1812: The Rivers of War

CHAPTER 46

The American lieutenant died at his post, after firing a last round of canister from his twelve-pounder that killed three British soldiers and wounded several more. In their fury, no fewer than four of Thornton's soldiers bayoneted the man repeatedly after they reached him, practically ripping his body into shreds.

Gasping for breath, Thornton looked down at the corpse. The lieutenant still gripped the smoldering fuse in his hand.

Sometime later, Thornton knew, he'd feel admiration for the man. The unknown lieutenant had just added to the splendid reputation which the little U.S. Navy had gotten in the course of the war. But at the moment, he felt more like stabbing the corpse himself, with his saber. That battery had hammered the Eighty-fifth worse than Thornton had expected.

After a few more breaths, Thornton regained his wind. Amazingly enough, in that last charge, he hadn't himself suffered as much as a scratch, even though he'd been in the lead much of the way.

But what next?

A round from the battery still firing on the American right killed another British soldier and scattered his squad, right in front of Thornton's eyes. Damnation! Against all logic and reason, that bloody unit was still in place and still firing its cannons with the same rate and accuracy that had ripped the Eighty-fifth throughout the charge. The rest of the American line had peeled away and raced to the rear, even before the assault overwhelmed the artillerymen on the riverbank. But the other battery hadn't so much as flinched.

So much for logic and reason. As often, applied to military affairs, they'd proved to be treacherous beasts.

Quickly, Thornton considered his options. None of them were good.

"Shall we charge them, sir?" asked Lieutenant Colonel Gubbins, Thornton's immediate subordinate, nodding toward the American battery a few hundred yards away.

Thornton thought about it-quickly, because the battery was continuing to fire on them. Now that the Eighty-fifth had reached the redoubt on the riverbank, the men were somewhat sheltered. But not enough, and certainly not against fire that accurate.

Standard procedure would have been to silence the battery before pressing onward. No commander wanted to leave an enemy bastion threatening his rear. But Thornton decided to risk it. He had to take the main American battery, farther to the north, with its big cannons. And he had to do it quickly.

"No, we'll keep pressing on. However good that new American unit has proven to be, I don't think its commander will risk a sortie against our troops on the open field. And if he does, we'll turn and crush him."

Gubbins scanned the area, then nodded. "Soon enough, too, we'll be out of their range. Out of sight, for that matter, once the column moves a few hundred yards off."

Thornton saw that Gubbins was right, and his grim expression lightened considerably.

The American commander had established his line at a place where the cypress swamps were fairly distant-exactly the opposite of what Jackson had done across the river. Just a few hundred yards north, the swamps closed in again, leaving an open area not more than two or three hundred yards wide between the cypress and the waterway. Once the British column reached that narrow neck, they'd be out of sight of the American battery altogether.

"Do you want to leave a detachment behind, sir?" Gubbins asked.

"Yes. They'll serve to guide the Forty-third and the West Indians, once they arrive." Thornton looked over the guns they'd seized from the naval detachment. One twelve-pounder and two six-pounders, neither of which the Americans had found time to spike. For a moment, he was sorely tempted to take the cannons with him. But they wouldn't be enough to affect whatever battle started across the river on Chalmette field; and, in the meantime, the detachment he left behind would need those guns to defend themselves against the American battery that was still in place.

"Leave as small a detachment as we can manage, but not so small that they might be overrun by those bloody bastards over there. Make sure they've enough experienced men to handle the guns we leave behind, as well."

Gubbins moved off. Thornton began organizing his regiment to make a rapid movement out of the shelter of the redoubt. Such as it was.

"Give it to 'em, boys!" hollered Ball. "Any crew slacks off I'll have their legs in with the rest of the shrimp in Marie's pot!" Brandishing a cutlass, he glared at the crew of the twelve-pounder. "Don't you be grinning at me, Corporal Jones! Those long legs of yours'll fit, too! That voudou queen got the biggest cook pot in New Orleans!"

Ball was demonstrating that his superb performance at the Capitol had been no fluke. He had as much of a knack for handling novice recruits as he did the veterans he'd had with him in Washington.

Better still, Driscol knew, the men themselves were blooded now-and in the best possible manner. Bloodlessly, for them. They'd been able to prove to themselves that they could inflict damage on an enemy before that enemy could attack them directly. When and if the British came at them, they'd have confidence that fighting back would make a difference, even in the face of a terrifying bayonet charge.

When, he thought, correcting himself. There'd be no "if" involved.

True enough, from what he could tell the British commander was getting ready to push onward, leaving Driscol and his battalion behind. But it was obvious that they'd faced only a portion of the British forces, thus far, not more than a regiment. There had to be more coming.

The British were pushing this assault far more vigorously-almost recklessly-than they ever would have for a simple diversionary movement. Driscol thought there would be at least another thousand soldiers arriving now on this side of the river. They'd be here soon enough.

In the meantime "Look, Sergeant! The bastards are leaving!" Excitedly, one of the gunners pointed toward the river, where the head of the British column could be seen moving to the northwest. "They're running away!"

Ball was there in an instant, swatting the man. Fortunately, he did it with his bare left hand, not the cutlass. "And what do I care, you stupid curree? Get back to your post! Fire on 'em, boys! Keeping firing, the Lord damn you! I want those bastards bled and gutted every step of the way!"

Splendid, splendid. Driscol wondered if Jackson's quirkiness would extend as far as to allow Driscol to promote Ball to a commissioned rank.

Maybe. You never knew, with Jackson.

After the sound of the guns faded, Robert Ross looked at Tiana, sitting across from him at the table on the square. Her face had remained expressionless, but seemed tighter than before.

He started to open his mouth, prepared to reassure her, but stopped almost at once. He brought the cup of his tea to his lips, to disguise the moment's lapse.

How could he reassure her? Driscol might well be dead by now.

Or not. Battles were unpredictable things. There had been many times in his life when Robert Ross had thought the peculiarly abstract nature of military terminology-those fussy and precise terms like enfilade and all the rest, often enough drawn from a foreign tongue-served the main purpose of shielding soldiers from the raw certainty that battles were nothing but chaos, carnage, ruin, and agony. Battles would be unbearable, faced without that prism to shield the human heart and mind.

"He's dead now, isn't he?" There was no tone at all in Tiana's voice, though the voice itself seemed brittle.

Robert shook his head firmly. "There's no way to know, girl. Trust me about this. There is simply no way to know."

Steadily, like a metronome, Pakenham's fist kept pounding the tree trunk. Very gently, now.

"I wonder if he's being wise, sir," commented Gibbs, watching the British column that was continuing north along the riverbank.

Pakenham shook his head firmly. "We shall not be second-guessing Colonel Thornton, General. He knows he's far behind schedule. No fault of his own, of course. So he's leaving that bastion behind, and going for the critical guns. What other course can he follow?"

Pakenham wondered what he might have chosen to do, in Thornton's place. He didn't wonder more than a moment, though. The very same thing. Err on the side of aggressiveness, if err you must.

"A splendid regimental commander," he pronounced. "I'll see him knighted, so help me God."

Jackson was back at his window, studying the battle through his glass. Once the British column moved past the naval battery they'd overrun, he lowered the glass and shook his head.

"I will be good goddamned," he stated, lapsing into blasphemy. "The niggers held. The only ones that did except the regulars, goddamn all Kentuckians."

He swiveled his head and glared at his aides. "What's the name of Driscol's chief sergeant over there? The black one, I'm talking about-black as the ace of spades. The fellow he brought with him from Washington."

The aides glanced at each other. Reid cleared his throat. "Not sure, sir. 'Ball,' I think."

The glare was joined by a grin that was, if anything, more ferocious still. "Well, he's Lieutenant Ball now. Army regulations be damned, along with the whole state of Kentucky."

Jackson turned back to the open window, leaned out of it, and shook the eyeglass in the direction of New Orleans. "Take that, you trembling bastards! Take that, you craven curs! Rot on your stinking plantations, you treacherous cowards!"

He continued in that enthusiastic vein for a time, becoming more vulgar and profane as he went. Andrew Jackson, in a mood for cursing, was extraordinarily good at it.

When Houston saw the oncoming British column, he skidded to a halt. "Hold up!" he shouted. "Form a line!"

Fortunately, the sailors from Patterson's unit were veterans, so they had the three-pounders in line quickly enough to give the rest of Houston's regiment an anchor point. The three-pounders were positioned directly across the narrow dirt road that led up the riverbank. Houston placed his Baltimore dragoons on either side, and extended the Capitol volunteers in a line stretching toward the nearby swamp.

There was no time to make breastworks, of course. The British weren't more than three hundred yards away by now. But Sam was sure that, firing in a line against a narrow column, his men would at least be able to hold the British for a few minutes.

That left Major Ridge and his two hundred Cherokees.

"Can you get through that cypress?" Sam asked.

Ridge glanced at the swamp. "It'll take a bit of time."

"Sure. I'll give you the time. You get in there and hit them on the flank." He peered into the distance. "There's not more than two hundred yards between the river and the swamp, where I'll stop them."

Ridge left immediately, fading swiftly into the underbrush with his Cherokees in tow. John Ross went with them, without waiting to hear what Sam wanted him to do.

Sam was a little surprised by that. John was normally punctilious about military protocol, even if his own status in the U.S. Army was somewhat anomalous. But, clearly, the young Cherokee captain had decided his identity here was with his own nation.

So be it. Houston wouldn't really have known what to do with him anyway. The situation was about as clear and simple as it could get: the American regiment would start firing on the British once they got within a hundred yards, and keep shooting until it was all over.

"We'll stand here, boys!" he shouted. Belatedly, he remembered his sword. A moment later, he had it waving about. "We'll win here or we'll die here, but whatever else, we shall not retreat! "

The regiment sent up a cheer. A bit too wavering a cheer, to Sam's mind.

"D'you hear me, blast it! We'll stand and win, or stand and die!"

His mind raced through the Iliad, then raced back again to the beginning. Yes, that verse would do nicely.

"Since great Achilles and Atrides strove,

Such was the sov'reign doom, and such the will of Jove!"

Most of the veterans from the Capitol burst into laughter.

"I'm getting a little predictable," Sam muttered.

But…

Being predictable, he decided, was probably a good quality for a military commander. To his men, at least, if not the enemy. And besides, that laughter from the veterans seemed to have braced the morale of the rest even more than the preceding cheer.

He wondered why that should be so, other than the general quirkiness of the human soul. But he didn't wonder for long. The British were coming fast, now. They'd be breaking into a full run any moment. The oncoming rows of bayonets made them seem not so much like an army, but a single beast. A great huge snake, making its strike.

"All right, boys, let's kill that snake!" They were in range now, Sam decided. Certainly for the three-pounders. "Let 'em have it!"

The cannons went off before he finished the sentence. Grapeshot shattered the front lines of the column.

"Let 'em have it, I say!"

The first musket volley was fairly done, if somewhat ragged. But the men shot straight enough, the most of them. And if their ensuing fire was ragged, it didn't slack off. They had the inevitable advantage that a line always has, firing on a column. There wasn't much coming in the way of return fire, to rattle his inexperienced troops.

And-though Sam didn't know it-those first volleys decapitated the snake.

Colonel Thornton's shoulder was shattered by a grapeshot. The blow spun him around. Reeling but still on his feet, his face pale with shock, he stared at Gubbins.

"Keep the men-"

Whatever Thornton's last command might have been went unspoken. A musket ball penetrated the back of his head and blew out his left eye.

Gubbins wiped the gore off his face. "Forward, damn you! Forward,