Pierre Berton's War of 1812 (112 page)

A few doubts are raised about Scott’s wisdom in immediately attacking Riall’s position. Was such rashness necessary? Would it not have been better to wait for the rest of the army? Did not Scott, in his search for glory, needlessly sacrifice hundreds of men? After all, what advantage did the Battle of Lundy’s Lane give to Brown’s army, apart from raising American morale?

These hard questions are drowned in the chorus of jubilation that follows the battle. Scott, in dreadful pain, his life at times despaired of, achieves during his convalescence a triumph that might have brought a blush to the cheek of a Roman conqueror. Medals, swords, banquets, addresses, honours of every kind—including a promotion to major-general—are heaped upon him. A national hero, he can do no wrong. He will continue to serve his country for another half century, every ambition achieved—General-in-Chief, Old Fuss and Feathers, the Nestor of the Republic—all because of a bloody and indecisive battle fought on a Stygian night at the margin of Lundy’s Lane.

CHIPPAWA, UPPER CANADA, JULY 26, 1814

In his tent at 1
A.M
., the wounded Jacob Brown sends for Brigadier-General Ripley, orders him to reorganize the troops, feed them, and then with every available man march back to the battlefield at dawn to meet the British.

It is a foolish order. Ripley’s effective force does not exceed fifteen hundred. It is scarcely conceivable that they can retake the hill after only a few hour’s sleep. Nonetheless, Ripley sets off the following morning at daybreak.

Samuel Tappan, a company commander in the 21st Regiment, marches with him. Tappan’s situation suggests Ripley’s problem. The previous day he took forty-five men into battle of whom seventeen were casualties. But such is the state of confusion and morale in Brown’s battered army that Tappan has been able to muster only nine men on this march back down the Queenston road.

Ripley sends Tappan and another officer forward through the woods on the left to reconnoitre. As the two emerge from the
thickets a mile from the battlefield, they see Drummond’s army posted on the heights above, the guns on a knoll near the road, the flanks protected by the river on one side and a thick forest on the other. Tappan realizes that the Americans are outnumbered.

Neither side has any stomach for a fight. Ripley withdraws to Chippawa and prepares to move the entire army farther back. Brown is furious. He has lost all confidence in Ripley, who he is convinced “dreaded responsibility more than danger.” On his shoulders he places all the blame for the loss of the British guns and, by implication (though he can never say it), for the defeat at Lundy’s Lane—forgetting his own harsh retort to the disgraced Colonel Stone, after the burning of St. Davids, that accountability must rest with the senior officer.

Ripley demands a court of inquiry—he has many supporters, including Miller and Jesup—but the President intervenes before the first witness is finished. Congress has already decided that Ripley and everybody else involved in the battle is a hero. Nobody in Washington wants to sully the legend of victory at Lundy’s Lane with adverse testimony.

Brown is borne across the Niagara with the other wounded, but the recriminations do not end. His report of the battle, dictated to an aide, does not satisfy some of the chief participants. Three of Scott’s commanders—Leavenworth, Jesup, and Colonel Hugh Brady of the 22nd—are bitter, feeling that they have been denied the kind of glowing praise that will bring them glory and promotion. Porter, too, is bitter: his militiamen have not received proper credit for their part in the Battle of Chippawa; they have been treated as “the tools and drudges of the regular troops.” He himself has not been given the command he expects. He frets, in a letter to the Governor of New York, that because his casualties are so low “it will seem that we were cowardly and did not do our duty.”

It is well that his men are not privy to that callous statement. As Ripley prepares to withdraw to Fort Erie, one of Porter’s men, the Pennsylvanian Alexander McMullen, passes down his own line and views “a scene of distress … which I hope I may never
witness again.” Porter may bemoan his few casualties, but it seems to McMullen that every tent contains at least one wounded man, each still wearing his blood-soaked uniform. John McClay, the company quartermaster, struck in the forehead by a musket ball, his skull cracked open, lies groaning on his back, his face covered with gore, a wild look in his eyes. In a nearby house, his cousin, Thomas Poe, lies mortally wounded. McMullen helps carry him across to the waiting boats. Poe shakes his hand weakly.

“Alexander,” he says, “you will never see me again in this world.” A few minutes later he expires.

McMullen notes that of one hundred men who came with him from Franklin County, only twenty-five are whole. He counts forty wagons moving toward the river, loaded with wounded men. Knocked about in the lumbering carts, they suffer horribly.

McMullen begins to feel giddy. Attacked by a high fever and a violent headache, he scrambles into one of the wagons, where the jolting all but deranges him. He climbs out, attempts to walk, falls, is finally helped along by one of the regulars.

In a meadow near Fort Erie, the army halts. The men drop where they stand. David Douglass, the engineer who brought Scott’s message to Brown the previous day, is so tired he stretches out on the first available wagon and slumbers without complaint on a heap of crowbars, pickaxes, and spades. Alexander McMullen flops down in the meadow under a single blanket as the rain pours down in torrents.

The British do not have the strength to follow. In a crumbling log shack near Lundy’s Lane, the assistant surgeon of the 89th, Dr. Dunlop, struggles to save the wounded. The chief surgeon is so ill he has been shipped home. The chief assistant, also ill, has exhausted his strength helping bring down the wounded. Tiger Dunlop works alone.

The casualties lie in tiered berths from which they must be moved in order to have their wounds dressed—an excruciating operation. As more men are herded into the makeshift hospital, they are laid on straw on the floor. By noon, Dunlop has 220 men to attend.

There is no time for niceties. Limbs that might be saved are amputated to forestall gangrene. The heat is stifling, the flies thick. Maggots breed in open wounds, causing dreadful irritation. For two days and nights, Dunlop seldom sits down, pausing only to eat and change his clothes. On the third day he collapses, and for five hours nothing can wake him. Refreshed, he plunges in again.

An American militiaman is brought in—a big, powerful farmer from New York State, about sixty years old. He is suffering grievously. A ball has shattered his thigh bone, another has passed through his body, wounding him mortally. His ageing wife arrives from across the river under a flag of truce to find her husband writhing in agony on a bed of straw. Stunned at what she sees about her, she takes her husband’s head in her lap, the tears running down her face, and sits in a stupor until awakened by a groan from the dying man. She clasps her hands together, looks about her wildly, and cries out:

“O that the King and the President were both here this moment to see the injury their quarrels lead to—they surely would never go to war without a cause that they could give as a reason to God at the last day, for thus destroying the creatures that He hath made in his own image.”

Half an hour later, her man is dead.

BLACK ROCK, NEW YORK STATE, AUGUST 13, 1814

Well before dawn, eleven hundred British soldiers under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel J.G.P. Tucker slip across the Niagara River to the American side in nine boats on a mission, which, if successful, could force the enemy out of Canada.

The Americans have retreated to the protection of Fort Erie and are constructing a vast fortified camp, with the original fort forming a bastion at one corner. They are supplied and reinforced by rowboats from Buffalo and protected by batteries set up along the American side of the river. Tucker’s task is to destroy the supply depots, disperse the troops at Black Rock, and wreck the batteries, leaving the American flank exposed. If he succeeds, the Americans
will not be able to hold Fort Erie, and Gordon Drummond will not have to mount a long and costly siege.

These are seasoned troops. Half come from the veteran 41st Regiment, which has fought in Upper Canada since the start of the war. Only a hard core of originals remain, however. Private Shadrach Byfield of Wiltshire is one. Of the 110 men in his company who marched into Detroit with Isaac Brock in the summer of 1812, fewer than fifteen are left. Most, including Byfield himself, have been wounded at least once.

At twenty-five, Shadrach Byfield is a survivor. He missed death by inches at the River Raisin, survived the bloody siege of Fort Meigs, escaped from the ditch after the failed attack on Fort Stephenson, was one of the few who slipped through Harrison’s fingers after the debacle on the Thames, took part in the capture of Fort Niagara, emerged unscratched after storming up the hill at Lundy’s Lane. Now, as dawn breaks, he prepares once more to face hostile guns.

Tucker is counting on surprise. He expects to land before dawn, seize the bridge over Sacjaquady Creek, and move to his objective. But the Americans are waiting for him behind a breastwork of logs. The far side of the bridge, obscured from the attackers, has also been rendered impassable.

As Tucker’s force lands and moves up the narrow path in the dark, three hundred sharpshooters, protected by the logs, begin to pick them off.

A strange thing happens: the veterans are seized by an unaccountable panic. They crouch, duck, flatten themselves in the face of the deadly fire. It is more than possible that they have seen enough fighting for a time, that they are used up by the bloody events of the previous week. Nevertheless, their officers rally them, and the column moves on, dashing across the bridge at the double quick only to discover that the planking at the far end has been torn up. The column recoils, but its momentum is such that many of the men are thrown into the water. An attempt is made to rebuild the floor of the bridge, but the American riflemen keep up such a steady fire that the task must be abandoned.

Shadrach Byfield, staring across the creek, sees one of the Americans climb above the breastwork only to fall back, struck by a British ball. At almost the same moment a bullet strikes Byfield’s right arm, just below the elbow. One of his comrades cuts his uniform away, and Byfield staggers to the rear, finds a doctor, and asks him to amputate the arm. The surgeon refuses, believes the limb can be saved, orders Byfield into one of the boats.

To General Drummond’s disgust, the remains of Tucker’s entire force returns to Canada, its mission a failure.

“The indignation excited in the mind of the Lieut.-General … will not permit him to expiate on a subject so unmilitary and disgraceful,” his General Order declares. “… it is … the duty of all officers to punish with death on the spot any man under their command who may be found guilty of misbehaviour in front of the enemy.… Crouching, ducking, or laying down when advancing under fire are bad habits and must be corrected.”

With the Americans daily reinforcing their camp at Fort Erie, Drummond has been cheated of an easy victory. It will now require a vigorous and undoubtedly a bloody effort to dislodge them.

To Shadrach Byfield, all this is of minor importance. The doctors have done their best to save his arm, but mortification has set in. It must come off. That is a heavy blow, for he is a weaver by trade.

He seeks out a fellow soldier whose own arm has recently been amputated.

“Bill, how is it to have the arm taken off?”

“Thee woo’t know, when it’s done,” Bill reassures him.

Several orderlies are detailed to blindfold and hold him down before the surgeon goes to work with knife and saw, but Byfield waves them away. There’ll be no need of that, he says, stolidly. The operation seems to take forever and is very painful, but he bears it well. Then, his stump dressed, he goes off to bed, mercifully groggy from a draught of mulled wine.

Later, he asks for his severed arm. An orderly replies casually that it has been thrown onto a dung heap. Enraged, Byfield leaps out of bed, tries to strike the man with his one good hand. Then, nothing
will do but that he search through the heap, find the missing appendage, look about for lumber, somehow manage to nail a coffin together, and give his arm a decent burial.

Byfield’s fighting days are over. He returns to England where he and his family must make do on a pension of nine pence a day, later raised to fifteen through his own importuning. One night he dreams that he is working at his old trade, wakes his wife, tells her he is certain that, arm or no arm, he can weave cloth.

“Go to sleep,” says she. “There was never such a thing known as a person having but one arm to weave.”

But in his sleep Byfield works out his destiny. The following day he visits a blacksmith, draws the design of an instrument similar to one in his dream and, thus equipped, finds work at his former trade with a clothier at Staverton Woods, not far from his home in Wiltshire. There, from time to time, he looks back on his youthful adventures. Those memories begin to blur until he cannot quite remember which battle came first or what the places were called or what his companions looked like. Certain incidents stand out sharply—the spectacle of an Indian throwing a wounded man into the fire after Lundy’s Lane, for instance—but it is all a little unreal, rather like one of his dreams. Only his missing forearm testifies to the reality of his experience on the embattled border of a strange, cold colony, an ocean and more away.

THE BRITISH CAMP BEFORE FORT ERIE, UPPER CANADA, AUGUST 14, 1814

After a week of bombarding the American fortifications, Lieutenant-General Gordon Drummond is convinced that the time has come to attack. A shell has just landed on the American magazine chest. Drummond is certain that it has caused heavy casualties. With the Americans off balance he will this very night assault the fort from three sides.