BACK to his negroes and mules and carts and scrapers goes the General,
and sets them to renewed hard labor on those immortal mud walls which
he will never get too high. Those cotton bales, so distressing to
Papa Plauche and the “Fathers,” are eliminated, at which that paternal
commander breathes freer. The hunting-shirt men, with each going down
of the sun, resume their nighthawk parties, which swoop upon English
sentinels, taking lives and guns.
The English themselves are a prey to dejection. The foe against whom
they war is so strange, so savage, so sleepless, so coldly inveterate!
Also those incessant night attacks sap their manhood. They build no
fires now, but sit in darkness through the nights. A fire is but the
attractive prelude to a shower of nocturnal lead, and the woefully
lengthening list of dead and wounded tells strongly against it. To even
light a cigar after dark is an approach to suicide; and so the English
wrap themselves in blackness--very miserable! Their earlier horror of
the hunting-shirt men is increased; for they have three times studied
backwoods marksmanship from the standpoint of targets, and the dumb
chill about their heart-roots is a testimony to its awful accuracy.
The General, who reads humanity as astronomers read the heavens, is
not wanting in notions of the gloom which envelops the English like a
funeral pall.
“Coffee,” says he, at one of those famous war councils of two, “in their
souls we have them beaten. They will fight again; but only from pride.
Their hope is gone, Coffee; we have broken their hearts.”
The reports of the General's scouts teach him that the English will
put a force across the river. In anticipation, he dispatches Commodore
Patterson, with a mixed command of soldiers and sailors, to fortify
the west bank. Commodore Patterson emulates the General's four-foot
mud walls and throws up a redoubt of his own, mounting thereon twelve
eighteen-pounders taken from the Louisiana.
He tries one on the English opposite. The result is gratifying; the gum
pitches a solid shot all across the Mississippi and into the English
lines.
Eight days pass by in Indian file, and Sir Edward Pakenham with his
English feels that, for his safety as much as his honor, he must attack
the General, whose mud walls increase with each new sunset. The General
foresees this, and has reports of Sir Edward's movements brought him
every hour.
On the morning of the eighth the General's scouts wake him at two
o'clock and say that the English are astir. He is instantly abroad;
the word goes down the line; by four o'clock every rifle is ready, each
hunting-shirt man at his post.
The weak spot, the one at which Sir Edward will level his utmost force,
is where the General's line finds an end in the moss-hung cypress swamp.
It is there he stations the reliable Coffee with his hunting-shirt men.
To the rear, as a reserve, is General Adair with what Kentuckians the
good, unerring offices of those night-prowling hunting-shirt men have
armed at the red expense of the English.
In the center is the redoubtable Papa Plauche and his “Fathers.” The
“Fathers” are between the pirates Dominique and Bluche and Captain
Humphries of the regular artillery.
Papa Plauche is rejoiced at being thus thrust into the center.
“For my heroes!” cries Papa Plauche, in a speech which he makes the
“Fathers,” the center is the heart--the home of honor! “On us, my
Fathers, devolves the main defense of our beloved city, where sleep our
wives and children. Wherefore, be brave as vigilant--vigilant as brave!”
Papa Plauche's voice is husky, but not from fear. No, it is husky by
reason of a cold which, despite certain woolen nightcaps wherewith the
excellent Madam Plauche equipped him for the field, he has contracted in
sleeping damply among the stubble and the river fogs.
Six hundred yards in front of the General's mud walls, and near the
river, are a huddle of plantation buildings. The English, he
argues, will mask a part of their advance with these structures. The
forethoughtful General prepares for this, and has furnaces heating shot,
to set those buildings blazing at the psychological moment.
Also, in response to a comic cynicism not usual with him, he has out
the brass band of Papa Plauche, with instructions to strike up “Yankee
Doodle” as the first gun is fired. The band, in compliment to the
General, has been privily rehearsing “'Possum up a Gum Tree,” which
it understands is the national anthem of Tennessee, and offers to play
that.
The General thanks the band, but declines “'Possum up a Gum Tree.” It
will not be understood by the English; whereas “Yankee Doodle” they have
known and loathed for forty years.
“Give 'em 'Yankee Doodle,'” says the General. “Since they are so eager to
dance, we'll furnish the proper music.”
Sir Edward is as soon afoot as is the General. He finds his English
steady yet dull; they will fight, but not with spirit. As the General
assured the conferring Coffee, the hunting-shirt men, with their long
rifles like wands of death, have broken the English heart.
The English are to advance in three columns; General Keane on the right
with Rennie's Rifles, in the center Dale's Highlanders, on the left,
where the main attack is to be launched, General Gibbs, with three
thousand of the pride of England at his back. General Lambert is to hold
himself in the rear of General Gibbs, with two regiments as a reserve.
As the columns form, there are eighty-five hundred of the English;
against which the-General opposes a scanty thirty-two hundred. And
yet, upon those overpowering eighty-five hundred hangs a silence like a
sadness, as though they are about to go marching to their graves.
The solemn fear in which the English hold the hunting-shirt men finds
pathetic evidence. As the columns wheel into position, Colonel Dale of
the Highlanders gives a letter and his watch to the surgeon.
“Carry them to my wife,” says he.
“I'll peel for no American!” and twenty-four hours later he is buried in
that cloak.
The English stand to their arms, and wait the breaking of day. Slowly
the minutes drag their leaden length along; morning comes at last.
With the first streaks of livid dawn, a Congreve rocket flashes skyward
from Sir Edward's headquarters. The rocket is the English signal to
advance. In a moment, General Gibbs, General Keane, and Colonel Dale
with his “praying” Highlanders are in motion.
The signal rocket uncouples thousands upon thousands of fellow rockets;
the air is on fire with them as they blaze aloft in mighty arcs, to fall
and explode among the hunting-shirt men.
“Toys for children, boys,” cries the General, as he observes
the hunting-shirt men watching the flaming shower with curious,
non-understanding eyes; “toys for children! They'll hurt no one!”
The General is right. Those congreve rockets are supposed to be as
deadly as artillery. Like many another commodity of war, however, meant
primarily to fatten contractors, they prove as innocuous as so many
huge fireflies. The hunting-shirt men laugh at them. The battery of
eighteen-pounders, wherewith the English second that flight of rockets,
is a more serious affair.
As the sun shoots up above the cypress swamp and rolls back the mists
of morning, the English make a gallant picture. The dull yellow of the
stubble in front of the General's line is gay with splotches of red and
gray and green and tartan, the colors of the various English corps.
The hunting-shirt men, however, are not given much space for admiration;
for, with one grand crash, the big guns go into action and the
red-green-gray-tartan picture is swallowed up in powder smoke. Also,
it is now that Papa Plauche's band blares forth “Yankee Doodle,” while
those anticipatory hot shot set fire to the plantation buildings. As the
latter burst out at door and window in smoke and flames, Colonel Rennie
and his riflemen are driven into the open. The conflagration gets much
in the English way, and spoils the drill-room nicety of Sir Edward's
onset as he has it planned.
Colonel Rennie, being capable of brisk decision, makes the best of a
disconcerting situation. When the flames and smoke from those fired
plantation buildings drive him into the open before he is ready, he
promptly orders a charge. This his riflemen obey; for the inexorable
Patterson, across the river, is already upon them with those
eighteen-pounders, and his solid shot are mowing ghastly swaths through
the rifle-green ranks, tossing dead men in the air like old bags. With
so little inducement to stand still, the riflemen hail that word to
charge as a relief, and head for the General's mud walls at double
quick.
The oncoming Colonel Rennie and his English are met full in the face by
a tempest of grape, from Major Humphrey and the pirates Dominique and
Bluche, which throws them backward upon themselves. They bunch up
and clot into lumps of disorder, like clumps of demoralized sheep in
rifle-green. At that, Commodore Patterson serves his eighteen-pounders
with multiplied speed, and the great balls tear those sheep-clumps to
pieces, staining with crimson the rifle-green. The English marvel at
the artillery work of the General's men, whose every shot comes on, well
aimed and low, bringing death in its whistling wake.
They should reflect: The theory, not to say the eye, which aims a
squirrel rifle will point a cannon.
Colonel Rennie, when his English recoil, keeps on--face red with grief
and rage.
“It's my time to die!” says he to Captain Henry. “But before I die, I
shall at least see the inside of those mud walls.”
Colonel Rennie is wrong. A bullet finds his brain as he lifts his head
above the breastworks, and he slips back dead in the ditch outside.
Major King and Captain Henry die with him, pierced each by a handful of
bullets.
When the English flinch and Colonel Rennie falls, the bugler--a boy of
fourteen--climbs a tree, not one hundred yards from the General's line.
Perched among the branches, he sounds his dauntless charges. The General
gives orders to let the boy alone. And so the little bugler, protected
by the word of the General, sings his shrill onsets to the last.
Finally an artillery-man goes out to him.
“Come down, my son!” says the cannoneer. “The war's about over!”
The little bugler comes down, and is at once taken to the fatherly heart
of Papa Plauche, who declares him to be a sucking Hector, and is for
adopting him as his son on the spot, but is restrained by thoughts of
Madam Plauche.
Sir Edward's main assault, with General Gibbs, meets no fairer fortune
than falls to Colonel Rennie by the river. Confusion prevails on the
threshold of the movement; for Colonel Mullins with his Forty-fourth
refuses to go forward. Later he will be courtmartialed, and dismissed in
disgrace. Just now, however, the recreant makes a shameful tangle of
the English van. As a quickest method of setting the tangle straight,
General Gibbs, as did Colonel Rennie, orders a charge. The column moves
forward, the mutinous Forty-fourth on the right flank, led by its major.
General Gibbs advances, brushing with the shoulder of his corps,
the cypress swamp. Behind the mud walls in his front, the steady
hunting-shirt men are waiting. The General is there, to give the latter
patience and hold them in even check.
“Easy, boys!” he cries. “Remember your ranges! Don't fire until they are
within two hundred yards!”
On rush the English. At six hundred yards they are met by the fire of
the artillery. They heed it not, but press sullenly forward, closing up
the gaps in their ranks, where the solid shot go crashing through, as
fast as made. Five hundred yards, four hundred, three hundred! Still
they come! Two hundred yards!
And now the hunting-shirt men! A line of fire unending glances from
right to left and left to right, along the crest of those mud walls, and
Death begins his reaping. The head of the English column burns away, as
though thrust into a furnace! The column wavers and welters like a red
ship in a murky sea of smoke! It pauses, falteringly--disdaining to fly,
yet unable to advance!
“Forward, men!” shouts General Gibbs. “This is the way you should go!”
As he points with his sword to those terrible mud walls, he falls
riddled by the hunting-shirt men.