Читать книгу Rabble in Arms: A Chronicle of Arundel and the Burgoyne Invasion - Kenneth Roberts - Страница 19

Table of Contents

If St. John’s had been a madhouse during early June, it became something far worse in the next few nightmare days.

First came the smallpox regiments, sent back from Sorel to die or get well—Greaton’s Massachusetts regiment and Poor’s New Hampshire regiment. For the most part they had inoculated themselves, so that some of them could walk, and some had to be carried; but in the regiments there were less than three hundred men able to be out of the hospital. They had the look of men dug out of graves, as they dragged themselves into town.

Hard on their heels came the reports that Sullivan’s new regiments had been hacked to pieces at Three Rivers. We had the news piecemeal, some from Ellen Phipps, who had been there when it happened; some from deserters, who pretended to be sick but weren’t, and were hopeful of making their way on foot through the wilderness that lay between St. John’s and Albany; and some from Canadians, who turned their coats with the news and now jeered at us openly.

They had gone down the river, those beautiful regiments, eager to fight and confident of smashing their way to Quebec through any force that might oppose them. In the dead of night they had landed a few miles from Three Rivers. General Thompson and Colonel St. Clair, who led the advance, had picked up a Canadian Frenchman as a guide, and the guide led them into a swamp, through which they struggled for hours, up to their thighs in mud and a tangle of roots that fairly wrenched their clothes from them.

They escaped from the first swamp only to stumble into a second. When dawn came, they were still far from Three Rivers; and at Three Rivers, rushed there the night before from Quebec, was not only the whole British fleet, but freshly arrived transports carrying a veritable army—an army that had somehow received word of the coming of the Americans, so that the men were trooping ashore, boatload after boatload, even as the Americans marched up to the attack.

Sullivan’s troops attacked, only to be overwhelmed by numbers; and when they broke and ran for their boats, the boats were gone. They took to the swamps, foodless and exhausted. General Thompson and Colonel Irvine were captured by the British; and when those that were left of these once-proud regiments at last struggled into Sorel, they were as destitute and as ragged and as dejected as the meanest men in that sorry camp.

... At the first report of the disaster, I had gone to the Château de St. Auge to urge Marie de Sabrevois to set out for Albany as soon as Ellen Phipps should return from Three Rivers. This time I was admitted without question; and when Marie de Sabrevois entered the small bare room in which I waited, my heart leaped, for Ellen Phipps was with her.

I knew from the strange and unexpected thumping beneath my smock that Ellen had been more in my mind than I had realised, and that I had feared she might come to some harm on her journey to Three Rivers. I would even have liked to say something of the sort to her, but since she hardly looked at me when she came in, and since her aunt was there, I felt somewhat fearful of speaking to her at all, and so did not.

Indeed, I had no time; for Marie de Sabrevois had no more than set eyes on me and nodded her golden head in greeting than she nearly gravelled me with a sudden question.

“Where’s your brother?” she asked, and there was a haughty look about her, as if she were provoked.

“I don’t rightly know,” I said. “He takes his orders from General Arnold. He might be in Montreal, and then again he might not.”

“Haven’t you seen him recently?” she persisted.

She and Nathaniel, I realised, must have met when she was journeying from Quebec to St. John’s. She must have expected to see him again on the day when Cap and I had sent him back to Montreal. Apparently my hesitation in replying told her what she wished to know; for she dropped the subject like a hot coal and turned to another. She was a smart woman: the smartest, I think, I ever knew.

“You had a message for Ellen’s brother, hadn’t you?” she asked. “You can tell her now, and she’ll see he gets it.”

I had clean forgotten Ellen’s brother as an excuse to ask for her, and for a second my mind churned like a mill-wheel in a freshet. Then I found an answer. “Yes,” I said, “we had word that Congress had resolved to raise three thousand Indians for service in Canada, and I thought Ellen’s brother might like to know about it.”

“Oh, indeed!” she said. “Three thousand Indians! Three thou—Who was it told you Ellen had a brother?”

“Why, Ellen told me,” I said. I looked at Ellen, hoping to have a glance from her, so that I could see whether the light in her eyes was, as I remembered it, like sunlight on my sextant; but she was busy creasing a fold in her coarse gray dress.

Marie de Sabrevois laughed. It was a pleasant laugh, musical and rippling; but my imagination found derision in it. I wished I had kept her in ignorance of how I had heard of Joseph Phipps.

If she had contempt for me, however, she let none of it show in her face, which was friendly and admiring. “Ellen’s brother would think twice, no doubt,” she said, “before joining those poor soldiers that ran from Three Rivers. Ellen saw them, running before the guns of the British ships. Tell him, Ellen.”

Ellen continued to crease the folds of her gray dress. In a low voice she told what she had seen from the house in which she and her nun-companion had taken refuge on their return journey—American troops, mud-stained, dog-tired, like sheep without a leader, bombarded by the British fleet whenever they came out from the swamps on to the river road. “They fought with their muskets against the ships’ cannons,” she said. “We could even hear the soldiers on the ships laughing when the Americans fired.”

“Poor men! Poor men!” Marie de Sabrevois sighed. “How could they be expected to stand against England’s finest regiments!”

“They’d have stood against them, and whipped ’em, too,” I reminded her, “if Arnold had led ’em, or if they hadn’t trusted one of these pig-tailed Frenchmen!” I waited eagerly for her reply, but she made none.

“Well,” I said at last, “that’s what I came to talk about. You spoke of going to Albany with Ellen, I wanted to tell you what had happened, in case you didn’t know about it, so you could get started. It wouldn’t be pleasant for either of you, would it, if you were caught in a retreat?”

“No, it would not,” Marie de Sabrevois said, “and it’s kind of you to have us in mind. When do you think we should start?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “As soon as you can.”

She nodded. “Yes, I can see you’re right. If there should be a retreat, the town might be burned or looted. We’ll do what you say.” Then, while I was racking my brains for a way to get a word with Ellen alone, she added musingly: “We’re both so sorry, my little girl here and I, that your brother is away; that we can’t see him whenever we wish—which would be often, of course. Do you think he’ll be coming back to St. John’s soon?”

“It’s war time!” I reminded her. “Men can’t come and go as they like, Mademoiselle de Sabrevois.” Then, with a grudging sort of gallantry I looked at her significantly and said, “Otherwise I have no doubt Nathaniel would be in St. John’s all the time.”

“Ah, you’ve noticed it too?” she asked with a sly air of amusement, and to my great puzzlement, she laughed a tinkling laugh and glanced at Ellen. “These young people!” she said, and added, “Well, I cannot see the harm. Ellen likes your brother very much—don’t you, Ellen?”

Ellen acquiescently murmured something inaudible to me. Her aunt smiled knowingly, gave me a merry glance, a look benevolent, as people do when they teasingly encourage an affair of young love. At that, Ellen blushed.

My heart suddenly felt weighted with enough buckshot to sink it to the pit of my stomach; and I thanked God I had not had the misfortune to become overly attached to this brown-haired girl. She had reminded me of my sister Jane, being so different in every way. That, I told myself, was probably why she had come to occupy so large a part of my thoughts. Certainly my interest was nothing more than brotherly; nothing more!

“Well,” I said cheerfully, “I’ll keep an eye out for Nathaniel. I guess we can probably contrive for Ellen to see him somehow.”

Ellen glanced up at me then with an odd expression; but since neither she nor her aunt had anything to say, I left the Château de St. Auge, wondering why Ellen’s look had touched a familiar chord in my memory. I was half-way across the river before I remembered having seen the same look on my sister Jane’s face when she was minded to thrust out her tongue at me.

In my heart I was not surprised that Ellen was attracted by Nathaniel; for I had often noticed that his cultivated voice and the crinkle in his brown hair made him sought after by every lady who saw him. We were supposed to look alike: yet seldom indeed did any woman ever give me a second glance when he was near; or at any other time, either, for that matter.

I was saved from overmuch thinking, however, by the voice of Cap Huff, which I began to hear long before I reached the shore. “Where the hell you been?” Cap shouted. “Get up to headquarters quick! Arnold’s in town! He wants you!”

... To hear Cap talk, Arnold was for ever in a passion over something or other; but the truth was that he was as kindly, forbearing and good-humoured a gentleman, under most circumstances, as I have ever seen—even under conditions that would drive the bulk of his critics into an apoplexy, especially those who have criticised him most bitterly.

When I rapped on the door of the dingy headquarters room in which I had talked to General Sullivan two weeks before, I expected to find Arnold in a rage over the defeat of the new troops and the supplies Hazen had refused to handle at Chambly, but the voice that bade me enter was a mild one. The General was alone in the room, writing at a rickety deal table. He cocked an eye at me as I came in, and said: “I’ll be only five minutes—this letter to Schuyler——” He went on writing, a half smile on his dark face, and his broad-shouldered figure crouched tensely over the table as if he intended to spring up the moment he had finished.

I have known hard workers in my day, but never a worker like Arnold. He could ride fifty miles; talk for hours at a council of war, cajoling the stubborn and bulldozing the weak-spined; then lead troops into battle and ride another fifty miles; and on top of it all sit down and write a dozen letters with a hand as steady and a brain as clear as though he had just risen from sleep.

I wondered, as I watched him, how any man could call him a horse-jockey, as Nathaniel had heard him called; for he was handsome, and there was a proud look to him—a look of distinction, that made it clear why he should be admired by such persons of breeding as General Schuyler and General Washington, and disliked by boors like Bedel and Hazen.

He pushed back from the table at last, folded his letter and gave it a thump with his fist.

“So you got the vessel off!”

“Thanks to Tom Bickford,” I said. “Tom did it. I had to stop.”

He wagged his head and looked distressed. “Poor Sullivan! He must have been in a state, pitchforked into this mess! What was it he set you to doing?”

When I told him, he raised his eyebrows. “Hardly necessary, was it? The Canadians are with us if we’re winning and against us if we’re losing. And wherever we lose an inch, Montgolfier contrives for every Canadian in the world to hear about it. I’ll say this for Montgolfier: he always makes that inch sound like a mile!”

The name Montgolfier struck me hard. That was the name in the letter Nathaniel had brought to Madame St. Auge from Marie de Sabrevois. I had it by heart. “To M. Montgolfier,” she had written, “I send my respects, and to you eight thousand kisses.”

“Who’s Montgolfier?” I asked.

Arnold growled a little. “He’s director of the Seminary of St. Sulpice in Montreal, and if he could arrange it, he’d have every last American strangled in his bed this night! He gets information from all parts of Canada and America: yes, and sends it out, too; but I’ll be damned if I know how! If I did——” He made a twisting motion with his fist: the motion of wringing a bird’s neck.

“At all events,” he went on, “it’ll be no loss to Sullivan if I set you to doing something else; and that’s exactly what I’ll do. De Woedtke was told to fortify this town, and the drunken sot hasn’t done it. To-day I laid out lines to the north. Works must be thrown up. We’ve got to have some sort of breastworks and trenches here in case of a retreat; but there don’t seem to be men to build ’em.

“Well, we’ve got to find men. They tell me deserters from Sullivan’s camp are going through here fifty a day. That’s your task. Round up deserters and put ’em to work. Here!” He reached for his pen and scribbled on a sheet of paper: then tossed it to me. It read:

“Capt. Peter Merrill has authority to employ unattached soldiers on fortifications. This is for the good of the Colonies, and Capt. Merrill is authorised to use all necessary force.