Produced by Lionel Sear
FORT AMITY.
BY
Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch.
TO HENRY NEWBOLT.
My dear Newbolt,
Two schoolfellows, who had sat together in the Sixth at Clifton,
met at Paddington some twenty years later and travelled down to
enter their two sons at one school. On their way, while the boys
shyly became acquainted, the fathers discussed the project of this
story; a small matter in comparison with the real business of that
day--but that it happened so gives me the opportunity of dedicating
_Fort Amity_ to you, its editor in _The Monthly Review_, as a
reminder to outlast the short life granted in these days to novels.
Yet if either of our sons shall turn its pages some years hence,
though but to remind himself of his first journey to school, I hope
he will not lay it down too contemptuously. The tale has, for its
own purposes, so seriously confused the geography of Fort Amitie,
that he may search the map and end by doubting if any such fortress
ever existed and stood a siege: but I trust it will leave him in no
doubt of what his elders understood by honour and friendship.
Of these two themes, at any rate, I have composed it, and dedicate it
to a poet who has sung nobly of both. "Like to the generations of
leaves are those of men"--but while we last, let these deciduous
pages commemorate the day when we two went back to school four
strong. May they also contain nothing unworthy to survive us in our
two fellow-travellers!
A. T. QUILLER-COUCH.
The Haven, April 20th, 1904.
PREFACE.
More than once, attempting a story of high and passionate love--in
this book, for example, and still more recklessly in my tale of
_Sir John Constantine_--I have had to pause and ask myself the
elementary question: Can such a story, if at once true and exemplary,
conclude otherwise than in sorrow?
The great artists in poetry and prose fiction seem to consent that it
cannot: and this, I think, not because--understanding love as they
do, with all its wonder and wild desire--they would conduct it to
life-long bliss if they could, but simply because they cannot fit it
into this muddy vesture of decay. They may dismiss us in the end
with peace and consolation:
And calm of mind, all passion spent.
And we know or have known that of its impulse among us lesser folk it
holifies and populates this world. But our own transience qualifies
it. Only when love here claims to be above the world--"All for Love,
and the World well Lost"--we feel that its exorbitance must wreck it
here and now, however it may shine hereafter. That is why all the
great legends of love--the tale of Tristan and Iseult, for instance--
are unhappy legends: as that is why they still tease us.
I hope these remarks will not be deemed too pompous for the preface
to a story in which true love is crossed by a soldier's sense of
honour. The theme is a variant on a great commonplace: and,
following my habit, I let the incidents and characters have their own
way without the author's comment or interference.
Q.
CONTENTS.
Chapter
PREFACE.
I. MALBROUCK S'EN VA-T'EN GUERRE.
II. A BIVOUAC IN THE FOREST.
III. TICONDEROGA.
IV. THE VOYAGEURS.
V. CONTAINS THE APOLOGUE OF MANABOZHO'S TOE.
VI. BATEESE.
VII. THE WATCHER IN THE PASS.
VIII. THE FARTHER SLOPE.
IX. MENEHWEHNA SETTLES ACCOUNTS.
X. BOISVEYRAC.
XI. FATHER LAUNOY HAS HIS DOUBTS.
XII. THE WHITE TUNIC.
XIII. FORT AMITIE.
XIV. AGAIN THE WHITE TUNIC.
XV. THE SECOND DESPATCH.
XVI. THE DISMISSAL.
XVII. FRONTENAC SHORE.
XVIII. NETAWIS.
XIX. THE LODGES IN THE SNOW.
XX. THE REVEILLE.
XXI. FORT AMITIE LEARNS ITS FATE.
XXII. DOMINIQUE.
XXIII. THE FLAGSTAFF TOWER.
XXIV. THE FORT SURRENDERS.
XXV. THE RAPIDS.
XXVI. DICK'S JUDGEMENT.
XXVII. PRES-DE-VILLE.
EPILOGUE--I.--HUDSON RIVER.
II.--THE PHANTOM GUARD.
FORT AMITY.
CHAPTER I.
MALBROUCK S'EN VA-T'EN GUERRE.
"So adieu, Jack, until we meet in Quebec! You have the start of
us, report says, and this may even find you drinking his
Majesty's health in Fort Carillon. Why not? You carry Howe,
and who carries Howe carries the eagles on his standards; or so
you announce in your last. Well, but have we, on our part, no
_vexillum?_ Brother Romulus presents his compliments to Brother
Remus, and begs leave to answer 'Wolfe!' 'Tis scarce
forty-eight hours since Wry-necked Dick brought his ships into
harbour with the Brigadier on board, and already I have seen him
and--what is more--fallen in love. 'What like is he?' says you.
'Just a sandy-haired slip of a man,' says I, 'with a cock nose':
but I love him, Jack, for he knows his business. We've a
professional at last. No more Pall Mall promenaders--no more
Braddocks. Loudons, Webbs! We live in the consulship of Pitt,
my lad--_deprome Caecubum_--we'll tap a cask to it in Quebec.
And if Abercromby's your Caesar--"
Here a bugle sounded, and Ensign John a Cleeve of the 46th Regiment
of Foot (Murray's) crushed his friend's letter into his pocket and
sprang off the woodpile where he had seated himself with the
regimental colours across his knees. He unfolded them from their
staff, assured himself that they hung becomingly--gilt tassels and
yellow silken folds--and stepped down to the lake-side where the
bateaux waited.
The scene is known to-day for one of the fairest in the world.
Populous cities lie near it and pour their holiday-makers upon it
through the summer season. Trains whistle along the shore under its
forests; pleasure-steamers, with music on their decks, shoot across
bays churned of old by the paddles of war-canoes; from wildernesses
where Indians lurked in ambush smile neat hotels, white-walled, with
green shutters and deep verandas; and lovers, wandering among the
hemlocks, happen on a clearing with a few turfed mounds, and seat
themselves on these last ruins of an ancient fort, nor care to
remember even its name. Behind them--behind the Adirondacks and the
Green Mountains--and pushed but a little way back in these hundred
and fifty years, lies the primeval forest, trodden no longer now by
the wasting redman, but untamed yet, almost unhandselled. And still,
as the holidaymakers leave it, winter closes down on the lake-side
and wraps it in silence, broken by the loon's cry or the crash of a
snow-laden tree deep in the forest--the same sounds, the same aching
silence, endured by French and English garrisons watching each other
and the winter through in Fort Carillon or Fort William Henry.
"The world's great age begins anew." . . . It begins anew, and
hourly, wherever hearts are high and youth sets out with bright eyes
to meet his fate. It began anew for Ensign John a Cleeve on this
morning of July 5, 1758; it was sounded up by bugles, shattering the
forest silence; it breathed in the wind of the boat's speed shaking
the silken flag above him. His was one of twelve hundred boats
spreading like brilliant water-fowl across the lake which stretched
for thirty miles ahead, gay with British uniforms, scarlet and gold,
with Highland tartans, with the blue jackets of the Provincials;
flash of oars, innumerable glints of steel, of epaulettes, of belt,
cross-belt and badge; gilt knops and tassels and sheen of flags.
Yonder went Blakeney's 27th Regiment, and yonder the Highlanders of
the Black Watch; Abercromby's 44th, Howe's 55th with their idolised
young commander, the 60th or Royal Americans in two battalions;
Gage's Light Infantry, Bradstreet's axemen and bateau-men, Starke's
rangers; a few friendly Indians--but the great Johnson was hurrying
up with more, maybe with five hundred; in all fifteen thousand men
and over. Never had America seen such an armament; and it went to
take a fort from three thousand Frenchmen.
No need to cover so triumphant an advance in silence! Why should not
the regimental bands strike up? For what else had we dragged them up
the Hudson from Albany and across the fourteen-mile portage to the
lake? Weary work with a big drum in so much brushwood! And play
they did, as the flotilla pushed forth and spread and left the
stockades far behind; stockades planted on the scene of last year's
massacre. Though for weeks before our arrival Bradstreet and his men
had been clearing and building, sights remained to nerve our arms and
set our blood boiling to the cry "Remember Fort William Henry!"
Its shores fade, and somewhere at the foot of the lake three thousand
Frenchmen are waiting for us (if indeed they dare to wait). Let the
bands play "Britons strike home!"
Play they did: drums tunding and bagpipes skirling as though Fort
Carillon (or Ticonderoga, as the Indians called it) would succumb
like another Jericho to their clamour. The Green Mountains tossed
its echoes to the Adirondacks, and the Adirondacks flung it back; and
under it, down the blue waterway toward the Narrows, went Ensign John
a Cleeve, canopied by the golden flag of the 46th.
The lake smiled at all his expectations and surpassed them.
He had imagined it a sepulchral sheet of water, sunk between
cavernous woods. And lo! it lay high in the light of day,
broad-rimmed, with the forests diminishing as they shelved down to
its waters. The mountains rimmed it, amethystine, remote, delicate
as carving, as vapours almost transparent; and within the rim it
twinkled like a great cup of champagne held high in a god's hand--so
high that John a Cleeve, who had been climbing ever since his
regiment left Albany, seemed lifted with all these flashing boats and
uniforms upon a platform where men were heroes, and all great deeds
possible, and the mere air laughed in the veins like wine.
Two heavy flat-boats ploughed alongside of his; deep in the bows and
yawing their sterns ludicrously. They carried a gun apiece, and the
artillerymen had laded them too far forward. To the 46th they were a
sufficiently good joke to last for miles. "Look at them up-tailed
ducks a-searching for worms! Guns? Who wants guns on this trip?
Take 'em home before they sink and the General loses his temper."
The crews grinned back and sweated and tugged, at every third drive
drenching the bowmen with spray, although not a breath of wind
rippled the lake's surface.
The boat ahead of John's carried Elliott the Senior Ensign of the
46th, with the King's colours--the flag of Union, drooping in stripes
of scarlet, white, and blue. On his right strained a boat's crew of
the New York regiment, with the great patroon, Philip Schuyler
himself, erect in the stern sheets and steering, in blue uniform and
three-cornered hat; too grand a gentleman to recognise our Ensign,
although John had danced the night through in the Schuylers' famous
white ball-room on the eve of marching from Albany, and had flung
packets of sweetmeats into the nursery windows at dawn and awakened
three night-gowned little girls to blow kisses after him as he took
his way down the hill from the Schuyler mansion. That was a month
ago. To John it seemed years since he had left Albany and its
straight sidewalks dappled with maple shade: but the patroon's face
was the same, sedately cheerful now as then when he had moved among
his guests with a gracious word for each and a brow unclouded by the
morrow.
Men like Philip Schuyler do not suffer to-morrows to perturb them,
since to them every morrow dawns big with duties, responsibilities,
risks. John caught himself wondering to what that calm face looked
forward, at the lake-end, where the forests slept upon their shadows
and the mountains descended and closed like fairy gates! For John
himself Fame waited beyond those gates. Although in the last three
or four weeks he had endured more actual hardships than in all his
life before, he had enjoyed them thoroughly and felt that they were
hardening him into a man. He understood now why the tales he had
read at school in his Homer and Ovid--tales of Ulysses, of Hercules
and Perseus--were never sorrowful, however severe the heroes'
labours. For were they not undergone in just such a shining
atmosphere as this?
His mind ran on these ancient tales, and so, memory reverting
to Douai and the seminary class-room in which he had first
construed them, he began unconsciously to set the lines of an old
repetition-lesson to the stroke of the oars.
Angustam amice pauperiem pati
robustus acri militia puer
condiscat et Parthos feroces
vexet eques metuendus hasta:
Vitamque sub divo et trepidis agat
in rebus . . .
--And so on, with halts and breaks where memory failed him.
_Parthos_--these would be the Indians--Abenakis, Algonquins, Hurons,
whomsoever Montcalm might have gathered yonder in the woods with him.
_Dulce et decorum est_--yes, to be sure; in a little while he would
be facing death for his country; but he did not feel in the least
like dying. A sight of Philip Schuyler's face sent him sliding into
the next ode--_Justum et tenacem_ . . . _non voltus instantis
tyranni_. . . . John a Cleeve would have started had the future
opened for an instant and revealed the face of the tyrant Philip
Schuyler was soon to defy: and Schuyler would have started too.
Then John remembered his cousin's letter, and pulled it from his
pocket again. . . .
"And if Abercromby's your Caesar--which is as much as I'll risk
saying in a letter which may be opened before it reaches you--
why, you have Howe to clip his parade wig as he's already docked
the men's coat-tails. So here's five pounds on it, and let it
be a match--Wolfe against Howe, and shall J. a C. or R. M. be
first in Quebec? And another five pounds, if you will, on our
epaulettes: for I repeat to you, this is Pitt's consulship, and
promotion henceforth comes to men as they deserve it. Look at
Wolfe, sir--a man barely thirty-two--and the ball but just set
rolling! Wherefore I too am resolved to enter Quebec a
Brigadier-General, who now go carrying the colours of the 17th
to Louisbourg. We but wait Genl. Amherst, who is expected
daily, and then yeo-heave-ho for the nor'ard! Farewell, dearest
Jack! Given in this our camp at Halifax, the twelfth of May,
1758, in the middle of a plaguy fog, by your affect. cousin--
R. Montgomery."
John smiled as he folded up the letter, so characteristic of Dick.
Dick was always in perfect spirits, always confident in himself.
It was characteristic of Dick, too, to call himself Romulus and his
friend Remus, meaning no slight, simply because he always took
himself for granted as the leading spirit. It had always been so
even in the days when they had gone birds'-nesting or rook-shooting
together in the woods around John's Devonshire home. Always John had
yielded the lead to this freckled Irish cousin (the kinship was, in
fact, a remote one and lay on their mother's side through the
Ranelagh family); and years had but seemed to widen the three months'
gap in their ages.
Dick's parents were Protestant; and Dick had gone to Trinity College,
Dublin, passing thence to an ensigncy in the 17th (Forbes') Regiment.
The a Cleeves, on the other hand, had always been Roman Catholics,
and by consequence had lived for generations somewhat isolated among
the Devon gentry, their neighbours. When John looked back on his
boyhood, his prevailing impressions were of a large house set low in
a valley, belted with sombre dripping elms and haunted by Roman
Catholic priests--some fat and rosy--some lean and cadaverous--but
all soft-footed; of an insufficiency of light in the rooms; and of a
sad lack of fellow-creatures willing to play with him. His parents
were old, and he had been born late to them--twelve years after
Philip, his only brother and the heir. From the first his mother had
destined him for the priesthood, and a succession of priests had been
his tutors: but--What instinct is there in the sacerdotal mind which
warns it off some cases as hopeless from the first? Here was a
child, docile, affectionate, moody at times, but eager to please and
glad to be rewarded by a smile; bred among priests and designed to be
a priest; yet amid a thousand admonishments, chastisements,
encouragements, blandishments, the child--with a child's sure
instinct for sincerity--could not remember having been spoken to
sincerely, with heart open to heart. Years later, when in the
seminary at Douai the little worm of scepticism began to stir in his
brain and grow, feeding on the books of M. Voltaire and other
forbidden writings, he wondered if his many tutors had been, one and
all, unconsciously prescient. But he was an honest lad. He threw up
the seminary, returned to Cleeve Court, and announced with tears to
his mother (his father had died two years before) that he could not
be a priest. She told him, stonily, that he had disappointed her
dearest hopes and broken her heart. His brother--the Squire now, and
a prig from his cradle--took him out for a long walk, argued with him
as with a fractious child, and, without attending to his answers,
finally gave him up as a bad job. So an ensigncy was procured, and
John a Cleeve shipped from Cork to Halifax, to fight the French in
America. At Cork he had met and renewed acquaintance with his Irish
cousin, Dick Montgomery. They had met again in Halifax, which they
reached in separate transports, and had passed the winter there in
company. Dick clapped his cousin on the back and laughed impartially
at his doubts and the family distress. Dick had no doubts; always
saw clearly and made up his mind at once; was, moreover, very little
concerned with religion (beyond damning the Pope), and a great deal
concerned with soldiering. He fascinated John, as the practical man
usually fascinates the speculative. So Remus listened to Romulus and
began to be less contrite in his home-letters. To the smallest love
at home (of the kind that understands, or tries to understand) he
would have responded religiously; but he had found such nowhere save
in Dick--who, besides, was a gallant young gentleman, and scrupulous
on all points of honour. He took fire from Dick; almost worshipped
him; and wished now, as the flotilla swept on and the bands woke
louder echoes from the narrowing shore, that Dick were here to see
how the last few weeks had tanned and hardened him.
The troops came to land before nightfall at Sabbath Day Point,
twenty-five miles down the lake; stretched themselves to doze for a
while in the dry undergrowth; re-embarked under the stars and, rowing
on through the dawn, reached the lake-end at ten in the morning.
Here they found the first trace of the enemy--a bridge broken in two
over the river which drains into Lake Champlain. A small French
rear-guard loitered here; but two companies of riflemen were landed
and drove it back into the woods, without loss. The boats discharged
the British unopposed, who now set forward afoot through the forest
to follow the left bank of the stream, which, leaving the lake
tranquilly, is broken presently by stony rapids and grows smooth
again only as it nears its new reservoir. Smooth, rapid, and smooth
again, it sweeps round a long bend; and this bend the British
prepared to follow, leaving a force to guard the boats.
Howe led, feeling forward with his light infantry; and the army
followed in much the same disposition they had held down the lake;
regulars in the centre, provincials on either flank; a long scarlet
body creeping with broad blue wings--or so it might have appeared to
a bird with sight able to pierce the overlacing boughs. To John a
Cleeve, warily testing the thickets with the butt of his staff and
pulling the thorns aside lest they should rip its precious silken
folds, the advance, after the first ten minutes, seemed to keep no
more order than a gang of children pressing after blackberries.
Somewhere on his right the rapids murmured; men struggled beside
him--now a dozen redcoats, now a few knowing Provincials who had lost
their regiments, but were cocksure of the right path. And always--
before, behind and all around him--sounded the calls of the
parade-ground:--"Sub-divisions--left front--mark time! Left, half
turn! Three files on the left--left turn--wheel!--files to the
front!" Singular instructions for men grappling with a virgin
forest!
If the standing trees were bad, the fallen ones--and there seemed to
be a diabolical number of them--were ten times worse. John was
straddling the trunk of one and cursing vehemently when a sound
struck on his ears, more intelligible than any parade-call. It came
back to him from the front: the sharp sound of musketry--two volleys.
The parade-calls ceased suddenly all around him. He listened, still
sitting astride the trunk. One or two redcoats leaped it, shouting
as they leaped, and followed the sound, which crackled now as though
the whole green forest were on fire. By and by, as he listened, a
mustachioed man in a short jacket--one of Gage's light infantry--came
bursting through the undergrowth, capless, shouting for a surgeon.
"What's wrong in front?" asked John, as the man--scarcely regarding
him--laid his hands on the trunk to vault it.
"Faith, and I don't know, redcoat; except that they've killed him.
Whereabouts is the General?"
"Who's killed?"
"The best man amongst us: Lord Howe!"
A second runner, following, shouted the same news; and the two passed
on together in search of the General. But already the tidings had
spread along the front of the main body, as though wafted by a sudden
wind through the undergrowth. Already, as John sat astride his log
endeavouring to measure up the loss, to right and left of him bugles
were sounding the halt. It seemed that as yet the mass of troops
scarcely took in the meaning of the rumour, but awoke under the shock
only to find themselves astray and without bearings.
John's first sense was of a day made dark at a stroke. If this thing
had happened, then the glory had gone out of the campaign. The army
would by and by be marching on, and would march again to-morrow; the
drill cries would begin again, the dull wrestle through swamps and
thickets; and in due time the men would press down upon the French
forts and take them. But where would be the morning's cheerfulness,
the spirit of youth which had carried the boats down the lake amid
laughter and challenges to race, and at the landing-place set the men
romping like schoolboys? The longer John considered, the more he
marvelled at the hopes he and all the army had been building on this
young soldier--and not the army only, but every colony. Messengers
even now would be heading up the lake as fast as paddles could drive
them, to take horse and gallop smoking to the Hudson, to bear the
tidings to Albany, and from Albany ride south with it to New York, to
Philadelphia, to Richmond. "Lord Howe killed!" From that long track
of dismay John called his thoughts back to himself and the army.
Howe--dead? He, that up to an hour ago had been the pivot of so many
activities, the centre on which veterans rested their confidence, and
from which young soldiers drew their high spirits, the one commander
whom the Provincials trusted and liked because he understood them;
for whom and for their faith in him the regulars would march till
their legs failed them! Wonderful how youth and looks and gallantry
and brains together will grip hold of men and sway their
imaginations! But how rare the alliance, and on how brittle a hazard
resting! An unaimed bullet--a stop in the heart's pulsation--and the
star we followed has gone out, God knows whither. The hope of
fifteen thousand men lies broken and sightless, dead of purpose, far
from home. They assure us that nothing in this world perishes, nor
in the firmament above it: but we look up at the black space where a
star has been quenched and know that something has failed us which
to-morrow will not bring again.
It was learnt afterwards that he had been killed by the first shot in
the campaign. Montcalm had thrown out three hundred rangers
overnight under Langy to feel the British advance: but so dense was
the tangle that even these experienced woodmen went astray during the
night and, in hunting for tracks, blundered upon Howe's light
infantry at unawares. In the moment of surprise each side let fly
with a volley, and Howe fell instantly, shot through the heart.
The British bivouacked in the woods that night. Toward dawn John a
Cleeve stretched himself, felt for his arms, and lay for a while
staring up at a solitary star visible through the overhanging boughs.
He was wondering what had awakened him, when his ears grew aware of a
voice in the distance, singing--either deep in the forest or on some
hillside to the northward: a clear tenor voice shaken out on the
still air with a _tremolo_ such as the Provencals love. It sang to
the army and to him:--
Malbrouck s'en-va-t'en guerre:
Mironton, mironton, mirontaine!
Malbrouck s'en va-t'en guerre:
--Ne sais quand reviendra!