Pierre Berton's War of 1812 (114 page)

Twice his men attempt to scale the walls with ladders and are beaten back. Finally, hidden under the smoke of the big guns, they creep along the outer ditch, scale the north bastion of the old fort, and leap into the upper storey.

“Give the damn Yankees no quarter!” shouts William Drummond.

The gunners desert their cannon as British and Americans struggle hand to hand with pikes, bayonets, spears. One of the American defenders, Lieutenant John McDonough, badly wounded by a bayonet, asks for quarter, but Drummond, in a rage, shoots him with his pistol. It is his final act. A moment later, the General’s brash nephew falls dead, shot through the heart and bayoneted.

The British manage to take possession of one side of the fort but are subject to heavy fire from the blockhouse above. The battle seesaws, neither side giving way, until suddenly beneath their feet comes a trembling followed by a roar and an appalling explosion. The magazine in the north bastion has blown up, either by accident or by design.

Douglass, over a hundred yards away, feels the ground shake under him, then sees a jet of flame shoot up from the fort for more than a hundred feet into the night sky, followed by a shower of stone, earth, chunks of timber, bits of human bodies. One of his own men falls dead, struck by the debris.

The carnage is ghastly. The Americans, protected by the walls of the barracks, are spared, but the British attackers are torn, crushed,
mangled. Some, flung from the parapet, die on the bayonets of their comrades in the ditch below. Nothing can stem the panic that follows. Believing the entire fort to be mined, the men break and flee across the plain to the safety of the British trenches.

Only a few escape the blast. Captain John Le Couteur, who made the snowshoe trip from New Brunswick in 1813, is blown off the parapet, falling twenty feet into the ditch, winded but unharmed. As he dashes toward the British camp, he sees an officer on a stretcher and asks who it is.

“Colonel Scott, sir, shot through the head.”

Le Couteur can see the bullet wound in Hercules Scott’s forehead. The commander of the British 103rd can no longer speak, and only the slight pressure of his hand reveals that he is conscious. He has only moments to live.

At this spectacle, Captain Le Couteur flings down his sabre and cries out: “This is a disgraceful day for Old England!”

“For shame, Mr. Le Couteur,” someone calls. “The men are sufficiently discouraged by defeat.”

“Don’t blame him,” says another. “It’s the high feeling of a young soldier.”

Another officer turns about—General Drummond.

“Where is Colonel Scott?” the General asks.

“Oh, Sir! He is killed, just being brought in by his men.”

“Where is Colonel Drummond?”

“Alas, Sir! He is killed, too. Bayoneted.”

At the memory of his commander’s death and that of three-quarters of his own men, Le Couteur bursts into tears.

The General is heartsick, and not just over the death of his nephew. Clearly he has underestimated the size of the American force and the strength of its defences and overestimated the effect of his artillery barrage. He has no time for recriminations. If the American commander knows what he is about, he will counter-attack at once while the British are off balance and in disarray and before Fischer’s broken column can return. Drummond has fewer than one thousand effective troops to put into the line. They wait
in their trenches for the counterblow. It does not come. Brigadier-General Gaines has not grasped his opponent’s weakness.

The British losses are appalling. More than nine hundred men—one-third of the army—are dead, wounded, or missing. Six battalions are so badly shattered they are no longer fit for field duty. The drummer Jarvis Hanks, visiting the ditch outside the fort in the morning, counts 190 bodies, the faces burned black, many horribly mutilated, one or two still alive but dying, a confusion of torn arms and legs heaped about, one human trunk bereft of head or limbs, “too sickening to look upon.” Men move about in the ditch picking the pockets of the dead and dying. William Drummond’s body lies under a cart, naked except for his shirt. American soldiers have looted it of epaulettes, money, and a gold watch.

Gordon Drummond blames both the “misconduct of this foreign corps,” the de Watteville regiment, and the happenstance of the explosion for his misfortune. It is the failure of the mission more than the deaths of good men that appalls him. “The agony of mind I suffer from the present disgraceful, and unfortunate conduct, of Troops committed to my superintendence wounds me to the Soul,” he writes to Sir George Prevost. He does not consider that his own hasty planning and faulty intelligence may have contributed to the debacle. But then, no commander on either side during this maladroit war has yet written—will ever write—“I blame myself.”

Prevost knows better. He chides Drummond gently in two letters, which the Americans intercept and Drummond never receives. It has been, the Governor General remarks, “a costly experiment,” but no doubt the Lieutenant-General will profit from the experience. He can say no more; Drummond is the best he has. He can scarcely replace him.

Gaines is jubilant, but his elation is short lived. Gordon Drummond has no intention of abandoning the investment of Fort Erie. The cannonade increases in fury. One aiming point is the chimney above Gaines’s headquarters. On August 29, a shell strikes it, drops through the roof, smashes the General’s writing desk, and wounds him so badly that he is evacuated to Buffalo, his part in the war at an end.

Within the encampment, as the rain pelts down and the bombardment goes on and autumn approaches, elation gives way to dismay. Was Ripley right, after all? Is it possible for the invasion force to seize the peninsula and march on to conquer York and Kingston? The Americans have won a significant victory on paper, but nothing has changed. They hold exactly fifteen acres—no more, and Drummond’s army blocks any further advance.

THE BRITISH CAMP BEFORE FORT ERIE, SEPTEMBER 17, 1814

Tiger Dunlop, the British army surgeon, is at dinner, well behind the lines, when the sound of gunfire interrupts his meal. Two American columns have left the safety of the fort and are attacking the British batteries two miles in front of the main camp. Jacob Brown, back on the Canadian side, is making one last attempt to break Gordon Drummond’s siege of the American encampment.

Dunlop rushes out without waiting for orders. By the time he reaches the forward trenches with the other officers, the skirmish is all but over. He sees the Indians bounding forward, yelling and flinging their tomahawks. He comes upon American corpses, their skulls cleft to the eyes by the throwing hatchets. He searches the battlefield for wounded men and comes upon one of his bandsmen carrying in a blanket a mortally wounded American officer, gulping water from a canteen. Dunlop proposes to dress his wounds, but the officer refuses.

“Doctor,” he gasps, “it’s all in vain, my wound is mortal and no human skill can help me—leave me here with a canteen of water and save yourself.…”

Dunlop takes him back to a hut; when he returns from his medical duties, the American is dead. Dunlop asks his identity and is told he is Jacob Brown’s confidant and David Bates Douglass’s friend, Colonel Eleazer Wood, the engineer.

Dusk is falling as the Americans regain the shelter of their fort and the British return to their camp. Two British batteries have been damaged, at appalling loss. Brown counts 511 casualties, Drummond
565. Both sides claim victory, each exaggerating the other’s strengths and losses. Neither will admit it, but the war on the Niagara frontier has again reached a stalemate. Drummond is low on ammunition and food, his troops miserable and diseased, desertions on the increase, his camp a heaving swamp. He is reinforced the next day but still has no more than two thousand effectives. On September 21, in a driving torrent of rain, he abandons the siege and moves quietly back to the original British position on Chippawa Creek. Brown, his own strength diminished by British cannon fire and the disastrous sortie, is too weak to follow. The two forces resemble equally matched prizefighters, staggering about the ring in the last round, scarcely able to raise their arms in combat.

Both commanders are hungry for fresh troops. On September 28, George Izard arrives at Batavia, New York, having marched all the way from Lake Champlain with four thousand seasoned American troops. He is determined to drive the British out of Fort Niagara, but Brown wants instead to repeat the Battle of Chippawa. On October 10, Izard moves his army across the river and three days later is skirmishing with the British outposts at Street’s Creek. In all this there is a weary sense of
déjà vu
.

Drummond suffers an agony of frustration. His force is not strong enough to go on the attack, but he is convinced that with two more regiments he could drive the Americans back across the river and finish the war in Upper Canada. He pleads with Prevost for supplies and men. Commodore Yeo is sitting at Kingston with the fleet. The new ship,
St. Lawrence
, is almost ready. Why can’t the navy supply him?

Drummond’s frustrations are nothing compared to Izard’s. In his projected sweep across the Chippawa and up the peninsula to seize Burlington Heights and York, the Major-General has counted on Chauncey. Now he discovers to his chagrin that the American commodore, having learned of Yeo’s superiority on the lake, has fled to the shelter of Sackets Harbor and will not come out. Izard cannot conceal his bitterness; Chauncey’s timidity has destroyed all hope of any forward movement.

Drummond, meanwhile, is feverishly awaiting the arrival of the 9th Regiment from Kingston. Yeo reluctantly agrees to carry some troops and provisions across the lake but is so fearful of overloading his great new ship,
St. Lawrence
, that he carries only a small number of men; the rest are forced to struggle on by land over roads little better than rivers of mud. Drummond is as bitter at Yeo’s caution as Izard is at Chauncey’s. To both naval commanders their ships are too precious to be risked in battle and too grand to be used as transports.

Both opposing generals are dispirited and both are ill. Drummond is so sick that he asks to be sent home. Izard is so sick he cannot write to the Secretary of War. The troops on both sides are weak from dysentery. The weather grows worse each day.

The fight has gone out of the men on the Niagara frontier. The American militia, without pay for three months, are mutinous. Izard can see no practical reason to remain on the Canadian side of the river and so, after several days’ wait for clement weather, embarks his troops. By November 1 all are back on their own soil. Nobody has the temerity to recall the gloomy prophecies of the perverse and discredited brigadier-general Eleazar Ripley.

And what of Fort Erie, over which so much blood has been spilled? In Izard’s view, it is worthless: “It commands nothing, not even the entrance of the strait.” It is “a weak, ill planned … hastily repaired redoubt.”

On November 5, Gordon Drummond, guided by a sixth sense, dispatches James FitzGibbon, one-time leader of the Bloody Boys and now a captain with the Glengarry Light Infantry, to travel upriver to see what is happening at the fort. FitzGibbon finds it deserted. The Americans have blown up the works, dismantled everything of value, and vanished across the Niagara.

FitzGibbon rides through the rubble of the deserted encampment. Except for a dozen cases of damaged cartridges, the enemy has left nothing. Five months have passed since Winfield Scott first leaped ashore in its shadow. Yet no territory has been captured; none given up. The invasion has ended just as the last one did the previous December. Thousands are dead, more are crippled, hundreds are in prison. In the glowing reports of the opposing commanders, scores of officers have achieved immortality of a sort, their deeds of heroism, zeal, steadfastness, loyalty, leadership, and resolve recorded for all time. But where in this crumbling, rain-swept redoubt—its walls spattered with old blood, its ramparts scarred by cannon fire—is the glory? Where the victory? Here, as at Chippawa and Lundy’s Lane, the dead lie mouldering in common graves. To what purpose have they fought? For whose honour have they bled? For what noble principle have they fallen? Even the suave diplomats, charged with treading the delicate pathway toward peace in the ancient Flemish city of Ghent, can no longer be certain.

ELEVEN
The Burning of Washington

August, 1814

Heeding Sir George Prevost’s request to create diversions along the eastern seaboard of the United States in support of the struggle in Canada and also as a reprisal against American raids on Canadian private property—especially the vengeful burning of Port Dover in the spring—British ships have for months been harassing settlements on Chesapeake Bay. Now, with the war in Europe ended and reinforcements available, the British plan to attack the gunboats guarding Washington and, at the same time, mount a land raid on the capital
.

BENEDICT, CHESAPEAKE BAY, MARYLAND, AUGUST 19, 1814