1812: The Rivers of War

CHAPTER 37

A mile upriver of the Villere plantation, near New Orleans

Colonel William Thornton decided to try one last time.

"I beg you, sir," he said forcefully, "consider that every single piece of evidence leads us to believe that we've caught Jackson completely by surprise." Dramatically, he pointed a finger ahead of them, to the northwest. "The prize is but a few miles away, sir! One vigorous push now, and we can be into the city before Jackson can organize its defense."

General Keane replied with an equally dramatic finger pointed to the rear. Specifically, to the Villere plantation house that was still visible to the southeast.

"Every piece of evidence?" the general demanded. "Hardly that, Colonel! Villere himself escaped from captivity this morning, did he not? By now, he'll surely have brought warning to the enemy."

Thornton silently cursed the fluke of chance that had allowed that to happen. As time went on, Thornton was learning how astute General Ross's assessment of the Americans was-even if that assessment often ran counter to the established wisdom of British officers.

"Don't fool yourselves, gentlemen," Ross had said. "They are our cousins, and lack neither courage nor intelligence. Sluggish one moment, they can be decisive-even daring-the very next. So you will do me the favor of not matching Cousin Jonathan's carelessness with carelessness of your own."

Those words, said in a tone that was unusually harsh for the normally mild-mannered Ross, had sobered his officers. Ross had gone on, in a more congenial manner, to elaborate.

"The key thing is that the Americans are brittle in war. But brittle is not the same thing as soft. Indeed, some of the finest alloys can be quite brittle. The trick is to catch them by surprise-to strike at the haft of the American blade, as it were, and be sure to miss entirely the edge. Because that edge can be very, very sharp, gentlemen. Don't ever forget that."

Very sharp, indeed, as they'd discovered in the failed assault on the Capitol. In truth, Thornton had already discovered that earlier at Bladensburg. "A rout," Bladensburg would be called in the historical records. But the Eighty-fifth had been the unit which encountered the edge in that battle, when Thornton had led his men across the key bridge near Lowndes Hill.

The bridge had still been standing in the first place because of American incompetence. Any professional army would have destroyed it. But, just as Ross had said, having blundered one moment, the Americans had rallied the next. The defense their artillerymen and riflemen had put up for that bridge had been ferocious. Thornton could not remember ever coming under such heavy fire from an enemy, even if it hadn't lasted that long before the Americans broke.

Sharp edge, indeed-but the haft was brittle.

And today, only two days before Christmas, Thornton knew that the British expedition, if it moved quickly and decisively, could strike Jackson's sword before the American general could bring the edge into position. They could snap that brittle blade at the haft.

Wait a day, and the opportunity might be lost.

"No, Colonel," General Keane said, shaking his head. "We'll halt the advance here and bivouac while we wait for the rest of our forces to arrive. By now, Villere will have carried the warning to New Orleans. I am not so reckless as to attempt the city with only a portion of my army, and with my lines of supply stretched as badly as they are."

Nothing for it.

Thornton walked away obediently, almost grinding his teeth. The small mistake of allowing Villere to escape was about to be compounded, he thought, by the huge mistake of allowing Jackson to escape.

Such an odd fellow, Cousin Jonathan, as if two completely different men inhabited the same skin. Up till the moment of his escape, Major Gabriel Villere had been a laughingstock to his British captors. A commanding officer caught on his own porch, smoking a cigar!

Yes, a farce, all very comical-and all very typically American. Amateur soldiers who'd disobey orders in order to safeguard their own property, and lounge about whenever they felt like it.

Even Villere's sudden bolt for freedom when his British guards grew slack had been amusing enough. Especially comical had been the sight of Villere's faithful dog, racing across the yard after its master, barking excitedly.

But Thornton and his men had not laughed some minutes later, when they'd found the dog's body in the swamps. The poor beast's throat had been cut. By Villere himself, obviously. Feckless Cousin Jonathan had been cold-blooded and ruthless enough to kill his own loyal dog, rather than run the risk of having the excited beast give away his location to his pursuers.

Damnation! Colonel Thornton desperately wished that Robert Ross was still leading this army, instead of lying close to death on a ship in Lake Bourgne. Ross would have understood immediately that they had the chance -now, this moment, if they moved- to capture Andrew Jackson on his own figurative porch, smoking a cigar.

But Ross was not in command, alas, Keane was. And while Keane was certainly a courageous enough commander, he was neither an imaginative nor a particularly intelligent one.

If Keane let the American general escape, allowed him that one carelessly unguarded moment…

Villere had cut the throat of a dog. Jackson would cut the throat of an army, if they gave him the time to bring that brittle but very sharp blade into position.

Hiding nearby in a cypress swamp, Major Arsene Latour studied the British positions as Keane's army began its bivouac. Latour and another military engineer, Major Howell Tatum, had left New Orleans that morning. General Jackson had commanded them to scout the terrain in the vicinity of the Villere plantation. Partly, to determine the current position of the British; partly, to assess the possibility of erecting good fieldworks in the area.

Well, they'd done both.

The Mississippi River coursed east by southeast from New Orleans for some fifteen miles before it began the bend that culminated in the English Turn. The English Turn was blocked by Fort St. Leon on the opposite bank-and the fort itself was protected by the cypress swamps that surrounded it. Coming up by the bayous from Lake Bourgne, therefore, the British would have no choice but to follow the east bank of the river, in order to reach the city.

It was a truly terrible route for an invading army. Any part of the area between the Chalmette and Villere plantations would make superb terrain for the Americans, allowing them to erect fortifications to defend the city. There was less than a mile of open ground at any given point, with no easy possibility for the flanking maneuvers a British professional army could manage so much better than Jackson's largely volunteer force.

To the southwest lay the Mississippi, impossible to cross without boats-and Jackson had a small flotilla under Commodore Daniel Patterson to prevent that from happening. To the north and east, at distances varying from half a mile to a mile from the Mississippi, the thick cypress swamps filled most of the land between the river and the lakes. Those swamps weren't exactly impenetrable-Latour knew that Jackson's Indian allies and many of his frontiersmen would manage in them quite handily. But they might as well be, for an army organized and trained to fight great formal pitched battles on the continent of Europe.

Earlier in the day, Latour and Tatum had decided to recommend to Jackson that he make his stand at the Rodriguez Canal, just west of the Chalmette plantation. The terrain there was ideal for a defending force. The cypress swamps encroached more closely upon the river there than elsewhere, choking the passable open ground to a stretch perhaps half a mile wide. Better still, the canal itself could easily and quickly be turned into a moat, with solid fieldworks behind it. The British would need scaling ladders and fascines to surmount such a fortified line-which they'd have to bring with them across a narrow open field after enduring heavy American fire as soon as they came into range.

Almost perfect. On the chance they might find something still better, however, Latour and Tatum had continued on. No sooner had they gotten to the next plantation, De la Ronde's, when they met several people racing westward who told them that the British had already reached the Villere plantation. Had apparently captured Gabriel Villere himself, in fact.

Tatum rushed back to New Orleans to inform the general that the British were much closer than anyone had suspected. Latour, meanwhile, forged on ahead to do a reconnaissance of the enemy forces.

To his surprise-and immense relief-he discovered that the British were preparing to bivouac, despite the fact that it was still early in the afternoon, and they could easily have managed to march the remaining ten miles to New Orleans.

That was a bad mistake on their part, he thought. Neither Jackson nor his troops at New Orleans were at all prepared to fight a battle that day. If the British had pressed on, Wellington's veterans would have had the upper hand, storming into an open city where the largely amateur defenders would have difficulty organizing themselves in the chaos of city streets overrun by panicked civilians.

But… apparently they were going to give Jackson a day to prepare.

The idiots.

A man might as well give a tiger advance notice that he's about to be bagged the next morning.

So be it. Latour would exploit the opportunity to study the British field positions. Unless he was very badly mistaken, Andrew Jackson wasn't going to wait until the morning. This was his jungle, and tigers can prowl at night.

Latour chuckled, as he carefully began jotting down the locations on his notepad. Especially when some of those tigers were Cherokees and Choctaws, who were already beginning their rituals for battle. The two engineers had taken the time that morning before they left the city to watch, fascinated, as the wild savages painted themselves openly on the streets of New Orleans.

Tatum had been goggle-eyed where Latour had not, of course. Latour was a French Creole and, thus, vastly more sophisticated than his companion. The Anglo-Saxon Tatum wasn't much more than a wild savage himself. Latour had learned his engineer and architect's trade at the Paris Academy of Fine Arts. Where had Tatum learned? Who could say. Probably in a rude schoolhouse in some wretched frontier village, made entirely of logs.

Latour shrugged the matter off. The Americans who were now the masters of New Orleans were barbarians, true enough. But at least they weren't Englishmen. Latour continued jotting down his notes. In French, which he'd have to translate for the barbarians later.

By the time Latour got back to New Orleans, it was late in the afternoon. As he'd expected, he found the city in an uproar-but it was the sort of uproar that showed a resolute and energetic commander in charge, not the panic of leaderless soldiers and civilians.

Jackson had made a bad mistake, of course, underestimating the ability of British regulars. But if the tiger had been sleeping carelessly, the beast was wide awake now. Awake-and roaring.

Latour came into Jackson's headquarters, pushing his way past officers rushing in the other direction. No easy task that, the way those officers were moving. Fortunately, Latour was a very big man. Even so, his progress was slow, and he could hear Jackson shrieking long before he caught sight of him.

"I will smash them, so help me God! By the Eternal, they shall not sleep on our soil!"

The general was even blaspheming, something he normally seemed to avoid. The Americans were odd, that way, as one could expect from superstitious primitives. They'd use profanity in a coarse manner no Creole would stoop to-the Anglo-Saxon terms "fuck" and "shit" and "piss" and all the rest rolled off their tongues casually, often enough even in the presence of women. But they used the silliest circumlocutions to refer to God and His works.

Latour could still remember his puzzlement the first time he heard Americans talking about someone named Jesse, and another fellow named Sam Hill. Especially when they often seemed to use the names to refer to locations instead of people. When he'd eventually realized the truth, he'd been astonished. Did the barbarians really think that naming Satan and his domain openly would bring a devil's curse down upon them? That damnation would be avoided by calling it "tarnation"? That the omniscient deity who had created the universe would be fooled if they asked someone named "Gol" to "dern" their enemy-instead of, honestly and forthrightly, asking God to damn them?

Perhaps so. They were Protestants, after all-of one or another of the multitude of creeds that promiscuous heresy generated-and thus lacked the benefit of Latour's sane and rational Catholicism.

Still. At least they weren't Englishmen.

Latour finally pushed his way into the room, bearing his precious notes.

Driscol spotted the Creole engineer the moment he came into Jackson's headquarters. Latour was an impossible man not to notice, between his great size and skin, eyes and hair which were darker than many Indians.

He spotted the notepad clutched in the big engineer's hand an instant later, and smiled thinly. Latour was an obnoxious Creole snob, but he was also very competent at his trade-not that Driscol would use the lowly term "trade" in front of Latour himself. The Creole engineer would immediately shower him with voluble protests, and remind them that he was a graduate of some fancy academy in Paris. As if Driscol cared where a man learned to do anything, so long as he did it well.

That notepad would be full of jottings placing the British positions, unless Driscol was badly mistaken. Written down in Latour's flowery French and fussy handwriting-but dead accurate, nonetheless.

"Well, that's a relief," he commented quietly to Houston, who was standing next to him.

The young colonel spared him a quick glance. He and Driscol were standing in a corner of the room, waiting for their turn for Jackson's instructions. "It's always hard to tell, with that stone face of yours, but I had a feeling you weren't very happy with the situation."

"That's putting it mildly. Two hours ago, I thought we were probably on the verge of disaster."

He didn't add because Jackson blundered badly, out of overconfidence. Something the general has a tendency to do, from what I've seen thus far. Long habit would have kept Driscol from openly criticizing his commanding officer, even to Houston. He certainly wasn't inclined to do so with a commander like Jackson, for whom he had developed an immense respect.

"Disaster?" Houston frowned. "Do you really think it was that close a thing?"

"Oh, aye. If the Sassenach had been smart enough to keep coming. Not even Jackson, for all his ferocity, could have rallied these mostly inexperienced soldiers in a handful of hours. Not well enough to withstand a British assault with no prepared defenses."

He shook his head firmly. "Not a chance. Not when those troops are Wellington's veterans, with decades of war under their belts. I've seen British regulars smashing their way into a city, once the defenses were breeched. The most frightening thing about it was that they maintained their order and discipline even under the conditions of street fighting."

Houston was still frowning. "Really? But what about-"

"Forget Badajoz. That was the exception, not the rule. The reputation they've gotten due to the sack of Badajoz and a few other incidents is misleading. As a rule, even in a sack, British regulars remain professional-and their officers are quick to execute any man who misbehaves."

"Well… That was true in Washington, I agree. After the British left, we found the body of a British soldier. Executed at Cockburn's own order, apparently, from the accounts of an eyewitness. The man had been caught robbing American civilians at gunpoint, while Cockburn had been burning the president's mansion. The admiral had him shot immediately."

"I heard about it. The reason I hate the Sassenach isn't because they're a pack of howling savages. Oh, no. It's because they're such cold-blooded and calculating savages. They'll commit atrocities as bad as any Hun-but they'll do it under orders, given by the haughtiest noblemen in the world."

He had to restrain himself from spitting on the floor. "An army like that will tear apart the amateur defenders of a city, once that city's defenses are breeched. Rip them to shreds. If the British had gotten into New Orleans, Jackson would have been in the position of trying to lead panicked chickens against a pack of very professional weasels."

"Why didn't they, do you think? March into the city, I mean."

Driscol shrugged. "Excessive caution on the part of the commander, I suppose. That'll be Keane, until Pakenham gets here, and he's new to top command."

Jackson's waving hand summoned Houston, at that point. While the colonel hurried over, and before Driscol got his own summons, he had the time to ponder that last statement.

He'd come to regret the thing personally, but…

I'm glad I had Robert Ross ambushed at the Capitol.

The thought of Robert Ross being still in charge was too grim to contemplate, so Driscol left it aside. What mattered was that Ross was not commanding the army that was advancing upon New Orleans. He was probably on a ship crossing the Atlantic back to Britain, by now.

Driscol had gotten a letter from the general, telling him that he'd been exchanged and would be released soon, and that he thought his shoulder had mended well enough to allow him to travel. The letter hadn't finally caught up with Driscol until he'd reached New Orleans, so the information was weeks out of date. The workings of the American postal service could be peculiar, but it was usually persistent.

More peculiar, however, had been the fact that it wasn't until the day after he'd read the letter that it had occured to Driscol that his reaction itself was the most disconcerting thing of all. Patrick Driscol, from County Antrim, had smiled with pleasure as he learned of a British general's continuing recovery, from a terrible wound Driscol had inflicted upon him with murderous intent.

Ah, well. Driscol's found himself not worrying about it, because his soul seemed to have grown considerably lighter these past months. He could still summon the troll, whenever he needed it, but he found himself nowadays spending less and less of his time in that dark monster's lair.

That was Tiana's doing, mostly. The girl respected the troll, but had no liking for the creature. Still, Driscol would admit-even to himself-that the British general had something to do with it, too.

A man could surely spend half a lifetime slaying Sassenach, and spend it well. But when that lifetime, he finally realizes, constitutes but thirty-two years, he has to ask himself whether the same righteous work can fill three-fourths of a lifetime. Possibly even four-fifths, given Driscol's iron constitution.

For Patrick Driscol, at least, the answer was coming to be no. Amazingly enough, the soldier from County Antrim was growing weary of the killing trade.

Of course, there'd still be some fine moments, before he retired, with a commander like Andrew Jackson.

The same impatiently waving hand summoned Driscol. In less than a minute, Jackson gave him his orders, tersely and concisely. Then, sent him on his way.

As he headed out the door, Driscol heard Jackson erupting again.

"I will smash them, so help me God! By the Eternal, they shall not sleep on our soil!"

By Driscol's reckoning, that was the eleventh time Jackson had shrieked those same two sentences that afternoon. It would have all been quite comical, except that the time between the histrionic shrieks Jackson had spent issuing a blizzard of orders to his subordinates. Every single one of which had been coherent, logical, intelligent-and had, as their sole invariant purpose, smashing the enemy and driving him from American soil.

TheRiversofWar