The Constable's Tale (32 page)

He made a quick calculation from what he remembered about the strength of redcoat units. There must have been as many as four thousand men there. About as many as the more densely clustered
French. Men on both sides ready to die in a place where they did not live for men they almost certainly had never met, the kings of Britain and France.

French crews busied themselves about several cannon they had wheeled into place, firing and reloading with the practiced poise of court dancers. Otherwise, both sides stood motionless, or as still as men can hold themselves for extended periods. As if waiting for the gods of war to make up their minds. Say what should happen next.

Rifle fire was coming from a stand of trees to the right, where the burning houses were, and the cornfield on the left, the same area where Harry had fought with the Indian. The shooting was intermittent. Sudden thin gray stalks of smoke belching from barrels here and there at random intervals. The occasional redcoat dropping as a ball found flesh or a twelve-pound globe of iron from a cannon went bounding through the line like a bowler’s ball, taking off limbs or heads or cutting men clean in two. Or when an explosive charge sent up a spray of fire and dirt and bits of iron. The redcoats stood impassively through it all, seeming to ignore oncoming death as one might disregard a minor distraction, a buzzing of flies. Harry recalled what Abel had said about what he had seen of British army discipline.
They is more scared of their officers than they is of the enemy.

Ayerdale was nowhere in sight.

“We’d better go back,” said Harry.

“And miss this? You must be joking.” Craning her neck as if that might help her see better.

He spotted a stand of bushes grown up around a pile of small boulders. There they would be at least partly hidden but still able to see what was afoot. They could duck behind the rocks if the firing became too worrisome.

They had no more than settled in when a motion went through the British line. The redcoats seemed to be melting into the grass. In groups. Not falling, Harry realized, but lying down. Making themselves less visible to riflemen and cannoneers.

The miracle of the ascent of several thousand Britons up a cliff seemed not to have extended to horseflesh. The only mounted men in view were a dozen or so French officers grouped together off to the right. Harry did spot two small brass cannon on the British side. He tried to imagine how they had managed to get them up. And he recognized why Montcalm was concerned. Once the redcoats dug in, they could begin zigzagging their trench line forward to a place where those two cannon, plus as many bigger brothers as they cared to hoist up at their leisure, could murder the walls of the citadel.

The mounted Frenchmen were deferring to an individual toward their center, a portly officer with heavy eyebrows who was wearing a clean white uniform and black tricorn and sitting atop a finely muscled black horse. Starvation might be stalking Quebec, but this man and his animal seemed not to have suffered.

“Montcalm?” Maddie said into Harry’s ear, following his gaze.

“That would be my guess.”

The cluster broke up. Riders headed off in different directions. A few minutes later, commands went up and down the line. Muskets came unslung. The general made his way smartly into the front of the ranks. He wheeled and began riding back and forth, shouting angrily as he went and gesticulating toward the British. Harry looked to Maddie for translation. She made a shrugging motion. Too far away, she said, and suggested he use his imagination.

After a few minutes of this, Montcalm wheeled and faced downfield. More commands passed through the lines, this time triggering a clatter of drums. Syncopated, blood quickening, boasting of deadly purpose.

Montcalm raised his sword. His mount began stepping forward at a stately pace.

A cheer swept through the ranks and they too began to move. Their pace matching the relentless cadence of the drums. All the formations moving together with precision, as if one giant machine. Bayonets pointing forward.

“Come on,” said Maddie, getting to her feet. She looked flushed and excited. “I want to get closer.”

“This is a pretty good spot. I think I’ll stay here. But you go ahead. You can tell me about it later.”

She hesitated, gave him a disgusted look, and sat down again.

Although the masses of men were moving away, their shouts grew louder. A long, sustained sound of many voices but no longer what Harry would call a cheer. He remembered what the physician had said, his talk of British actions over the summer. He had put the matter politely but pointedly. “Depredations,” he called them. Harry recognized the voices of angry men. Their thirst for revenge held in check beyond endurance by leaders who kept saying they were not strong enough to ride out of their fortress, challenge the enemy. And so the anger had festered. Especially, Harry guessed, among the militia. The regulars, those that survived whatever happened, could expect to return to France and find their homes and families intact. It was the Canadian fighters who had seen their farms and houses and shops turned to ash, wives and children going hungry, living like outcasts in their own land. Though Harry had never experienced anything like this himself, he felt he understood. Now, finally released from restraint, the militiamen especially must be burning for retribution, determined to expel the foreigners from their midst, as a human body might heave up a dose of poison. All their stored-up bitterness and frustration now focused on this feeble streak of scarlet etched like a taunt across the plain. A scab begging to be torn away.

He had seen this kind of anger before. When it settled over men of quality, it could be resolved in only one of two ways: with pistols or swords. Passions on both sides of the matter bridled by an ancient, strictly prescribed ritual. Appointed hours, attendants, chosen weapons, measured steps. God would choose which cause was the more just. As for the rest of humankind, the ordinary sorts of men, there was little ceremony. Just spontaneous maiming contests of fists and knives and axes or whatever weapons came to hand. Now
Harry understood he was seeing something new to his experience: the virtuous anger that underlies duels and brawls multiplied by thousands.

In their eagerness, some of the militia began to run ahead. The regulars quickened their step, and orderliness began to suffer. Defining spaces between battalions blurred. The wrath of each individual Frenchman flowing into a gyre, a whorl of ferocity that fed on its own energies like a piney-wood fire or one of the violent summer storms that come in from the ocean. The voice of this human tempest not that of many but as if from one. A slavering beast hungering for slaughter.

The charge now took the form of a coiling line, its contours changing with each passing moment. Muscular and fluid as it fumed and howled and boiled across the grass and scrub. Driving unremittingly forward.

The leading loop overtook Montcalm. He responded by surging ahead, gesturing with his sword. Trying to restore order, Harry guessed. Whatever commands he was shouting surely lost in the uproar. Some of the soldiers responded by running faster. Maybe thinking he was urging them on.

The redcoats rose from the grass. Still in their perfect double-row formations. Battalion by battalion, on command, each front rank dropped to one knee. Rear ranks remained standing.

And the French throng kept coming.

Harry tried to imagine what the redcoats were seeing as they stood shoulder to shoulder, barrack mates on either side, each soldier facing his own destiny. Close enough to make out the face of its agent, the tone of his flesh, whether light-or dark-skinned, the shape of his beard. Each life about to hang on the whim of a hot, fat ball as it made its wobbly way through the morning air. The brainless gob of metal having not the slightest care where it landed.

Maddie tugged at Harry’s sleeve. “Why don’t they shoot?” Urgency in her voice, as if ready to shout a warning to General Wolfe. Explain that in another minute it would be too late.

Before Harry could offer a guess, the French units that had surged the farthest ahead, the ones on the left and right sides of the field, stopped, took aim, and fired a volley.

It was more ragged than their officers probably would have liked for the sake of military display as well as lethality. But it had an effect. The report took several moments to reach Harry’s ears, by which time a few tiny redcoated figures had crumpled.

Another platoon fired on command, then another. More British went down each time. The survivors remained all but motionless, only shuffling from one side to the other to close up gaps. Seemingly indifferent to the death visiting their ranks as randomly as a scatter of summer hail. Ritual slaughter the way Harry was given to understand they did it on the plains of Europe. Insanity, to Harry’s thinking.

Then he noticed something odd. Although not a single shot had been fired from the British side, men in the French ranks were dropping. But not the whitecoats. Just militiamen in their civilian clothes.

“What’s happening?” said Maddie.

“I think the Canadians are falling on to the ground to reload. If the French army is like the British, their regulars are trained to stay upright.”

It came to Harry that Ayerdale was likely among those now on their bellies. If in fact he had even shown up.

The advance resumed. Firing and reloading as they went, mostly by platoons but some individually. Their eagerness to dispatch redcoats still plain. Organization suffering even among the better-trained regulars, who, Harry figured, might have been getting thrown off their pace by the sight of militiamen collapsing around them. Maybe not sure if they were being struck by unseen British fire or maybe just had decided to abandon the fight, hunker down until it was over. The Ayerdale strategy.

The left and right sides of the field now bore little resemblance to an organized army. Some haphazardly strewn clumps of men were going ahead faster than others. Only those in the center, where Montcalm
likely had put his most experienced warriors, retained their definable formations, though even they had lost some of their crispness.

Thin though it was, the red line looked as unmovable as if each soldier had been screwed into place. Within minutes, a few knots of French soldiers were so close that Harry imagined they could have exchanged greetings. Or insults.

Finally, the forward line of a redcoat platoon on the left leveled muskets and fired.

“At last,” said Maddie.

The precisely timed volley made a flying wall of metal. The result was gratifying. The closest host of Frenchmen collapsed as neatly as grass cut down by a scythe. A visible shudder passed through the rest of the ranks.

Moments later, a squeal of bagpipes reached Harry’s ears. Maybe they had been playing before and the sound was just now arriving on the breeze. At the same time, British platoons on the left and right commenced firing volleys. With each flight of lead and each resultant row of newly dead or crippled French soldiers, the advance faltered. Only the center formations continued at the same deliberate pace, still stepping to the drums.

The center of the British line had not yet fired. For an instant, Harry wondered if they had been standing in one place for so long as to have fallen asleep. The idea had barely entered his head when both rows of men, the ones standing and those kneeling, leveled their muskets. The maneuver as precise as that of a high-born lady snapping open her fan.

In his twenty-eight years of being alive, Harry had seen many noteworthy things. Mysterious balls of light playing through swamps on moonless nights. A panther killing a bear. The top of a sap-rich pine tree exploding like a bomb when struck by lightning. But he had never seen anything close to what he saw next.

A simultaneous flash of fire and smoke issued from hundreds of Brown Bess muskets. A single tremendous clap of thunder. Smoke
billowed over the field so thickly that Harry could not see who was still alive on the other side and who was not.

By the time the smoke had drifted enough to allow vision, the British had reloaded. All were on their feet now, stepping forward, their own drums beating time. The hay-colored grass to their front turning red and flattened by the weight of bodies. The Frenchmen who remained standing looking dazed.

Then, with the precision of fine clockwork, the redcoats stopped, leveled their muskets, and fired a second volley.

Madness, maybe. And yet, he had to admit, convincing proof of why His Majesty’s enemies, from snowy Prussia to the steaming lowlands of India, feared his soldiers. What was left of a distinguishable French line dissolved. Men dropped their weapons and ran in the opposite direction. First just a few, then many, as panic infected those still standing. The entire army suddenly was scurrying away like a pack of beetles caught in a light.

The last of the low-lying clouds had melted away. Under a bright midmorning sky, the sight of fleeing Frenchmen seemed at last to awaken passion among the Britons. A faint roar reached Harry’s ears. War cries. A detachment of kilted redcoats broke away and gave chase. Claymores twirled and glittered in the sunlight, in the distance looking like shiny needles. Straggling Frenchmen, either wounded or just exhausted, disappeared underneath the swarm of highlanders. Huzzahs went up elsewhere across the plain as other battalions surged forward, joined the chase.

Running men filled the field. All headed more or less in the direction of Harry and Maddie.

He weighed their options. They could stay in the bushes or hide behind rocks, but they could not become invisible. They could put their arms in the air and try to explain to the first British soldier that arrived what they were doing there. Or a shortened version of the story. But the redcoats did not look like they would be interested in listening to explanations just now. In fact, they seemed focused on a simple purpose: making holes in every living thing not wearing red.

His other thought was to join the retreat, flee to the safety of the French citadel, temporary though that safety might be. But that carried its own risk: discovery as British subjects and not in uniform. The definition of spies. Someone might even remember that when last seen they had been in the jail.