Pierre Berton's War of 1812 (48 page)

The village is surrounded on three sides by a palisade constructed of eight-foot logs, split and sharpened at the ends. These pickets, which do not come all the way down to the river bank, enclose a compact community of log and shingle houses, interspersed with orchards, gardens, barns, and outbuildings. The whole space forms a rectangle two hundred yards along the river and three hundred deep.

On the right of the village, downriver, lies an open meadow with a number of detached houses. Here Lieutenant-Colonel Samuel Wells, brother to the slain scout Billy Wells and a veteran of Tippecanoe, encamps his regulars. Winchester demurs: the regulars would be better placed within the palisade. But Wells insists on his prerogatives: military etiquette determines that the regular troops should
always
be on the right of the militia. Winchester does not argue. Wells’s men are exposed, but he expects to find a better campground for them on the following day.

Leaving Wells in charge of the main camp, the General and his staff, including his teenaged son, take up quarters on the south side of the river in the home of Colonel Francis Navarre, a local trader. It is a handsome building, the logs covered with clapboard, the whole shaded by pear trees originally brought from Normandy. Winchester is given a spacious guest room at the front of the house, warmed by a fireplace. It is now Wells’s turn to demur. He believes the General and his officers should be as close as possible to the troops on the far side of the river in case of sudden attack. The British fort is only eighteen miles away.

But James Winchester has made up his mind. For twenty years as a wealthy plantation owner he has enjoyed the creature comforts of a sedentary life. For five months without complaint he has slept out in the elements, enduring the privations with his troops, existing on dreadful food—when there was food at all—drinking, sometimes, stagnant water scooped out of wagon tracks. Later, he will argue that there was no house in Frenchtown; he would have had to move some of the wounded. But this is palpably false.

A strange lassitude has fallen over the General and his troops. The sudden euphoric victory, the almost magical appearance of food, drink, warmth, and shelter—the stuff of their dreams for these past weeks—has given them a dreamlike confidence. There is talk of moving the camp to a better position, and on the following day the General and some of his officers ride out to look over the ground. Nothing comes of it. It does not apparently occur to them that it might be a good idea to put the river between themselves and the British.

Wells leaves camp that morning claiming that he has baggage to collect at the rapids. Winchester, who believes that Wells has lost faith in him, sends a note with him to Harrison, detailing his situation. It reflects his sense of security: his patrols have detected no British in the vicinity; he does not believe any attack will take place for several days. His own intentions are far from clear. Later that night, Captain Nathaniel Hart, Harrison’s emissary, rides in with the news that Harrison has arrived at the Maumee rapids and that reinforcements are on the way. This adds to the general complacency.

It is an axiom of war that from time to time even the best of generals suffer from a common failing—a refusal to believe their own intelligence reports. Psychological blinkers narrow their vision; they decline to accept any evidence that fails to support their own appreciation of the situation. Winchester seems deaf to all suggestions that the British are massing for an attack. On the morning of the twenty-first, he sends Navarre’s son Peter and four of his brothers to scout toward the mouth of the Detroit River. En route, they intercept Joseph Bordeau, Peter’s future father-in-law, crossing on the ice from the British side. Bordeau, who has escaped from Amherstburg, brings positive news that the British, with a large body of Indians, will be at the Raisin some time after dark. But “Jocko” La Salle, a voluble and genial French Canadian—and a possible British plant—convinces Winchester that this news must be in error. Winchester and his officers, “regaling themselves with whiskey and loaf sugar” as Elias Darnell believes, dismiss Peter Navarre with a laugh.

That afternoon, a second scout confirms the story, but again Winchester is deaf. Later in the evening, one of Lewis’s ensigns learns from a tavern keeper that he has been talking to two British officers about an impending attack. But Lewis does not take the report seriously.

Some of Winchester’s field officers expect that a council will be called that night, but no word comes from the General. Though Winchester has issued vague orders about strengthening the camp, little has been done. Nor does he issue the ammunition, stored at Navarre’s house. Wells’s detachment is down to ten rounds per man.

It is bitterly cold. The snow lies deep. Nobody has the heart to send pickets out onto the roads leading into the settlement. William Atherton notices that most of the men act as if they were perfectly secure, some wandering about town until late into the night. Atherton himself feels little anxiety, although he has reason to believe the situation is perilous. He sleeps soundly until awakened by the cry “To arms! to arms!” the thundering of cannon, the roar of muskets, and the discordant yells of attacking Indians.

AMHERSTBURG, UPPER CANADA
, January 19, 1813. It is long past midnight. From the windows of Draper’s tavern comes the sound of music and merriment, laughter and dancing. The young people of the town and the officers of the garrison have combined to hold a ball to celebrate the birthday of Queen Charlotte, the consort of the mad old king of England. Suddenly the music stops and in walks Procter’s deputy, Lieutenant-Colonel St. George, equipped for the field. His voice, long accustomed to command, drowns the chatter.

“My boys,” says the Colonel, “you must prepare to dance to a different tune; the enemy is upon us and we are going to surprise them. We shall take the route about four in the morning, so get ready at once.”

Procter has just received word of the British defeat at the Raisin. The Americans, he knows, are in an exposed position and their numbers are not large. He determines to scrape up as many men as possible and attack at once. This swift and aggressive decision is not characteristic of Procter, a methodical, cautious officer who tends to follow the book. It was Procter, after all, who strongly opposed Brock’s sally against Detroit. Now Brock’s example—or perhaps Brock’s ghost—impels him to precipitate action. The moves are Procter’s, but the spirit behind them is that of his late commander.

He plans swiftly. He will send a detachment under Captain James Askin to garrison Detroit. He will leave Fort Amherstburg virtually defenceless, manned only by the sick and least effective members of the militia under Lieutenant-Colonel Jean-Baptiste Bâby. The remainder—every possible man who can be called into service, including provincial seamen from the gunboats—will be sent across the river. In all, he counts 597 able men and more than five hundred Indians—Potawatomi displaced from their homes by Harrison, with bitter memories of Tippecanoe; Miami, victims of the recent attacks at Mississinewa; and Chief Roundhead’s Wyandot, formerly of Brownstown.

The first detachment leaves immediately, dragging three three-pound cannon and three small howitzers on sleighs. John Richardson,
the future novelist, is young enough at fifteen to find the scene romantic—the troops moving in a thin line across the frozen river under cliffs of rugged ice, their weapons, polished to a high gloss, glittering in the winter sunlight.

Lieutenant Frederic Rolette, back in action again after the prisoner exchange that followed the battle of Queenston Heights and fresh from his losing struggle to regain the gunboat
Detroit
from the Americans, has charge of one of the guns. He is suffering from such a splitting headache that Major Reynolds urges him to go back. Rolette looks insulted, produces a heavy bandanna. “Look here,” he says, “tie this tight around my head.” Reynolds rolls it into a thick band and does so. “I am better already,” says Rolette and pushes on.

The following day the rest of Procter’s forces cross the river, rest that night at Brownstown, and prepare to move early next morning. As darkness falls, John Richardson’s favourite brother, Robert, aged fourteen, a midshipman in the Provincial Marine, sneaks into camp. His father, an army surgeon, has given him strict orders to stay out of trouble on the Canadian side, but he is determined to see action and attaches himself to one of the gun crews.

In the morning, Procter moves his force of one thousand to Rocky River, twelve miles from Brownstown, six miles from the American camp. Two hours before dawn on the following day they rise, march the intervening distance, and silently descend upon the enemy.

The camp at Frenchtown is asleep, the drum roll just sounding reveille. This, surely, is the moment for attack, while the men are still in their blankets, drowsy, brushing the slumber from their eyes, without weapons in their hands. But the ghost of Isaac Brock has departed. Procter goes by the book, which insists that an infantry charge be supported by cannon. Precious moments slip by, and the army’s momentum slows as he places his pieces. A sharp-eyed Kentucky guard spots the movement. A rifle explodes, and the leading grenadier of the 41st, a man named Gates, drops dead: a bullet has literally gone in one ear and out the other. Surprise is lost. The battle begins. Procter’s caution will cost the lives of scores of good men.

The Battle of Frenchtown

It is still dark. The British and Canadians can see flashes of musketry several hundred yards to the front but nothing else. Slowly, in the pre-dawn murk, a blurred line of figures takes shape, standing out in front of the village. They fire a volley at this welcome target, but the line stands fast. They fire again without effect. Who are these supermen who do not fall when the muskets roar? Dawn provides the answer: they have been aiming, not at their enemies, but at a line of wooden pickets that protects them.

A second problem frustrates them. Procter has placed one of his three-pounders directly in front of his centre, so that the American fire aimed at the gun plays upon the men behind it while the gunners themselves are in jeopardy from their own men in the rear.

A British musket ball strikes Frederic Rolette in the head. The tightly rolled silk bandanna saves his life. The ball is caught in the fold and flattens against his skull, increasing his headache and causing a goose egg but no further damage.

The fire grows hotter. Behind the palisades the Americans can easily pick out targets against the lightening sky. When the British abandon a three-pounder twenty yards from the fence, the Kentuckians leap over the puncheons to capture it. But Rolette’s
mate, Second-Lieutenant Robert Irvine, the same man who tried to beat off the attack on
Caledonia
, seizes the drag rope and hauls it back to the British line just as a musket ball shreds his heel.

Private Shadrach Byfield, whose name was left off the list for prize money after the fall of Detroit, is fighting in Adam Muir’s company of the 41st when the man on his left falls dead. It is light enough now to see the enemy, and he spots a Kentuckian coming through the palisades. “There’s a man!” cries Byfield to a friend. “I’ll have a shot at him.” As he pulls the trigger, a ball strikes him under the left ear and he topples to the ground, cutting his friend’s leg with his bayonet in the process. He is only twenty-three, a Wiltshire man who joined the British army at eighteen—the third in his family to enlist—an action that caused his poor mother to fall into a speechless fit from which she never recovered. Now he believes his last moment has come. “Byfield is dead!” his friend cries out, and Shadrach Byfield replies, in some wonder, “I believe I be.” An age-old question flashes across his mind, a question that must occur to every soldier the instant he falls in battle. “Is this death?” he asks himself.
Is this how men die?

But he is not dead. He raises his head and begins to creep off on his hands and knees. “Byfield,” calls a sergeant, “shall I take you to the doctor?” But Shadrach Byfield at twenty-three is an old soldier. “Never mind me, go and help the men,” he says, and makes his way to a barn to have his wound dressed. Here he encounters a spectacle so affecting that he can never forget it—a young midshipman, wounded in the knee, crying in pain for his mother, convinced he is going to die.