A Passionate Girl (39 page)

What a glorious sight that was, the backs of those red coats. They scampered pell-mell, flinging away guns and packs, screaming like frightened children. It was hard to believe they were the same confident, cheering soldiers who had advanced so bravely only minutes before. They had thought the contemptible Irish would run at the first volley. Their bravery was born of prejudice and ignorance.

I found myself cheering like a madwoman. “We beat them, we beat them!” I screamed. I sprang up on the stone wall and leaped off into Tom Gallaher's arms. Battle lust, battle madness, I was drunk with it.

Heavy firing continued for a few more minutes on the left. Some of the companies that had made the charge let the rest continue the pursuit of the Canadian center and swung to cut off the Redcoats who had attempted to out-flank our position in the maple trees. This they did handily, turning that branch of the Canadian army into frantic fugitives like the rest, while a half dozen threw down their guns and surrendered.

Five more minutes and it was over. Not a sound but an occasional triumphant yell and a random shot from far down the road. “Now we must go to work,” Tom Gallaher said.

“What?” I said blankly. In my frenzy I had forgotten he was a doctor, why we were here.

“Go to work,” he said. He took off his coat, rolled up his sleeves, and took a white apron from the rear of the wagon. He gave it to me and tied another around his waist. He handed me a box containing opium pills and bandages. We walked slowly down the line of the rifle pits. We heard a groan. In the ditch lay my red-haired friend, Captain Hennessy. He had been shot through the face. His dead eyes stared at me in a sort of ghastly surprise. Beside him writhed another man, clutching his belly. Blood trickled through his fingers.

“Oh, my God,” I gasped and turned away. I lurched past Tom Gallaher, the ground heaving beneath me, the blue sky turning black and purple. He grabbed my arm and cuffed me in the face. He was a muscular man. Except for the Ku Klux whip, I never felt such pain.

“If you can cheer for them, you can bandage them,” he said.

I clutched my aching cheek, too stunned to be angry.

“I can't help it, I—”

“You can help it,” he said, and struck me again.

“You—you bastard,” I cried.

“Precisely,” he said, with a cold smile. “That is precisely what you must be in this business. Now cut away his shirt and trousers and hold him while I probe for the bullet.”

He handed me a scissors. With a hand so steady I could not believe it, I cut away the bloody cloth and confronted the torn red ugliness of the wound. Dr. Gallaher knelt down, the steel scalpel in his hand. “If I can get the bullet out before it works too far into him, it will be all to the good. Give him an opium pill.”

I popped one into the man's mouth, and Dr. Bastard went to work. The man clung to me, groaning in agony. He was about thirty, a thickset fellow. I asked him his name. He said it was Doyle. He had been in the Civil War from Bull Run to Appomattox with never a scratch. He had a wife and child in New York. “Oh, Jaysus, I know the belly's bad, is it bad, Doctor?” he gasped.

“You'll be fine,” Dr. Gallaher said with his empty smile. He called to some men from Doyle's company and ordered them to carry him into the brick house.

“He'll be dead before morning,” Gallaher said as soon as Doyle was out of earshot.

So we proceeded across the battlefield in the blazing heat of Sunday, the third of June, closing the eyes of the dead like poor Hennessy and probing wounds, bandaging them. We treated friend and foe alike as we came to them. Around the maple grove there were a half dozen Canadians either dead or badly wounded. I was shocked by their youth. I asked one of the least wounded, a blond red-cheeked boy so pretty he could have passed for a woman if he wore skirts, how old he was. “Seventeen,” he said.

“Good God,” I said, “what are you doing here?”

He glared at me. “Defending my country,” he said.

By the time we reached the field where the Canadians had tried to form their squares against Dan's cavalry feint, my artificial calm, created by the shock of Tom Gallaher's slaps, was beginning to crumble. He saw it and began another shock treatment. He told me how he had sat on the porch last night and imagined himself in bed with me, slowly seducing me, touch by kiss by touch. It was described with cold intensity, with no detail left unimagined. Yet it did not seem in the least obscene.

“
And then I took the nipple of your left breast and placed it in my mouth and rotated my tongue against it,
” he whispered and simultaneously felt for the bullet in the breast of a half-conscious young Canadian.

We gazed down at the crumpled figure of our color bearer, wrapped in the folds of his green flag. “
Your mons veneris was as warm and soft as the inside of a rose
,” he said as he took the pulse, found nothing, and closed the sightless eyes.

A few feet away, two Fenians were tugging loose a Union Jack from beneath the body of a young Canadian, about the same age as the Irish color sergeant. We performed the same sad service for him, while my mad doctor said, “
You cried out when I entered you. Never had you known such pleasure was possible
.”

He began to infect me with his madness. I suppose it was preferable, anything was preferable, to thinking about what we were doing.

“You make it sound so interesting, I might let you try it,” I said. “If he didn't object.”

Dan strode across the field toward us, stepping over the dead bodies as if they were stones or stumps. There was no victorious exultation on his face. Nor was there any on or within any part of me, now.

“We're goin' to fall back to Fort Erie,” he said. “Those boys won't stop runnin' till they get to Port Colborne. But the other column is a different story. Twice as big and with cavalry and artillery. We've got to get some reinforcements. Maybe you can get back across the river and tell about this fight. It might change some minds.”

“Yes,” I said dully, without the slightest hope.

“We'll go ahead with the wounded—the ones worth moving,” Tom Gallaher said. “The rest we'll leave in the farmhouse.”

We loaded a dozen wounded into the wagon, gave them more opium pills, and set out for Fort Erie. It was late afternoon by the time we came down the river road into the center of town. We noticed a tug tied up at the wharf. Our hopes rose wildly. Had the river been opened? Not until we got much closer did we realize the tug was flying the Union Jack. It was impossible to flee. A ride in a runaway wagon would have destroyed the wounded men. So we continued steadily to the door of the post office. There we were confronted by a big man in a red coat. On the side street lounged half a hundred men wearing the enemy's colors. “What's this?” the big man boomed.

“Wounded men,” Tom Gallaher answered.

“And who might you be?”

“Dr. Thomas Gallaher, volunteer surgeon with the Irish Republican Army.”

“I am Colonel J. S. Dennis, brigade major of Her Majesty's loyal militia in this district, and you are under arrest. So are those criminals and your wagon and that woman, whoever she is.”

“She's a nurse. Her name is Fitzmaurice.”

“She's under arrest, too. Get off that wagon. Where is Colonel Booker?”

“Was he the commander of the column that marched from Port Colborne?” I asked.

“Of course,” snapped Dennis, who had a short Prince Albert beard below a huge pendulous nose. He was the very picture of British pomposity.

“I imagine he may have reached Port Colborne by now,” Tom Gallaher said. “He was running well ahead of his men the last time I saw him.”

“This is not the time or the place for jokes, sir,” huffed Colonel Dennis.

“I'm not joking, and I would like to get my patients out of the sun and into the expert hands of my colleague, Dr. Donnelly.”

Colonel Dennis mouthed a few words and then rushed down the wharf to confer with the captain of the tug. We helped our wounded down from the wagon and half-walked, half-carried them to the mattresses Dr. Donnelly had stretched on the floor inside. While we worked, Donnelly told us that Dennis had arrived from Port Colborne with two companies of Canadian volunteers aboard the tug and arrested about sixty of the stragglers we had seen that morning on the river road. They were imprisoned belowdecks in the tug.

We heard shouts in the street. We rushed out to discover an old man on horseback, anxiously pointing to the bluff above the town. “They're comin', the whole dang bunch of them,” he yelled.

“Form, form,” bellowed Colonel Dennis, and his men scrambled into ranks in the street before the ferry wharf. They stood there in parade formation, with Colonel Dennis on the wharf facing them. “Remember, men,” he said, “you are fighting for Canada and the queen. Duty—”

He was stopped in midsentence by the appearance of the Fenians on the bluff above the town. They were led by Lieutenant Colonel Bailey on a white horse. As they spread out along the ridge, it was obvious that they numbered in the hundreds. The old man had told the truth. Colonel Dennis remained paralyzed, speechless, like a man struck by a spell. Terror had numbed his brain.

A sensible officer would have rushed his fifty men aboard the tug and fled. A pugnacious one might have thrown his men into nearby houses for shelter, and tried to make a fight of it. Dennis did neither. He let his men stand there in the street. The Fenians on the bluff fired a volley over their heads, hoping to drive them off without bloodshed. A Redcoat in the first rank, with as Irish a face as I've ever seen, dropped to his knee, aimed his rifle and replied. Lieutenant Colonel Michael Bailey clutched his chest and toppled from his horse. The men on the ridge fell back, amazed by such deadly aim.

Still Colonel Dennis stared, gape-jawed, his men drawn up in the street. The Fenians started firing back at them in earnest. The Canadians opened their ranks a bit and began returning their fire. We stood in the door of the post office, watching in disbelief. When the first shot was fired, there were ten or fifteen civilians in the street, some of them women and children. They huddled against the houses, in terror of the bullets. “Get in here,” I called to the nearest of them, and they scampered to the safety of the post office's stout wooden walls.

On the road to the south, down which we had come in our wagon, there was the sound of hoofbeats. Into view came at least half the Fenian army, Dan and John O'Neil on horseback at their head, all on the dead run for Colonel Dennis and his paralyzed command. The infantry yell stormed from their throats. Heroic Colonel Dennis took one look and squawked, “Save yourselves, men!” Followed by about twenty-five of his best sprinters, he legged it down the river road; Fenian bullets whistled all around them. Five or six Canadians dived behind piles of cordwood on the wharf and fired at the oncoming Fenians. Another twenty or so tried to form a line in the street. The captain of the tug, no more a hero than Colonel Dennis, cut his lines and drifted off with the current, abandoning those who were trying to make a stand. It was a paradigm of the madness, the heroism and the cowardice of war, all in one wild minute.

The Fenians fired a volley at the men in the street and came on with the bayonet. By this time the doctors and I were inside the post office with all the civilians who could get to it. Four or five Canadians went down in the street, and the man who had shot Colonel Bailey legged it into the post office, followed by a half dozen of his friends. The rest threw down their guns and surrendered, many of them falling to their knees and begging for mercy. The men on the wharf were swept away in another minute, a few surrendering, one, an officer, emptying his pistol and flinging himself into the river as the Fenians rushed him.

A crash of glass was followed by the thunder of guns within the post office. The deadly marksman and his friends began firing into the Fenians in the street. It was pure folly. They cut down at least three or four men before the Fenians realized what was happening. All became madness and fury. The Fenians had already had at least a dozen men wounded or killed in this senseless skirmish, and they turned on these last tormentors with every gun in their army.

“Down on the floor,” yelled Tom Gallaher as bullets hurtled into the room through every window. Women and children—half-grown boys, most of them—lay face down, whimpering and screaming. I saw one of the Fenian wounded, weak as he was, drag down and hold a boy who began running about insane with terror. A tremendous crash shook the front door. They were battering it down. But the first Fenian into the room was met by two Canadians with bayonets. As he raised his rifle to fire, one of them plunged his bayonet into his throat. The Irishman gave a terrible cry and toppled back against those who were rushing after him, throwing them into confusion. They retreated to the street, leaving the wounded man bleeding to death on the steps. He died in terrible agony within a few minutes.

Now the Fenian rage was all-consuming. Volley after volley crashed into the building. Prone on the floor, I noticed the Canadians were no longer firing back. They crouched beside the windows, looking as miserable and frightened as everyone else. “They're out of ammunition,” I said to Tom Gallaher.

“Who's going to stick his head up to tell the boys outside?” he said.

I seized a sheet we had confiscated for bandages and crept on my hands and knees, and more often squirmed on my belly, to the stairway to the second floor. There were no Canadians up there, so the Fenian fire was all coming into the first floor. I crawled up the stairs as rapidly as possible. I could see the walls shuddering with the impact of the bullets. If one had come through I would have been a dead woman. By the time I reached the second floor I was too weak with fear to do anything but lie there for a full minute, face down. I did not want to die in this stupid, meaningless fight.