Pierre Berton's War of 1812 (42 page)

Driscoll cannot stand the silence, shakes Clibborn by the shoulder:

“For heaven’s sake, tell us what you know.”

Clibborn answers at last, almost choking:

“The General is killed; the enemy has possession of Queenston Heights.”

At those words, every man in the battery becomes paralysed. The guns cease firing. These are men of the 49th, all of whom have served under Brock in Europe; they are shattered by the news. Some weep openly. Others mourn in silence. Several begin to curse in frustration. The sound of enemy cheers, drifting across the river, rouses them to their duty. In a helpless rage over the death of their general, they become demonic, loading, traversing, and firing the heavy guns as if they were light field pieces, flinging round after round across the river in an attempt to avenge their former chief.

All over the province, similar expressions of grief are manifest. Glegg, Brock’s military aide, calls it “a public calamity.” Young George Ridout of the York Volunteers writes to his brother that “were it not for the death of General Brock and Macdonell our victory would have been glorious … but in losing our man … is an irreparable loss.” Like many others, Ridout is convinced that Brock was the only man capable of leading the divided province. Samuel Jarvis crosses the lake to bring the news of the tragedy to York where “the thrill of dismay … was something indescribable.”

In Quebec, an old friend, Anne Ilbert, who once volunteered to embroider some handkerchiefs for the bachelor general so the laundresses wouldn’t steal them, writes to an acquaintance that “the conquest of half the United States would not repay us for his loss … by the faces of the people here you would judge that we had lost everything, so general is the regret everyone feels for this brave man, the victory is completely swallowed up in it.” She fears for the future, wonders what the troops will do under another commander, suspects that Upper Canada will fall to the Americans before winter’s end. “This is the first real horror of war we have experienced. God send it may not lead to a train of others.”

Prevost, when he learns of his general’s death, is so badly shaken that he can scarcely hold the pen with which to report the tragedy to Sir John Sherbrooke in Halifax. Yet he mentions the matter only briefly in that letter. And later, when a dispatch reaches him quoting the Prince Regent at some length on Brock’s heroism and ability, he publishes in the Quebec
Gazette
the first non-committal sentence only, omitting phrases about “an able and meritorious officer … who … displayed qualities admirably adapted to awe the disloyal, to reconcile the wavering, and animate the great mass of the inhabitants against successive attempts by the enemy to invade the province.…”

Meanwhile, Sheaffe concludes an immediate armistice with the Americans, “the most ruinous policy that ever was or could have been adopted for the country,” to quote a nineteen-year-old subaltern, William Hamilton Merritt, the future builder of the Welland Canal. Brock, who has been knighted for the capture of Detroit (posthumously, as it develops), would certainly have pursued Van Rensselaer’s badly shaken force across the river to attack Fort Niagara and seize the northern half of New York state, but Sheaffe is a more cautious commander—Prevost’s kind of general.

Brock’s body, brought back to Newark, lies in state for three days. His funeral, in George Ridout’s words, is “the grandest and most solemn that I have ever witnessed or that has been seen in Upper Canada.” Brock’s casket and Macdonell’s are borne through
a double line of Indians and militia—five thousand men resting on reversed arms. The twin coffins are buried in the York bastion of the fort. Guns boom every minute during the procession while across the river, at both Niagara and Lewiston, the Americans fire a salute to their old enemy. Sheaffe, on hearing the American guns, is overcome and says in a choked voice to one of his officers that “noble minded as General Brock was, he would have ordered the same had a like disaster befallen the Enemy.”

Upper Canada is numb, its people drawn closer by a common tragedy that few outsiders can comprehend. In the United States, attention is quickly diverted by another naval skirmish in which the American frigate
Wasp
, having incapacitated and captured the British sloop of war
Frolic
, is herself taken by the enemy.

Europe is far more interested in the fate of Moscow, under attack by Napoleon, who at the very moment of the naval skirmish on October 18 is preparing to withdraw his army from the charred and deserted Russian capital. This bitter decision, still unknown to most of the world, marks the beginning of the end of the war with France. Had Madison foreseen it, the invasion of Canada, scarcely yet underway, would never have been attempted.

With Brock’s burial, the myth takes over from the man. The following day, the Kingston
Gazette
reports “the last words of the dying Hero.”

General Brock, watchful as he was brave, soon appeared in the midst of his faithful troops, ever obedient to his call, and whom [he] loved with the adoration of a father; but, alas! whilst collecting, arranging, forming, and cheering his brave followers, that great commander gloriously fell when preparing for victory—
“Push on brave York Volunteers,”
being then near him, they were the last words of the dying Hero—Inhabitants of Upper Canada, in the day of battle
remember BROCK
.

If Brock ever uttered these words it could only have been when he passed the York Volunteers on the road to Queenston. It was the
49th, his old battalion, that surrounded him at the moment of his fall. Nor do dead men utter school-book slogans. Nonetheless, the gallant injunction passes into common parlance to become almost as well known as “Don’t give up the ship,” uttered in the same war by an American naval commander whose men, on his death, did give up the ship. The phrase will be used in future years to support a further myth—that the Canadian militia really won the war. In December, the York
Gazette
gushes that “it must afford infinite satisfaction to every Loyal Bosom that on every occasion, the Militia of the Province has distinguished itself with an alacrity & spirit worthy of Veteran Troops.” It is not an assessment with which the dead general would have agreed, but it is a fancy that will not die. John Strachan, future bishop of Toronto, leader of the Family Compact and mentor of the young officers who formed the backbone of the York Volunteers, helps to keep it green. In Strachan’s belief, the militia “without the assistance of men or arms except a handful of regular troops” repelled the invasion.

The picture of Brock storming the heights at Queenston, urging on the brave York Volunteers, and saving Canada in the process is the one that will remain with the fledgling nation. He is the first Canadian war hero, an Englishman who hated the provincial confines of the Canadas, who looked with disdain on the civilian leaders, who despised democracy, the militia, and the Indians, and who could hardly wait to shake the Canadian mud from his boots and bid goodbye forever to York, Fort George, Quebec, and all the stuffy garrison towns between. None of this matters.

His monument will be erected on the ridge, not far from where he fell, by the leaders of a colonial aristocracy intent on shoring up power against republican and democratic trends seeping across the border. This Tuscan pillar, 135 feet high, becomes the symbol of that power—of the British way of life: the Loyalist way as opposed to the Yankee way. In 1840, a disaffected Irish Canadian named Benjamin Lett, one of William Lyon Mackenzie’s followers in his failed rebellion against an elitist autocracy, determines on one last act of defiance and chooses the obvious site: he blows up Brock’s monument.
The Family Compact cannot do without its symbol, mounts a long public campaign, raises fifty thousand dollars, builds a more splendid monument, half as high again as its predecessor—taller, it is said, than any in the world save for Wren’s pillar marking London’s Great Fire. John Beverley Robinson, Strachan’s protégé and the Compact’s chief justice, is on hand, of course, at the dedication, and so is his successor and fellow subaltern in the Brave York Volunteers, Mr. Justice Archibald McLean. Robinson’s spectacular career dates from Queenston Heights when, a mere law student of twenty-one, he is named acting attorney-general of the province to replace the mortally wounded Macdonell. (“I had as much thought of being made Bey of Tunis,” he recalled.) By Confederation the field on which he and McLean did battle has become, in the words of the
Canadian Monthly
, “one of Canada’s sacred places” and the battle, in the description of the Canadian nationalist George Denison, is “Canada’s glorious Thermopylae.”

So Brock in death is as valuable to the ruling class as Brock in life. He will not be remembered for his real contribution to the country: his military prescience, his careful preparation for war during the years of peace, his astonishing bloodless capture of an American stronghold. When Canadians hear his name, as they often will over the years, the picture that will form in their minds will be of that final impetuous dash, splendidly heroic but tragically foolish, up the slippery heights of Queenston on a gloomy October morning.

SEVEN
Black Rock

Opéra Bouffe on the Niagara

Hearts of War! Tomorrow will be memorable in the annals of the United States
.

—Brigadier-General Alexander Smyth,
November 29, 1812.

BUFFALO, NEW YORK
, November 17, 1812. Brigadier-General Alexander Smyth is putting the finishing touches to a proclamation, which, like Hull’s, will return to haunt him.

“Soldiers!”
he writes, underlining the word. “You are amply prepared for war. You are superior in number to the enemy. Your personal strength and activity are greater. Your weapons are longer. The regular soldiers of the enemy are generally old men, whose best years have been spent in the sickly climate of the West Indies. They will not be able to stand before you when you charge with the bayonet.

“You have seen Indians, such as those hired by the British to murder women and children, and kill and scalp the wounded. You
have seen their dances and grimaces, and heard their yells. Can you fear
them?
No. You hold them in the utmost contempt.”

Smyth warms to his task. Having stiffened the backs of the regular troops he will now imbue the recalcitrant militia with a fighting spirit:

“VOLUNTEERS!” he prints in large, bold capitals. “I esteem your generous and patriotic motives. You have made sacrifices on the altar of your country. You will not suffer the enemies of your fame to mislead you from the path of duty and honor, and deprive you of the esteem of a grateful country. You will shun the
eternal infamy
that awaits the man, who having come within sight of the enemy,
basely
shrinks in the moment of trial.

“SOLDIERS OF EVERY CORPS! It is in your power to retrieve the honor of your country; and to cover yourselves with glory. Every man who performs a gallant action, shall have his name made known to the nation. Rewards and honors await the brave. Infamy and contempt are reserved for cowards. Companions in arms! You came to vanquish a valiant foe. I know the choice you will make. Come on my heroes! And when you attack the enemy’s batteries, let your rallying word be
‘The cannon lost at Detroit—or death.’ ”

Out it goes among the troops and civilians, most of whom greet it with derision. To this Smyth is absolutely oblivious, for he is a prisoner of his ego. The word “vanity” hardly does justice to his own concept of himself. He is wholly self-centred. His actions and words, which others find bizarre and ridiculous, are to him the justifiable responses of a supreme commander who sees himself as the saviour of the nation. The newspapers scoff at him as “Alexander the Great” and “Napoleon II.” Smyth is the kind of general who takes that satire as a compliment.

If words were bullets and exclamation points cannonballs, Smyth might cow the enemy through the force of his verbiage. A master of the purple passage, he bombards his own countrymen with high-flown phrases:

Men of New York: The present is the hour of renown. Have you not a wish for fame? Would you not choose to be one of those
who, imitating the heroes whom Montgomery led, have in spite of the seasons, visited the tomb of the chief and conquered the country where he lies? Yes—You desire your share of fame. Then seize the present moment. If you do not, you will regret it.…

Advance, then, to our aid. I will wait for you a few days. I cannot give you the day of my departure. But come on, come in companies, half companies, pairs or singly. I will organize you for a short tour. Ride to this place, if the distance is far, and send back your horses. But remember that every man who accompanies us places himself under my command, and shall submit to the salutary restraints of discipline.