ON MY return to barracks at the Isle of Jesus, I found it difficult to accommodate myself immediately to civilized customs, and was glad to be told that in ten days’ time I would be sent out in an officer’s party to train twenty non-commissioned officers in the arts that I had learned from the Indians. Meanwhile I detested the disorder and quarrelsomeness of barrack life. Since Major Bolton went, there was little care shown for the well-being of the men: they were not regularly and usefully employed, and preferred idleness and drinking to that healthful indulgence in sport which kept the Canadians merry. A whimsical notion occurred to me: how salutary it would be if a Colonel, with a perfect indifference to precedent, were to put the men under his command to school during such periods of enforced idleness! It would be vain, of course, to hope for signs of genius in the pupils, but at least all could be taught to read and write a fair hand, and to state a plain matter intelligibly upon paper, which so few were able to do, even among the sergeants. Nor would it be ill for such an innovator also to instruct his young officers in the military science, in which on the whole they were dangerously deficient, especially in that of military engineering.
The quarrelsomeness of which I complained was not confined to the ranks, for officers frequently called one another out to avenge imagined affronts. One ludicrous case occurred. A Captain Montgomery of The Ninth, who had a very prominent nose, happened to leave his lodging to go to the Mess, not four doors away, when he met with Lieutenant Murray emerging from thence. ‘God bless me!’ cries the Lieutenant, ‘your nose is frost-bit.’
The Captain was very tender on the subject of his nose and because it was not half a minute since he had stepped into the street, believed that he was being bantered. ‘God damn you, sir, for your impertinence!’ he cried.
Lieutenant Murray could not let this pass, and says he: ‘Sir, let me repeat in all civility that you have a large nose that is frost-bit. Go, rub it in snow to make the blood circulate and keep away from a fire, else you will have but a short nose.’
Captain Montgomery very fiercely: ‘Mr Murray, my second will wait upon you tomorrow morning to arrange a rendezvous.’
Lieutenant Murray: ‘Sir, frostbite occasions no sort of pain, and you are therefore unaware that what I say is true. Rub your nose at once with snow, or mortification will ensue. Or, perhaps, get your second to perform the service for you.’
The Captain went blustering into the mess, and ‘God bless me!’ every one cried, ‘Your nose is frost-bit! Keep away from the fire in heaven’s name! Outside at once, and rub it well with snow, else you will lose it for sure.’
So out he went, to rub his nose with snow, and though a greedy man and sharp set with hunger missed a very good meal; exactly as Lieutenant Murray, that waggish Irishman, had intended when he had rehearsed the scene beforehand with his brother-officers. And the Captain that same evening made the Lieutenant a handsome apology.
It was remarkable to me that none of the men attempted to learn how to glide along the frozen river on skates. Perhaps they thought that to do so would be presumptuous, for several of the officers had provided themselves with skates and had instituted a skating club. I had myself learned the sport from the Indians, who could cover immense distances by this means of progression; it may not be credited but, for a wager, three Indians not long before had skated in a single day, between dawn and dusk, all the way from Montreal to Quebec – a distance of one hundred and eighty miles! However, this glory was purchased with death, for two instantly expired on reaching their goal and the third did not survive above a week. Contiguous to the frozen river’s sides, the ice supplied a flat and level ground to go on, but in the mid-current the passage was rugged and hilly. This was occasioned by the powerful force and rapidity of the water underneath, throwing up fragments of broken ice. Standing upon a rising ground of ice thus formed, you might perceive the most grotesque appearances and figures, sometimes of human beings, beasts and birds and of almost every object which the earth offers the eye.
My journey with the non-commissioned officers proved uneventful and pleasant; Lieutenant Kemmis conducted us. He was a gentleman who never affected, as many young coxcombs do, that the epaulettes upon his shoulders had given him the power of knowing better than his subordinates in rank upon every conceivable subject. While avoiding to appear publicly in the character of my pupil, he inquired beforehand from me how marching, cooking, sleeping, and other matters were regulated among the Indians, and gave his orders accordingly; whenever an occasion arose where he was at a loss, he had no false shame in asking my advice.
Our tour was to Three Rivers, through the woods on the northern side of the river and back through the woods on the opposing side. We stopped for a night at Three Rivers and drank with the Brunswick Grenadiers at the barrack. The Germans I found a very strange people, combining fortitude with superstitious panic, kindliness with brutality, mechanical skill with sheer stupidity, erudition with a plentiful lack of wit. Those with whom we spoke seemed to have no notion of the cause they were engaged in, or of the probable course of the campaign, nor had they any curiosity to inform themselves. Their thoughts ran on pay, plunder, their families in Germany, and God. They were for ever singing psalms and hymns, and had less idea of diverting themselves with sport even than our men. Their attention to religion had, in a manner of speaking, been their downfall, for the Duke of Brunswick’s press-gang had caught most of them as they emerged from their parish churches one fine Sunday morning.
I have heard it said that if one is acquainted with five Britons, one is acquainted merely with five several Britons; whereas to be acquainted with a similar number of Germans, from whatever principality or walk of life they might be taken, is to know all Germans. Their humours and character are said to vary but little between whole multitudes, and Lieutenant Kemmis informed us that a Roman historian who lived about the time of the Emperor Nero had remarked, even at that early date, that the German tribes known to him exhibited a remarkable sameness of behaviour. Thus it is that they are more subject to sympathetic infection by joy, fear, or any other emotion than any nation in the world: let ten men go weeping through a street in a German town and soon the entire countryside will be in tears; or let them dance, and a long procession will follow them of passionate dancers. At Three Rivers the emotion was melancholy and the words: ‘Werd ich meine armen Kinder nimmer wieder sehen?’, ‘Am I ne’er to see my poor children again?’ From this they proceeded to a conviction that, no, they would never live to revisit their homes. Parties of twenty or thirty men would relate to one another a conviction that death was soon coming to them; whereupon they moped and pined, obsessed with the notion, and nothing could cure them of it.
I endeavoured to argue a couple of them, who drank with me, out of this settled presentiment. It was to no purpose: the Rider upon the White Horse was close upon them, they said, and they could not escape the stroke of his scythe. Already scores of them were dead from no visible ailment, but merely from superstition. A sergeant took me miserably by the hand and led me into a long, unheated room appropriated as a morgue, the place where dead bodies were kept until the thawing of the frozen ground permitted them to be decently buried. ‘Alles meine guten Kameraden,’ he said wistfully, pointing about him.
It was a very strange and laughable sight that met my gaze, for the superintendent of the morgue, an apothecary, was evidently a very fanciful fellow. He had taken the bodies of these poor, pig-tailed, leather-breached Germans, while still warm, and placed them fully clothed in various lifelike postures where death and the weather preserved them stiffly. Some were kneeling with hymn-books in their hands, their jaws open as if singing; others seated in chairs with cold pipes in their mouths; many leaning against the wall with hands in pockets or one leg carelessly crossed over the other; one man standing balanced on his head and hands.
At first I could not imagine them dead, despite their ghastly countenances, but dead they were. Two big tears trickled down my Grenadier’s cheeks and wetted his great moustachios. ‘Ach,’ he sighed, ‘bald komm ich auch’, ‘Soon I too shall come hither.’ And he raised a hand at various heights from the ground to indicate the respective sizes of unfortunate children who soon would be left fatherless, by his decease, at Wolfenbuttel in Germany.
He told me the characters and professions of the dead men, as if he were a guide in a museum of wax-works. Most of them were ‘good comrades’ from Wolfenbuttel; but there were many strangers too. This was a fringe-maker from Hanover, a surly fellow; that, a whimsical creature, a discharged secretary from the post office at Gotha; that, a renegade monk from Wurzburg, but a good comrade; that, an upper steward from Meningen, a very pleasant man who could play the organ, but a thief; that, a cashiered Hessian major, very proud and evil; that, an unsuccessful playwright from Leipzig; that, a poor, bankrupt Bavarian pastry-cook; the one in the corner a retired Prussian sergeant of Hussars, who spoke no more in life than now in death.
As I came away I pondered a metaphysical question: whether in the same way as these Germans draw death upon themselves by the power of superstition, so a man might repel death by a contrary superstition of invulnerability – such as I myself had lately come to feel. ‘Aye,’ said I, ‘but only so long as this presentiment of life is vouchsafed. It will vanish suddenly one day when that bullet is run into the mould which is destined for my skull alone.’
I communicated to Lieutenant Kemmis a plan I had for rousing the spirits of our company when we returned to Montreal, namely of instructing them in the Indian ball-game, called by the French la crosse, which was a prime divertisement among the Mohicans. The ball was similar in materials and construction to that used by our Irish schoolboys in their ancient game of hurry, but was propelled with two sticks, or crosses, one in each hand, resembling large battledores. The field of play measured three hundred feet in length, with goal-posts at either end through which the contending parties sought to drive the ball with their sticks. The party that effected this twelve times in all was accounted victorious. The parties might trip, strike, grapple, wrestle, knock away each other’s sticks, or employ any stratagem whatsoever, provided that the ball were propelled only with the stick and that no man lost his temper and shed blood. These matches among the Indians, of which I witnessed several while in Buffalo settlement, were played with intense excitement. The greatest chiefs and most distinguished warriors took part in them, and important sums were staked upon the result by the spectators. The players, who were naked and slippery with bear’s grease, played with a furious hilarity that was perfectly indescribable and grew most desperate as the game advanced until but one more point remained to be notched by the winning side. The most remarkable circumstance was that no player was ever slain.
Lieutenant Kemmis readily agreed to my proposal for forthwith playing the game on the ice, with ten men a side, and himself for umpire. We improvised the crosses and the ball, and were soon sufficiently adept at the game to look forward with pleasure to imparting it to our men at the Isle of Jesus and playing matches in rivalry between the several companies. However, Lieutenant Kemmis, fearful of accidents, barred fisticuffs and kicking, and bade us play in our waistcoats rather than stark naked.
After our first game, which left us with limbs very stiff, but in the highest spirits, I wished that I were in General Riedesel’s confidence and could recommend the sport to him as a medicine for his dispirited heroes.
We were aware that, with the end of winter, our period of inactivity would come to an end, and our campaign be resumed. To me, Canada had proved a very kind foster-mother. Indeed, it occurred to me that, were I ever obliged to remove from my native country and inhabit another, this would be my choice, though situate within winter’s peculiar meridians. The climate of Montreal was especially salubrious and did I but take pains to master the French tongue – for the Canadian French are very loath to learn the English – I might with industry and a small principal settle myself here very comfortably indeed. This feeling of gratefulness, still warm in my breast, will excuse that I have dwelt at such length upon the beauties and natural curiosities of the province.
I had the good fortune to visit Montreal on Holy Thursday, which they called La Fête Dieu, and which generally coincided with the departure of winter. On that day, at eleven o’clock in the forenoon, a great procession of the clergy in general, and the friars of all the monasteries, attended with a band of music, moved out from the great church and passed down the streets, occupying nearly half a mile of ground. They bore lighted candles in their hands.
The townspeople had prepared for this ceremonial by procuring large pines and firs from the woods, with which they lined the streets on both sides, making the boughs connect at the top, so that the religious spectacle proceeded under an umbrageous shelter, as if through a grove of living trees. The centre of the procession was occupied by the Host laid upon an open copy of the Scriptures in Latin, with a white cloth spread over, and above it a crimson canopy borne by six venerable priests. Boys in white vestments scattered flowers while others swung silver thuribles which they constantly wafted towards the Host, so that the smell of incense made the streets fragrant; and all the people sang joyful anthems. Protestant or no Protestant, I was pleased to pull off my cap, as had been ordered by General Phillips, the City Commandant, out of respect for the innocent emotions of these gay, good people – who fell with one accord upon their knees as the Host passed – and for the superb solemnities of the Romish Church.
On Holy Thursday the yellow wax candles that had been used in the ceremonial were cut into small pieces and distributed to the faithful, for a small pecuniary consideration, to be used as charms against tempests. If such a stump were lighted when the wind rose, its fury would – they thought – soon abate. A woman who kept a grog-shop near the barracks, with whom I was a favourite, presented me with one of these relics; informing me of its powers, and solemnly warning me against using it except for the purpose I have mentioned. I put it in my knapsack, after thanking her gravely, and thought no more about it.
Before the end of March the thaw had begun, Montreal having three weeks’ advantage of Quebec in the matter of the spring’s arrival, and it was no longer safe to play la crosse or perform our military exercises upon the frozen river. The river had been the parade-ground for some time past, for the snow lay deep upon the ground, but upon the ice it thawed daily in the sun and froze to small ice overnight – moreover, a steady footing was provided for the troops by the sweepings of the stables and byres which were thrown out upon the ice to be carried off when it should break up. One day, as we were at our platoon exercise, a sharp crack sounded under our feet like a discharge of grape and the ice split across from bank to bank. We broke ranks in alarm and one man was injured by a bayonet in the general sauve qui peut, but the crack was of no immediate significance. However, the warm weather continued and soon the ice along the bank gaped with great chasms. Frequent roars of breaking ice were heard from the centre of the river, where the fantastic ice-mountains had formed. As the waters became swollen by the melting of the snow, these mountains fell into the stream and were hurried down towards Quebec with tremendous impetuosity: until becoming wedged in narrow places between islands and heaping up there again in the form of new mountains. The greatest roar of all was heard at midnight of the last day of April when some obstruction, half a mile downstream from us, gave way. When we awoke in the morning, there was the river flowing clear and blue under the cloudless sky, and we were true islanders again; instead of carriages and sleighs driving across from the barracks to the mainland, canoes and batteaux came dancing down.
However, so long as there remained fragments of ice in the river, no navigation was possible to ships of burden, for these bergs, when frozen to the bottom, were no less dangerous than a rock – or than a charging spermaceti whale, when afloat.
We were distressed to learn that among the many victims of the thaw was Major Bolton, who was drowned in the Lakes on his way to Montreal, by the batteau he was in striking a submerged lump of ice with great force and sinking forthwith. Richard Harlowe brought us the melancholy intelligence; and in consequence of his employer’s death he was obliged to quit The Eighth and be restored to the strength of The Ninth. When he was asked what had become of his wife, he replied that he feared her drowned in the Falls of Niagara, pursuant upon a threat that she had made him in a fit of rage. He affected to be disconsolate, and, whether or not he had banished from his mind all memory of his half-breed mistress, he at least refrained from boasting to us of that conquest. Towards me, he continued sullen and reserved.
During a fortnight the roads had been impassable, but now were quite dry and even dusty. Spring came with a rush, and we had hardly congratulated ourselves upon its delightful appearance when it passed on and gave place to summer. In a very few days the bare trees were in full leaf and the barren, frozen ground was green with grass and decorated with innumerable flowers.
Our annual supply of clothing, the new suit for every man for which stoppages were made from our pay, had not yet arrived, and we were told that we must commence the campaign in our old clothes, most of which were in a very ragged condition. But, to make them more presentable, all with long coats were told to reduce them to jackets, and their hats into caps; the cloth remaining over to be used as patches for rents and burns. The caps were now to be furnished with cockades of hair, but no hair being provided we were expected to go foraging for it – as the Israelites of old were expected by their task-masters to furnish themselves with straw for their bricks.
Terry Reeves, who had lately returned to us, his wound healed, and very sorrowful to be parted from his Indian squaw, led a foray of about twenty men of our company into a paddock where a herd of cows was grazing; intending to cut the hair from the ends of their tails. The plan miscarried. The farmer and a number of relatives who happened to be present in the farm-house, because of a funeral feast in progress there, rushed out with sticks and began laying about them with great fury. Two soldiers had their heads broken and their bodies severely bruised before they could be rescued; they were foolish enough the next day to complain to Major Forbes, their officer, of this ‘premeditated assault’. Major Forbes told them downrightly that they had got no more than their deserts. In the first place, it was an inhumane act to cut from the tails of cows those hirsute appendages provided by Nature for switching away the flies that so greatly plagued them in the hot season; in the second, they had evidently gone without their side-arms, which should always be worn, being the same to a soldier as a sword is to an officer; in the third, horsehair was far superior to cow’s hair for the making of cockades. Terry therefore led a new expedition, under cover of darkness, to the artillery barrack at Montreal, where sufficient hair was secured for the whole company from the tails of the gun horses and officers’ chargers found unguarded there in the stables.