Pierre Berton's War of 1812 (29 page)

SANDWICH, UPPER CANADA, AUGUST 16, 1812
. Dawn.

The moment is at hand. Brock’s couriers have scoured the countryside, roused the militia from the farms, emptied the mills and harvest fields. Now these raw troops gather on the shore at McKee’s Point, four hundred strong, waiting their turn to enter the boats and cross to the enemy side. Three hundred have been issued the cast-off crimson tunics of the 41st to deceive Hull into believing that Brock’s force of regular soldiers is double its actual strength.

The Indians are already across, lurking in the forest, ready to attack Hull’s flank and rear should he resist the crossing. Thomas Verchères de Boucherville has watched their war dance the night before; he finds it an extraordinary spectacle—six hundred figures, leaping in the firelight, naked except for their breech cloths, some daubed in vermilion, others in blue clay, and still others tattooed with black and white from head to foot. Even to de Boucherville, with his years of experience in the fur trade, the scene is macabre—frightful and horrifying beyond expression. It occurs to him that a stranger from Europe witnessing it for the first time would believe he was standing at the very entrance to Hell “with the gates thrown open to let the damned out for an hour’s recreation on earth!”

But on this calm and beautiful Sunday morning, a different spectacle presents itself. A soft August sun is just rising as the troops climb into the boats and push out into the river, their crimson jackets almost perfectly reflected in the glassy waters. Behind them, the green meadows and ripening orchards are tinted with the dawn light; ahead, in the lead boat, stands the glittering figure of their general. Charles Askin thinks it the handsomest sight he has ever
seen, even though in a few hours he may well be fighting his own brother-in-law. Already cannonballs and mortar bombs are screaming overhead.

The Capture of Detroit

On the far bank, pocked and riven by springs (hence the name Spring Wells), the figure of Tecumseh can be discerned, astride a white mustang, surrounded by his chiefs. The enemy is not in sight and the troops land without incident or opposition.

Brock’s plan is to outwait Hull, draw him out of his fort, and do battle in the open where, he believes, his regulars can devastate the wavering American militia. But now an Indian scout rides in with word that enemy horsemen have been spotted three miles to the rear. This is the detachment, 350 strong, that Hull has sent to the River Raisin and recalled to reinforce Detroit. Brock’s position suddenly becomes precarious. His men are caught between a strong fortification and an advancing column in their rear. Without hesitation Brock changes his plans and decides to attack immediately.

He draws up his troops in column, doubling the distance between the sections to make his diminutive force seem larger. His route to Detroit hugs the river bank at his right, protected by the guns of the
Queen Charlotte
and the
Hunter
(Frederic Rolette’s command) and by the battery at Sandwich. On his left, slipping through the corn fields and the woods, are Tecumseh’s Indians. To many of the militia this is familiar territory. Charles Askin, marching with the 2nd Brigade, greets and waves to old friends along the road, many of whom seem happy to see him.

At the town gate, the forward troops can spot two long guns—twenty-four-pounders—positioned so that they can enfilade the road. A single round shot, properly placed, is capable of knocking down a file of twenty-five men like dominoes. American gunners stand beside their weapons with matches burning. William McCay, who has come up from Queenston as a volunteer and is marching with Captain Hatt’s company just behind the British 41st, screws up his courage, expecting to be fired upon at any moment. Young John Richardson, the future novelist, cannot help a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach that he and his comrades are marching directly into the jaws of death, for the road “is as bad as any cul-de-sac.”

Brock, at the head of the line, rides impassively forward, a brilliant target in his cocked hat and gold epaulettes. His old friend, little Colonel Nichol, trots up to remonstrate with his commander:

“Pardon me, General, but I cannot forbear entreating you not to expose yourself thus. If we lose you, we lose all; let me pray you to allow the troops to pass on, led by their own officers.”

To which Brock replies: “Master Nichol, I duly appreciate the advice you give me, but I feel that in addition to their sense of loyalty and duty, many here follow me from a feeling of personal regard, and I will never ask them to go where I do not lead them.”

Why have the guns not fired? There is a host of explanations after the fact. One is that Hull refuses to give the order for reasons of cowardice or treason. Another, more plausible, is that the British are still out of effective range and the American artillery commander is waiting until they draw closer so that his grape-shot—a large
number of musket balls packed in canvas bags—can mow down the column.

If so, Brock outwits him, for suddenly, the British wheel to the left through an orchard and into a ravine protected from the enemy guns. John Richardson, for one, breathes more freely. Brock, meanwhile, commandeers William Forsyth’s farmhouse as a headquarters, then climbs up the bank to reconnoitre his position.

The town of Detroit, a huddle of some three hundred houses, lies before him. Its population, three-quarters French-speaking, is inured to siege and plunder. It has been transferred three times by treaty, twice besieged by Indians, burned to the ground only a few years previously. It is enclosed on three sides by a wooden stockade of fourteen-foot pickets. Entrance can be gained only by three massive gates. On the high ground to the northeast, covering three acres, sprawls the fort, built originally by the British, repaired by the Americans. The parapet is eleven feet high, twelve feet thick. A ditch, six feet deep and twelve feet across, together with a double row of pickets, each twice the height of a man, surrounds the whole. It is heavily armed with long guns, howitzers, and mortars. Most of the troops are quartered outside the walls.

The American position seems impregnable, but Brock has a secret weapon—psychology. Hull has already been led to believe that three hundred militiamen are regulars. Now Tecumseh and his Indians are ordered to march in single file across an open space, out of range but in full view of the garrison. The spectacle has some of the quality of a vaudeville turn. The Indians lope across the meadow, vanish into the forest, circle back and repeat the manoeuvre three times. Hull’s officers, who cannot tell one Indian from another, count fifteen hundred painted savages, screeching and waving tomahawks. Hull is convinced he is outnumbered.

Brock is still scrutinizing his objective, all alone, some fifty yards in front of his own troops, when an American officer suddenly appears, waving a white flag and bearing a note from his general. The American commander, it seems, is on the verge of giving up without a fight.

INSIDE THE PALISADE
, William Hull appears on the edge of nervous collapse. Except for Colonel Findlay, he has no battalion commanders to fall back on. Cass and McArthur have not yet returned. Miller is too ill to stand up. Hull’s son and aide, Abraham, is not only drunk but has picked a fight with a senior officer, in his father’s presence, and challenged him to a duel. A dozen Michigan volunteers on picket duty at the rear of the fort have allowed themselves to be captured by Tecumseh’s Indians. Elijah Brush, in charge of the Michigan militia, believes that if attack comes his men will flee. The fort itself is so jammed with soldiers, civilians, and cattle, all seeking refuge from the bombardment, that it is difficult to manoeuvre.

The cannonade has unnerved Hull. He saw blood enough in his Revolutionary days, but now he is transfixed by a spectacle so horrifying that it reduces him to jelly. Lieutenant Porter Hanks, relieved for the moment of appearing at his court of inquiry, has come into the fort to visit an old friend and is standing in the doorway of the officers’ mess with several others when a sixteen-pound cannon-ball comes bouncing over the parapet and skipping across the open space. It strikes Hanks in the midriff, cutting him in two, then tears both legs off Cass’s surgeon’s mate, Dr. James Reynolds, instantly killing him and mangling a second man with the appropriately grisly name of Blood.

A second cannonball dispatches two more soldiers. Blood and brains spatter the walls and the gowns of some women who have sought refuge nearby. One drops senseless to the ground; others begin to scream. Hull cannot be sure from a distance who is dead, but a frightful thought crosses his mind: can it be his own buxom daughter, Betsey? It is more than possible. She and her child have taken refuge in the fort with most of the civilians, all of whom Hull knows as well as his own family.

Something very odd is happening to Hull: he is becoming catatonic; his brain, overloaded by too much information, refuses to
function. It has happened before to better commanders when events crowded in too quickly, to Washington at the Battle of Brandywine, for one, and it will happen again—to Napoleon at Waterloo, to Stonewall Jackson at White Oak Swamp, to Douglas MacArthur at Manila.

Hull’s brigade major, Jesup, finds his commander half-seated, half-crouched on an old tent that is lying on the ground, his back to the ramparts under the curtain of the fort that faces the enemy. Save for the movement of his jaws he seems comatose. He is chewing tobacco at a furious rate, filling his mouth with it, absently adding quid after quid, sometimes removing a piece, rolling it between his fingers and then replacing it, so that his hands run with spittle while the brown juice dribbles from the corners of his mouth, staining his neckcloth, his beard, his cravat, his vest. He chews as if the fate of the army depended upon the movement of his jaws, rubbing the lower half of his face from time to time until it, too, is stained dark brown. Jesup, who has reconnoitred the British position, asks for permission to move up some artillery and attack their flank with dragoons. Hull nods, but he is clearly not in control. All he can say, as much to himself as to Jesup, is that a cannonball has killed four men.

It is the future as much as the present that renders him numb. A procession of ghastly possibilities crowds his mind; his troops deserting pell-mell to the enemy; the women and children starving through a long siege; cannon fire dismembering more innocent bystanders; and finally—the ultimate horror—the Indians released by Brock and Tecumseh, bent on revenge for Tippecanoe and all that came before it, ravaging, raping, burning, killing. He sees his daughter scalped, his grandchild mutilated, his friends and neighbours butchered. He believes himself outnumbered and outmanoeuvred, his plea for reinforcements unheeded. Sooner or later, he is convinced, defeat is inevitable. If he postpones it, the blood of innocent people will be on his hands. If he accepts it now, before the battle is joined, he can save hundreds of lives. He can, of course, fight on to the last man and go into the history books as a hero. But can he live with himself, however briefly, if he takes the hero’s course?

There is another thought, too, a guilty thought, lurking like a vagrant in the darker recesses of that agitated mind. The memory of the notorious proclamation has returned to haunt him. He himself has threatened no quarter to any of the enemy who fight beside the Indians. Can he or his charges, then, expect mercy in a prolonged struggle? Might the enemy not use his own words to justify their allies’ revenge?

The shells continue to scream above his head and explode. Six men are now dead, several more wounded, the fort in a turmoil. Hull determines to ask for a cease-fire and a parley with Brock, scrawls a note, hands it to his son, asks him to have Major Snelling take it across the river. (Incredibly, it does not occur to him that Brock may be with his troops outside the palisade.) At the same time he orders a white tablecloth hung out of a window where Dixon, the British artillery commander on the Canadian shore, can see it. He will not fight to the last man; in the future metropolis of Detroit there will be no Hull Boulevard, no Avenue of the Martyrs.