Dubious Allegiance Read online

  The young man did as he was ordered, letting out a bone-chilling shriek with each inch that he moved his crushed legs. He had to extricate himself by using only the upper part of his body, as his legs appeared to be lifeless. Marc’s shoulder, arms, and hands started to go numb. In another second he would have to let go. Bullets continued to whiz over his head or thud into the horse. With a wheezing gasp, Marc released the sabre. The corporal screamed as if he had been gelded.

  Marc forced himself to look over at him. The young man’s legs—limp, one of them askew—were completely free. His face was grey and awash with sweat. He was trembling uncontrollably. His lips were working, but he was unable to speak.

  “One of your legs is broken,” Marc said. “The other is likely numb, but you may be able to stand on it. When I say ‘go,’ I want you to raise both arms. I’m going to haul you up, and we’re going to make a run for it as if we’re in a three-legged race. Understand?”

  When no words would come, the young man nodded his assent.

  Just then a volley of gunfire roared out of the woods. Hilliard had been watching Marc’s every move. He was giving them four or five seconds of relief from the sniper fire.

  “Go!”

  The pounding of Marc’s heart and the rasping of his breath drowned out the corporal’s shrieks as the two men rose up, crab-like, against the horizon, and started to scuttle raggedly towards the woods. There could be no more covering fire now. They were silhouetted against the treeline like ducks in a shooting gallery. Forgive me, Marc whispered to Beth, who was always somewhere close by, as he braced for the bullet that would end his life and break his promise. Several of them skidded through the grass at his feet. The lad’s legs were useless. He had fainted with pain or terror. Marc picked him up in both arms, just as a fresh thought struck him: I will die with an enemy bullet in my back!

  But there were no more bursts of gunfire. The air about him had gone ominously quiet. Yet he was still moving: he could feel his boots thudding on the frost-hardened ground. He could feel the wind gusting and pulling on his tunic. He could feel snow on his cheeks. Snow. He was running—camouflaged—through a squall.

  “This way! This way!” It was Hilliard’s voice, soon joined by a chorus of others, orienting him as a rattling cup does a blind man.

  Seconds later he collapsed into a tangle of spruce boughs.

  “You made it!” Hilliard declared, beside him. And there was awe in his voice.

  * * *

  The rescued man was taken back to the surgeon. No-one in Marc’s company knew his name, and he was soon forgotten as Captain Riddell’s plan to take the barricade was now ready to be executed. The brief squall that had saved Marc’s life was now over. The air was clear and cold again. Sporadic gunfire to the right indicated that the main battle was still progressing. Marc was grateful that his squad had been designated to provide only the covering fire for Riddell’s pincered assault, as the adrenaline that had kept him going till now was fast draining away and not likely to return. He ordered Hilliard to direct the opening volleys, while he sat on his haunches and took deep breaths. Some sodden biscuit had been brought up, and he nibbled at it dutifully. Once the flanking troops had succeeded in nearing the sides of the log-rampart, he knew he would have to find some reserve of strength to lead his squad on the frontal assault and hand-to-hand fighting with sabre and bayonet.

  He heard the opening volleys, then the individual gunfire of the advancing troops, left and right.

  “They’re pinned down already,” Hilliard informed him. “We’ve got to go in now, or our fellows will be cut to pieces.”

  Marc tottered to his feet. “Sergeant,” he said to Ogletree, “have the men fix bayonets. We’re going to clear those buggers from that pile of poles!”

  Moments later, Marc found himself leading the charge across ground that he had already traversed twice. The enemy gunfire on both flanks of the rampart had stopped abruptly. The rebels must have guessed at the plan and were hastily reassembling at their gun-slits to take on the frontal assault. Dodging dead horses and two fallen comrades, Marc’s men sallied towards the barricade, bayonets brandished and voices roaring with menace and bravado. At the same time, the troops on either flank began to rise and make a dash towards the same target. This was it. Once in such motion, no British infantry unit could be stopped, short of annihilation.

  Marc was the first man to leap up onto the rampart and start swinging his sabre. There was nothing to swing at. In less than thirty seconds the rebels had melted away, undetected. Their rampart had been raised on the crest of a shallow coulee, so they had been able to retreat running upright and unseen to a dozen possible sniping positions beyond.

  “Damn it all,” Hilliard cursed angrily, slicing at the air with his fearsome blade and looking up and down the barricade. “All that suffering on our part and we haven’t killed one of the bastards yet!”

  “True,” Marc said. “But we’re gaining ground bit by bit. Their ground.”

  Having cleared the left flank of skirmishers and enfilading sniper fire, Captain Riddell’s company now turned its attention to assisting the main assault force. Major Markham had abandoned any attempt at a systematic infantry charge: all personnel were firing at will, whenever they could locate the source of enemy strafing. The battle was being waged on the rebels’ terrain using their own favoured tactics: hit, run, hide, and hit again. Even so, a number of sheds and barns had been cleared, at some cost, and gradually the rebels were being herded into an ever more crowded and shrunken territory. If General Colborne had given Gore double the complement of troops—or if Gore had not exhausted the ones he had in a fruitless forced march aimed at surprise—then sheer persistence and willingness to take casualties would have worn the enemy down and eventually resulted in a bloody but complete victory. As things now stood, there were simply not enough rested and motivated regulars to do the job. Major Markham himself had been stalled but not stopped by two wounds to his neck.

  “We’ll take that barn over there,” Marc said to Hilliard and Ogletree, who was dragging one leg behind him. Spurts of gun-smoke issued from the cracks in the rotting barn-board, and the soldier beside Ogletree clutched at his thigh and spun to the ground.

  “Spread out and approach when you can!”

  A dozen men dropped low, grateful for the cautionary order. While sporadic, the fire from the barn was hazardous enough to keep Marc’s men pinned down. He thought of ordering a series of timed volleys, but the exposed men would be cut to pieces with little tangible result. As soon as the rebels spotted any threatening activity, they got off as many rounds as they dared, then seemed to dive into the hollows or behind stout obstacles so that any return fire or volley thundered by without harm. Again, if they had had more men, such a defensive tactic would have quickly failed: the sheer firepower and discipline of the regulars would have proven too much. Even Marc, a novice in these affairs, could see that if they took too many casualties, the colonel’s base and the command post itself would be vulnerable to a counterattack. The rebels might already be moving squads across the Richelieu downstream of them to spring upon Gore from the rear. The colonel’s entire strategy had been poorly conceived and hastily carried out. Moreover, even as his troops pressed the defenders back towards the fortified house, marksmen from that quarter were now almost in range. Every ten minutes or so, a solid shot from the twenty-four-pounder over on the riverbank smashed into the stone façade of the house and bounced off with a pathetic clang. Not a single stone had been chipped away in several hours of shelling.

  “I don’t think the men have the stomach for a bayonet charge,” Hilliard said to Marc. “They’re asleep on their feet.”

  “We’ll go in first, then,” Marc said.

  Rick Hilliard’s eyes lit up. “And this time they won’t be able to scuttle off; there’s only one door on that barn, and we’re going in through it.”

  Marc motioned to Sergeant Ogletree to provide some distracting fire, drew his pist
ol, raised his sabre, and ran stride for stride with Hilliard towards the door of the barn. Bullets whizzed by, though from which side was unclear. But they reached the door together, unmarked. Hilliard’s shoulder struck it a split second before Marc’s.

  At first they could see nothing. Bits of sombre November light were leaking through myriad cracks in the barn-board and irradiating ripples of hay-dust. Several bales of straw had been propped up along the walls where the rebels had squatted and buttressed their musket-barrels, but there were no musketeers now manning these posts. It was as quiet and eerie as the apse of an empty cathedral. The two men stood stock-still, perplexed.

  “Where in hell did they all go?” Hilliard whispered.

  “There!” Marc cried.

  In the far right corner, where a sort of manger had once been, they saw the legs of a dark figure wriggling frantically. The rebels had devised a quick-escape hatch, but one of them had not quite made it out. Hilliard was the first to move. In two bounds he was standing over the rebel with his sabre raised. Accompanied by a guttural cry of triumph or anger, its blade descended in a violent arc and sliced through the flesh of the man’s buttocks till it struck bone. His howl rattled the barn-boards and sent the dust-motes aflutter.

  Marc cringed, horrified. But some fury, too long pent up and whetted by fatigue and frustration, had taken hold of Hilliard. He reached down, grabbed the screaming rebel by the feet, and dragged his body back into the ghastly light of the little barn. Then he flipped it over, face up. The poor devil was choking on his own sobs and hyperventilating. The eyes were bulbous with shock and disbelief. But these grotesqueries were not what brought both Hilliard and Marc to a stunned halt: the rebel was a boy, no more than sixteen or seventeen. And he was gaunt, almost fleshless, his skin sagging on the bones of his cheeks.

  “Christ,” Marc breathed, “he’s damn near starved. I’ve seen beggars outside Bedlam with more flesh on them.”

  Hilliard raised his sabre and drove it through the boy’s ribs into his heart. He died with a long, accusing wheeze.

  Marc fell back against the wall, dizzy and trembling.

  “I’ve killed him,” Hilliard said, as if somehow surprised at the consequences of his own savage action.

  Just then a ragged sequence of shots came singing through the rotting walls and slammed into the nearby posts and studding around them. Marc and Rick dropped to their knees without ceremony.

  “Now they’ve got us trapped in here,” Marc said.

  “We can wait for Ogletree and the men to move up.”

  “I’ve got to get back to the troop,” Marc said. “They should be covering the door if they’re still in position.” A bullet struck the post behind Marc and sent splinters of it flying about his head. “We can’t stay in here anyway.”

  “All right, out the door it is,” Hilliard said with customary bravura, but his lower lip was trembling like a child resisting tears. Neither man looked over at the bloody corpse.

  They rose together, bent low. Hilliard pushed the splintered door open and dashed boldly out into the mêlée. Marc was a step behind him. Hilliard skidded on the greasy snow and tumbled forward. Unable to stop, Marc tripped and landed beside him. Some part of Marc wanted to laugh at such a boyish pratfall, at the shared embarrassment of two playful companions at ease with their giddiness. He rolled over and came nose to nose with Rick.

  “So far, so good,” he heard himself say, with a barely suppressed giggle. Was he going mad? Was this the evidence of battle fatigue?

  Rick, too, had a funny look on his face, as if he were about to tell a joke but had just forgotten it. “I think I’ve been hit,” he said.

  “Jesus! Where?” Marc pulled himself up over Hilliard, who had turned partway onto his back. Shouts and explosions roared wildly, randomly, insanely about them.

  “Down here. I can feel . . .” Suddenly, Rick’s eyes began to close, like a slow curtain at the end of a melodrama. His mouth hung open, waiting for the word that did not reach it. His head lolled back, and he lay still.

  Paying no heed to the murderous fire around him, Marc leaned over Rick, pulled his jacket open, and lay an ear against his chest. He heard a heartbeat: faint but steady. Against his own rising panic, he poked blindly about below Hilliard’s waist till he felt the sticky ooze of blood. Rick had been hit somewhere in the bowel or groin. And he was bleeding profusely.

  Marc took a moment to survey his situation. It was quickly apparent that the assault had bogged down again. Most of the rebels appeared to have been pushed back into the fortified environs of the stone house, but with their backs to the wall, as it were, they were now raining a deadly and persistent fire upon the exposed regulars, who were hopelessly battered from the effort required to get this far. He saw Major Markham being dragged onto a stretcher. Marc’s own squad were scattered and now leaderless. He knew where his duty lay.

  But he did not go there. Instead, he picked up the unconscious body of his friend as gently as he could, laid it across his right shoulder, and began to trot back down towards the coulee, and the surgeon’s tent. He had taken only ten paces or so before he had to stop, drop to one knee, and catch his breath.

  Somewhere behind him a tumultuous shout rose above the roar of battle. Marc turned to see where it had come from. Could it be Colonel Wetherall arriving from Chambly with reinforcements? Were they to be saved at the eleventh hour?

  From the woods near the distillery several hundred fresh rebel troops came running across a ploughed field and a pasture, howling like Iroquois on a rampage. At the same time a second force materialized out of the bottomland along the river, threatening the cannon nearby. The defenders in the stone house had decided it was time to counterattack. But it was the approach of the group from the woods that brought Marc upright and incredulous. There wasn’t a single gun amongst them. They were armed with pitchforks, axe-handles, and mattocks—and a fury fueled by hunger, humiliation, and the knowledge that some kinds of death are more necessary than others.

  Suddenly, cries of “Fall back!” could be heard, faintly, from the lips of officers. Men were scampering backwards past Marc. He picked up Hilliard as he would a child, and joined them, Rick’s breath still warming his right cheek.

  Moments later, a bugle sounded the unthinkable: three hundred British regulars—heirs to the reflected glories of Waterloo, Culloden, and Agincourt—were in full retreat: beaten back by a rump parliament of farmers, tradesmen, and ordinary folk of every ilk.

  * * *

  Marc’s horse plodded wearily but dutifully alongside the scarlet ambulance-wagon that carried several of the wounded men, including Rick Hilliard. A light snow was falling, silent and peaceful, upon the length of the retreating column. It was after midnight, and they had just pulled out of St. Ours, little more than halfway to Sorel. Fortunately, one of the foraging parties had discovered a cache of potatoes in a barn en route, and Colonel Gore had consented to let the men stop long enough to roast them over an inconspicuous fire. Now they were back on the river road, the exhaustion of defeat added to the physical and mental fatigue exacted by the preceding thirty hours. A few of the mounted militia rode in desultory loops about the flanks of the column, but no organized pursuit or ambush materialized to harry them or provide some welcome distraction from the brooding weight of their failure.

  Rick had had his abdominal wound dressed to the point where any external bleeding had been stanched, but what was happening internally could only be guessed at. Rick remained unconscious. His breathing was either shallow or intermittently sharp and aching. Marc had removed his greatcoat and wrapped Rick in it. He never left his friend’s side, fearing that a sudden pain might cause him to move abruptly and loosen the cotton packing that had stopped the bleeding. But the only movement so far had been the anxious rise and fall of his breathing.

  The retreat from St. Denis had been neither orderly nor dignified. Once again Colonel Gore had not let the possibility of such a manoeuvre enter his wizened imagination. As
a result of their initial haste, three or four wounded men had been abandoned on the battlefield, left to the tender mercies of the rebels. The twenty-four-pounder was dragged down from its useless perch (sixty of the sixty-eight rounds having been expended), limbered, and hauled towards the makeshift log-bridge constructed earlier in the day. But after bearing the weight of almost three hundred retreating men and a dozen wagons, the bridge collapsed of its own volition just as the cannon was crossing it. The gun was tossed sideways into the muddy water. With enemy skirmishers harassing them on three sides, and the danger of more cutting off their retreat as they crossed the river, Gore continued to shriek commands at the exhausted men and beasts. Half a dozen of the latter died in the traces and had to be replaced by cavalry horses. The gun was hopelessly stuck, but Gore refused to abandon and spike it until the surgeon warned him that the men themselves would soon die beside the animals. As a result of this unnecessary delay, it had been dark before the column got started up the river road towards St. Ours and Sorel. The whoops of triumph from the rebels sang in their ears like a bully’s taunt. Fortunately, they were permitted to slink away, licking their wounds.

  No-one spoke. They were too numb to complain. It took energy to moan. The dried mud on their uniforms had caked and, whitened by the snow, made the men resemble perambulating ghosts. Marc was trying hard not to think about his own brush with death, about Rick’s savage anger and quixotic courage, about the colonel’s stubborn stupidity, about the patchwork army of half-starved youths who had humiliated them. There was nothing Napoleonic or glorifying about Papineau’s forces: they were fighting only to live, and be.

  “Could you spare a smoke?”

  The sound of an English voice uttering a full sentence startled Marc, and he glanced about in search of its author. None of the men tramping near him had looked up or shifted his rhythm.

  “I think I’d feel better if I just had a puff. . . .”

  It was a soft voice, weakened by fatigue or pain. And it came from the wagon carrying the severely wounded. Marc peered over the still form of Rick Hilliard and saw that the bundle of blankets next to him had suddenly produced a head and an arm. Marc swung down off his mount and began to walk alongside the wagon. He found himself face-to-face with the young cavalryman he had rescued from under his dying horse. He was propped up on one elbow and smiling.