” he said now, watching the enemy ships in the dark, “but it’s feeble.”
“Like the fort,” Lieutenant Dennis put in.
“The fort gets more formidable every day,” Wadsworth said, “which is why we must use haste.” He had been appalled when, at the afternoon’s council of war, General Lovell had toyed with the idea of starving the British out of Fort George. The Council’s sentiment had been against such a plan, swayed by Wadsworth’s insistence that the British would surely be readying a relief force for the besieged garrison, but Lovell, Wadsworth knew, would not give up the idea easily. That made tonight’s action crucial. A clear victory would help persuade Lovell that his troops could outfight the redcoats, and Wadsworth, looking at the marines, had no doubt that they could. The green- coated men looked grim, lean, and frightening as they waited. With such troops, Wadsworth thought, a man might conquer the world.
The militia were not so threatening. Some looked eager, but most appeared frightened and a few were praying on their knees, though Colonel McCobb, his mustache very white against his tanned face, was confident of his men. “They’ll do just fine,” he said to Wadsworth. “How many enemy do you reckon?”
“No more than sixty. At least we couldn’t see more than sixty.”
“We’ll twist their tails right and proper,” McCobb said happily.
Wadsworth clapped his hands to get the militiamen’s attention again. “When I give the word,” he called to the men crouching at the edge of the wood, “we advance in line. We don’t run, we walk! When we get close to the enemy I’ll give the order to charge and then we run straight at their works.” Wadsworth reckoned he sounded confident enough, but it felt unnatural and he was assailed by the thought that he merely playacted at being a soldier. Elizabeth and his children would be sleeping. He drew his sword. “On your feet!” Let the enemy be sleeping too, he thought as he waited for the line to stand. “For America!” he called. “And for liberty, forward!”
And all along the wood’s edge men walked into the moonlight. Wadsworth glanced left and right and was astonished at how visible they were. The silvery light glittered from bayonets and lit the white crossbelts of the marines. The long line was walking raggedly downhill, through pastureland and scattered trees. The enemy was silent. The glow of the campfires marked the battery. The guns there faced the harbor entrance, but how soon could the British turn them to face the approaching patriots? Or were the gunners fast asleep? Wadsworth’s thoughts skittered, and he knew that was caused by nervousness. His belly felt empty and sour. He gripped his sword as he looked up at the fort, which appeared formidable from this lower ground. That is what we should be attacking, Wadsworth thought. Lovell should have every man under his command assaulting the fort, one screaming attack in the dark and the whole business would be over. But instead they were attacking the battery, and perhaps that would hasten the campaign’s end. Once the battery was taken then the Americans could mount their own guns on the harbor’s northern shore and hammer the ships, and once the ships were gone then Lovell would have no excuse not to attack the fort.
Wadsworth leaped a small ditch. He could hear the waves breaking on the shingle to his right. The long line of attackers was very ragged now, and he remembered the children on the common at home and how he had tried to rehearse maneuvering them from column to line. Maybe he should have advanced in column? The gun emplacement was only two hundred yards away now, so it was too late to try and change the formation. James Fletcher walked beside Wadsworth, his musket held in clenched hands. “They’re sleeping, sir,” Fletcher said in a tight voice.
“I hope so,” Wadsworth said.
Then the night exploded.
The first gun was fired from the fort. The flame leaped and curled into the night sky, the lurid flash lighting even the southern shore of the harbor before the powder smoke obscured the fort’s silhouette. The cannon-ball landed somewhere to Wadsworth’s right, bounced and crashed into the meadows behind and then two more guns split the night, and Wadsworth heard himself shouting. “Charge! Charge!”
Ahead of him a flame showed, then he was dazzled as he heard the sound of the gun and the whistle of grape shot. A man screamed. Other men were cheering and running. Wadsworth stumbled over the rough ground. Marines were dark shapes to his left. Another round shot slammed into the turf, bounced, and flew on. A splinter of light came from an enemy musket in the gun emplacement, then another cannon sounded and grape shot seethed around Wadsworth. James Fletcher was with him, but when Wadsworth glanced left and right he saw very few militiamen. Where were they? More muskets shot flame, smoke, and metal from the battery. There were men standing on the rampart, men who vanished behind a rill of smoke as still more muskets punched the night. The marines were ahead of Wadsworth now, running and shouting, and the sailors were coming from the beach and the battery was close now, so close. Wadsworth had no breath to shout, but his attackers needed no orders. The Indians overtook him and a cannon fired from the emplacement and the sound deafened Wadsworth, it punched the air about him, it dizzied him, it wreathed him in the foul egg stench of powder smoke that was thick as fog and he heard the screaming just ahead and the clash of blades, and a shouted order that was abruptly cut off, and then he was at the earthwork and he saw a smoking cannon muzzle just to his right as Fletcher pushed him upwards.
The devil’s work was being done inside the emplacement where marines, Indians, and sailors were slaughtering redcoats. A gun fired from the fort, but the ball went high to splash harmlessly into the harbor. Lieutenant Dennis had stabbed a sword into a British sergeant who was bent over, trapping the steel in his flesh. A marine clubbed the man on the head with a musket butt. The Indians were making a high-pitched shrieking sound as they killed. Wadsworth saw blood bright as a gun-flame spurt from a skull split by a tomahawk. He turned towards a British officer in a red coat whose face was a mask of terror and Wadsworth slashed his sword at the redcoat, the blade hissing in empty air as a marine drove a bayonet deep into the man’s lower belly and ripped the blade upwards, lifting the redcoat off his feet as an Indian chopped a hatchet into the man’s spine. Another redcoat was backing towards the fires, his hands raised, but a marine shot him anyway, then smashed the stock of his musket across the man’s face. The rest of the British were running. They were running! They were vanishing into Jacob Dyce’s cornfield, fleeing uphill towards the fort.
“Take prisoners!” Wadsworth shouted. There was no need for more killing. The gun emplacement was taken and, with a fierce joy, Wadsworth understood that the battery was too low on the shore to be hit by the fort’s guns. Those guns were trying, but the shots were flying just overhead to splash uselessly into the harbor. “Let’s hear your drum now, John Freer!” Wadsworth shouted. “You can sound the drum as loud as you like now!”
But John Freer, aged twelve, had been clubbed to death by a redcoat’s brass-bound musket butt. “Oh dear God,” Wadsworth said, gazing down at the small body. The bloodied skull was black in the moonlight. “I should never have let him come,” he said, and felt a tear in one eye.
“It was that bastard,” a marine said, indicating the twitching body of the redcoat who had tried to surrender and who had been shot before having his face beaten in by the marine. “I saw the bastard hit the lad.” The marine stepped to the fallen redcoat and kicked him in the belly. “You yellow bastard.”
Wadsworth stooped beside Freer and put a finger on the drummer’s neck, but there was no pulse. He looked up at James Fletcher. “Run back to the heights,” he said, “and tell General Lovell we’re in possession of the battery.” He held out a hand to check Fletcher. Wadsworth was gazing east-wards at the British ships. The dark shapes seemed so close now. “Tell the general we need to put our own guns here,” he said. Wadsworth had captured the British guns, but they were smaller than he had expected to find. The twelve-pounder cannons must have been moved back to the fort and replaced with six-pounders. “Tell the general we need a pair of eighteen- pounders,” he said, “and tell him we need them here by dawn.”
“Yes, sir,” Fletcher said, and ran back towards the high ground and Wadsworth, watching him go, saw militiamen scattered on that long slope leading to Dyce’s Head. Too many militiamen. At least half had refused to attack, evidently terrified by the British cannon-fire. Some had kept going and now stood in the battery watching the fifteen prisoners being searched, but most had simply run away and Wadsworth shuddered with anger. The marines, Indians, and sailors had done the night’s work, while most of the minutemen had hung back in fear. John Freer had been braver than all his comrades, and the boy had a crushed skull to prove it.
“Congratulations, sir,” Lieutenant Dennis smiled at Wadsworth.
“You and your marines achieved this,” Wadsworth said, still looking at the militia.
“We beat their marines, sir,” Dennis said cheerfully. The gun emplacement had been protected by Royal Marines. Dennis sensed Wadsworth’s unhappiness and saw where the general was looking. “They’re not soldiers,
