Eureka - The Unfinished Revolution (67 page)

Pre-dawn, Sunday, 3 December, the Redcoats close in

Carefully now in that early pre-dawn where they are less men than ghostly spectres – their red jackets making little impact on the all-enveloping blackness that is just starting to lift – Thomas keeps his forces moving down into the gully and eastwards for some fifteen minutes along the northern banks of Yarrowee Creek. Then, on Amos’s signal, at a point a little less than one mile north-west of the Stockade, they cross the creek and head due south. The going is not easy, particularly for the foot soldiers carrying their heavy muskets over their shoulders and watching every step carefully in the dark,
but . . .
theirs is not to reason why.
In the thin, frozen moonlight, every breath from the horses’ nostrils and mouths instantly condenses into a smoky mist.

They navigate their way by moonlight through a landscape shorn of all landmarks, past endless mullock heaps, cruel shafts, shepherds’ holes, fallen logs, piles of slabs, muddy pools, pits full of trash and broken bottles, huts and tents held up by innumerable ropes as long as they are taut. It’s all but impossible to see in this light – made even more so since Thomas’s own edict that no lights are to be shown after dark has been obeyed everywhere but inside the Stockade, and all the tents and huts remain dark.

Still, with the tail obliged to follow the body, as the body must follow the head, the main thing is that the head is Commissioner Amos, and he knows the route well. Carefully, quietly, he now turns the column due east parallel to the north bank of Specimen Gully as the men keep moving in their ‘muffled tramp’.

A shot rings out in the night, coming from somewhere up on the curiously elongated mound of Black Hill. Mercifully, it has come from a great distance away. The crack of the gun has not faded before, among the advancing troops, Captain Thomas cocks his ear towards where the shot originated and whispers, ‘We are seen. Forward, and steady men! Don’t fire; let the insurgents fire first. You wait for the sound of the bugle.’

They push on a little faster than before, and there is no further gunfire.

After 50 careful minutes, the men and horses arrive at their appointed position, just 300 yards to the north of the Stockade, hidden from whatever rebels might be on the lookout by the small rise of Stockyard Hill. The moon has now set, leaving only the most determined stars behind. On the eastern horizon, the first flush of dawn is starting to creep into the night sky above Warrenheip.

It is just after 4.20 am.

‘The Infantry,’ Captain Pasley would recount to his father, ‘were then formed in skirmishing order, with supports, and the Cavalry sent round to turn the left flank of the entrenchment. By Thomas’s desire I kept in the Centre of the skirmishers whilst he went to the right flank to be able to communicate with the Cavalry.’

Indeed, as Sub-Inspector Samuel Furnell takes his mounted police out onto that right flank to come at the Stockade from the south-west, the mounted infantry of the 40th Regiment, under the command of Lieutenant Hall, and the mounted police under Sub-Inspector Ladislaus Kossak, move up to the Free Trade Hotel on Stockyard Hill, to initially cover the north-east face of the Stockade – effectively its rear – about 250 yards away. Captain Thomas, meanwhile, whispers more instructions to his soldiers and they arrange themselves in battle order. And so, just as they have been trained to do, drilling for many months and even years, the government’s real soldiers arrange themselves into formation to advance. As they do so, officers on horseback – distinguishable from other mounted troopers by their golden braid and epaulets – wheel their mounts back and forth behind their men to be certain that all is just so.

Meanwhile, the rest of the infantry, waiting to the rear in close-packed ranks, are to remain in reserve and called up as required.

Once all is in place, near silence again reigns supreme as the men await the order to advance.

Among those readying to move closer to action, the more experienced of the soldiers take half a dozen rounds from their cartridge boxes and stuff them under their waist belts or into the waistband of their trousers. This tactic makes the ammunition easily accessible when the battle begins – when bullets are whizzing past your ears, the last thing you want is to be fumbling for cartridges in a box on your hip. Heard, too, are whispered prayers and the click of rosary beads.

All up, it is a great satisfaction to captains Thomas, Pasley and Wise that so far they have been able to manoeuvre this close to the Stockade without alerting the diggers inside. And yet, as quiet as the soldiers have been, it has not been possible to move such a large body of armed men so close to the Stockade, some of them on horseback, without having now been noticed outside its walls.

One man who has been aroused, who heard the approaching corps and reacted instantly, is Canadian digger Thomas Budden, camped just a couple of hundred yards from the Stockade. Realising that the worst is about to happen, Budden, who went to school in Toronto with Captain Charles Ross, now takes a courageous risk by racing to the Stockade, dodging the mounds of tailings and gaping mine-shafts as he goes, to warn Ross that the soldiers are coming. Running as silently as he can, he tells the sentries what is about to befall them and is allowed to pass, whereupon he immediately makes his way to rouse Ross. Speaking feverishly, Budden urges his old friend to get out
now,
while he still can. If he stays he risks losing his life. Come NOW, Charles!

Ross thanks his old friend but calmly refuses. If the Redcoats are about to attack, then his place is right here. What sort of a man would he be to turn tail at the first sight of the armed foe? He is staying and it is all that Budden can do now to safely get away.

At least Budden has given some warning that the troopers are indeed on their way, and the sentries now gaze down the hill. In the tepid and tragic light, there is suddenly an enormous sense of menace in the air as the realisation hits those in the Stockade: it really has come to this; they will shortly be under attack.

With all men now in position and the Stockade effectively surrounded, the word is quietly passed from rank to rank, soldier to soldier: Advance.’

And now the main body of soldiers under Captain Thomas, with Pasley leading the forward elements, marches up and over the small rise they have been sheltering behind, while the mounted soldiers and police on the fringes go around it. As one they strain their eyes to the east, looking for some sign of the rebels, something to help them get their bearings. It is nigh on impossible, though some think as they begin their ascent of the small gully in front of them that they can see the barest silhouette of the enemy flag against the lightening sky way up to their east, fluttering just above the tree line. But if the soldiers can see the Stockade, that must mean that those in the Stockade can . . .

Suddenly the blare of a bugle coming from the Stockade shatters the pre-dawn silence, As the soldiers continue to gaze upwards at the rebel stronghold, a shiver moves through them, almost as one. Some fancy they can see dim figures scurrying hither and thither, but the light is still so poor and the Stockade so distant at 300 yards that it might equally be the phantoms of their imagination.

As to the rebels, one of the men with the Independent California Rangers’ Revolver Brigade, John Lynch, would record ‘a terrible effervescence of hurry-skurry’ around him as his fellow rebels rush from their bunks and tents and take up their posts, their guns and pikes in hand. But it is an effervescence that throws little light, for he would also report that he ‘could hardly discern the military force at first’.

Soon enough, though, there they are. Up in the Stockade, the diggers really can now just make out the long line of Redcoats some 150 yards down the slope, moving into the open and advancing.

The first of the sentries runs back, shouting a warning to the others: ‘To Arms! To Arms!’ This is not just another false alarm such as those they have already had twice on this night and many times over previous nights. This is real. With the bugle, and now the shouting, it is enough to wake even the most profoundly asleep, including Peter Lalor. He is instantly up and moving, realising that the Redcoats have clearly come and, while more of a moral leader than a military one, at the very least he must quickly be seen to be present, doing whatever he can to get the defences of the Stockade organised.

And yet,
where are his men?
Emerging from his tent, his form throwing thin shadows from the flickering light of the fire in the middle of the Stockade, it is immediately apparent in this last gasp of night before Sunday morning that the ranks are alarmingly thin. The one clear order that does ring out, however, is at least a significant one, for it brings immediate results: ‘California Rangers, to the front!’

The Americans, many of them veterans of the Mexican War, leap to action and they are soon joined by other diggers.

At this point, the forces at Lalor’s rough command are just 70 men holding shotguns and rifles, 30 or so with pistols and 20 men with pikes, many of which have been fashioned by the German blacksmith John Hafele, who is now worthily holding one himself.

Even as the soldiers advance on the face of the Stockade, where the diggers least expect it because the going is so difficult, Captain Thomas tells the young bugle boy by his side to blow a key call, one recognised by all the men under his command. The lad does so, standing bravely and emptying his lungs into his brass instrument.

Just outside the Stockade, Tom Green, a veteran ex-rifleman who had fought under Lord Gough in India, instantly recognises the bugle. ‘That call,’ he roars to his mate, now also awake beside him, ‘means extend into skirmishing order, the military are here!’

And indeed it does. ‘Extend to skirmishing order’ means that instead of advancing in tightly packed formal ranks, a thin line of foot soldiers of the 12th and 40th Regiments commanded by Captain Wise go forward in a methodical manner. Working in groups of four – ‘a chain’, in military parlance – the men now ready themselves so that, once the battle proper begins, they can alternately step forward and kneel to fire before stepping back and reloading. This will ensure that there is a constant stream of gunfire coming from each group, rather than spasmodic volleys, and present a moving and broken line to those trying to draw a bead upon them. Yes, it is difficult to move up the slope over broken ground, but it is because of that very slope that Captain Thomas has chosen to attack from there. He knows that an idiosyncrasy of the smooth bore weapons the diggers will be using is that when they are fired downwards the bullets tend to follow a trajectory higher than intended – hopefully over the soldiers’ heads. (It was for this reason that, at the Battle of Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington ordered his men to aim for the groins of the Frenchmen, on the reckoning that the bullets would likely hit them in the chest.) The men start moving, slowly, methodically, towards the north-western face of the Stockade.

Their officers stay just behind them, and a tighter formation of soldiers continues to advance 50 paces behind them all, ready to react to whatever happens with that front line – to plug gaps or follow up hard on any breakthroughs. To the right of the skirmishers are the foot police.

———

At the Stockade, by the time the bulk of the diggers have taken up their positions at the barricades, the situation is becoming just a little clearer. By now the Redcoats and some of the foot police who are accompanying them are close enough – coming up the slight gully that starts just next to Stockyard Hill and goes right to the wall of the Stockade – that the diggers can clearly distinguish features.

It is time.

The diggers’ own Robert Burnette, a tiny but game-as-all-get-out fighting force of the California Rangers, steps forward, smoothly raises his rifle to his shoulder, takes aim in the rough direction of the advancing Redcoats and pulls the trigger.

Down in the advancing line, a lead ball sears from the shadows and hits Private Michael Roney of the 40th Regiment directly in the head.

RIP. Michael Roney. Born in Belfast 1833, died on the Eureka, in Australia, 3 December 1854.

The true significance of the shot, however, would be accurately described by digger John Lynch when he would later write that the ‘shot from our encampment was taken for a declaration of war.’ Captain Thomas, who is on horseback on the right of the infantry line, takes just a split second to determine that the shot has not come from beside or behind him, but from the Stockade.

This established, he is free to give the command for the bugle to sound the ‘Commence Firing’ order. The soldiers do not need to be told twice and, almost as one, swing their muskets to their shoulders, kneel and, with a terrible belch of white smoke and a tremendous roar, unleash an enormous volley of shots. True, at this distance the musket fire is wildly inaccurate, but at least some of the three-quarter-inch-calibre soft lead balls hit their mark and raise splinters from the bulwarks of the Stockade. No fewer than nine of the diggers fall.

The diggers are not long in making reply and the next flurry of shots hurtles down into the gully, one of them bearing an irretrievable fate.

An instant later, not far from where Roney fell, another soldier, Felix Boyle, is hit in the head through his nose and goes down with a cry of anguish. He is quickly dragged back by two comrades before they re-join the skirmishing line. But this veteran of the Sikh Wars in India is hurt badly alright, with the bullet clearly lodged in his head. And then another scream as Private William juniper is taken down by a musket ball to the thigh, resulting in a compound fracture of the femur.

Whatever else, the Redcoats and police know they are now in a real
battle.
(Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that Magistrate Hackett has no time to read the Riot Act – though he had made a preliminary sortie forward with Captain Thomas to see if it might be possible.)