Recollections of the War of 1812

CHAPTER III

Luckily the moment we arrived at Toronto, we were informed that a gun-brig was about to sail for Niagara, on board which we were shipped. About sun-set we sailed, and the wind being fair, we arrived in the mouth of the Niagara river at daylight, and lost no time in ordering horses; and while they were getting ready, we were anxiously employed in examining and cross-examining witnesses as to the contradictory reports that were in circulation as to a battle. All we could elicit was, that there had been some fighting, for many had heard from Queenston Heights the noise both of artillery and musketry. Some said we had been defeated, and were in full retreat on Niagara; others that we had cut the enemy to pieces, and that the few that were left were busy crossing to their own side. Of course, as in most matters of rumor, both reports were partly true and partly false. We had obtained a victory, but lost severely in so doing; and the enemy, in consequence of the masterly arrangements of Major General Scott, one of the best soldiers in the American Army, (and one of the most gentlemanly men I ever met with,) had retired on Fort Brie; and a body of our troops, under Major General Convan of the Royals, had pressed hard upon them, and had he not been disabled by a wound, it is the general opinion, would have followed them into the Fort. The first of the particulars we were told by an officer who had come from the field on the spur, with the despatches, and he advised me as a friend (for we were old acquaintances) to stay where I was, and get my hospital in readiness, for, he assured me, that from the manner our Regiment had been handled, I would have quite enough to do at home without going abroad to look for adventures. Accordingly, upon inquiring where my wounded were to be put, I was shown a ruinous fabric, built of logs, called Butler's Barracks, from having been built during the revolutionary war by Butler's Rangers for their temporary accommodation. Nothing could be worse constructed for an hospital for wounded men – not that it was open to every wind that blew, for at midsummer in Canada that is rather an advantage; but there was a great want of room, so that many had to be laid on straw on the floor, and these had the best of it, for their comrades were put into berths one above another as in a transport or packet, where it was impossible to get round them to dress their wounds, and their removal gave them excrutiating pain.

In the course of the morning I had my hands full enough. Our Surgeon had gone to Scotland in a state of health which rendered recovery hopeless, and our senior assistant, naturally of a delicate constitution, and suffering under disease at the time of the action, had the last of his strength exhausted in bringing his wounded down. Waggon after waggon arrived, and before mid-day I found myself in charge of two hundred and twenty wounded, including my own Regiment, prisoners and militia, with no one to assist me but my hospital serjeant, who, luckily for me, was a man of sound sense and great experience, who made a most able second; but with all this the charge was too much for us, and many a poor fellow had to submit to amputation whose limb might have been preserved had there been only time to take reasonable care of it. But under the circumstances of the case it was necessary to convert a troublesome wound into a simple one, or to lose the patient's life from want of time to pay him proper attention.

One of the many blunders of this blundering war, was that the Staff of the Army was never where it was wanted. The Medical and Commissariat Staffs, for instance, were congregated at the headquarters at Quebec, where they were in redundancy, with nothing for them to do, while a Staff Surgeon and an Hospital Mate were all that was allowed for the Army of the Right, – men who must have been active beyond all precedent if they could keep the office business, the accounts and returns square, without even attempting to interfere with the practice; and all this at a time too, when there was hardly a regiment in the field that had its full complement of medical officers.

There is hardly on the face of the earth a less enviable situation than that of an Army Surgeon after a battle – worn out and fatigued in body and mind, surrounded by suffering, pain and misery, much of which he knows it is not in his power to heal or even to assuage. While the battle lasts these all pass unnoticed, but they come before the medical man afterwards in all their sorrow and horror, stripped of all the excitement of the "heady fight."

It would be a useful lesson to cold-blooded politicians, who calculate on a war costing so many lives and so many limbs as they would calculate on a horse costing so many pounds – or to the thoughtless at home, whom the excitement of a gazette, or the glare of an illumination, more than reconciles to the expense of a war – to witness such a scene, if only for one hour. This simple and obvious truth was suggested to my mind by the exclamation of a poor woman. I had two hundred and twenty wounded turned in upon me that morning, and among others an American farmer, who had been on the field either as a militia man or a camp follower. He was nearly sixty years of age, but of a most Herculean frame. One ball had shattered his thigh bone, and another lodged in his body, the last obviously mortal. His wife, a respectable elderly looking woman, came over under a flag of truce, and immediately repaired to the hospital, where she found her husband lying on a truss of straw, writhing in agony, for his sufferings were dreadful. Such an accumulation of misery seemed to have stunned her, for she ceased wailing, sat down on the ground, and taking her husband's head on her lap, continued long, moaning and sobbing, while the tears flowed fast down her face; she seemed for a considerable time in a state of stupor, till awakened by a groan from her unfortunate husband, she clasped her hands, and looking wildly around, exclaimed, "O that the King and the President were both here this moment to see the misery their quarrels lead to – they surely would never go to war again 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." In half an hour the poor fellow ceased to suffer.

I never underwent such fatigue as I did for the first week at Butler's Barracks. The weather was intensely hot, the flies were in myriads, and lighting on the wounds, deposited their eggs, so that maggots were bred in a few hours, producing dreadful irritation, so that long before I could go round dressing the patients, it was necessary to begin again; and as I had no assistant but my serjeant, our toil was incessant. For two days and two nights, I never sat down; when fatigued I sent my servant down to the river for a change of linen, and having dined and dressed, went back to my work quite refreshed. On the morning of the third day, however, I fell asleep on my feet, with my arm embracing the post of one of the berths. It was found impossible to awaken me, so a truss of clean straw was laid on the floor, on which I was deposited, and an hospital rug thrown over me; and there I slept soundly for five hours without ever turning.

My instructions were, as soon as a man could be safely removed, to ship him for York, and as the whole distance was by water conveyance, and there were ships of war always in readiness, and as my men were eminently uncomfortable where they were, I very soon thinned my hospital, and the few that remained over were sent to a temporary general hospital, and I was despatched to Chippawa in the neighborhood of the Falls of Niagara.

My duty here was to keep a kind of a medical boarding house. The sick and wounded from the Army were forwarded to me in spring waggons, and I took care of them during the night, and in the morning I forwarded them on to Niagara by the same conveyance, so that my duty commenced about sun-set, and terminated at sun-rise. By this arrangement I had the whole of the day to myself, and in the vicinity of the Falls there was no difficulty in employing it agreeably. My first business on my arrival, on a beautiful summer afternoon, was to visit the Table Rock. My first sight of the Falls most woefully disappointed me, – it was certainly grander than any fall I had ever seen, those of the Clyde included; but it was not on that scale of magnificence I had been led to expect, the opposite shore seemed within a stone's throw, and the height of the Fall not very great. I walked to the edge of the rock, and seated myself with my legs dangling over, and blessed my stars that I was not a man to be thrown into ecstacies and raptures merely because other people had been so. After about a quarter of an hour's contemplation I resolved to return to my quarters, and previous to rising, I bent forward and looked straight down. Below me were two men fishing, diminished by the distance —

This immediately gave me a notion of the height I was perched upon; a sense of sickness and giddiness came over me, and, like Edgar, I prudently resolved —

But I did not make my retreat in a manner quite so dignified as could have been wished, for in coming down the bank I had unslung my sword, and was carrying it in my hand; it I pitched backwards over my head, and throwing myself first on the broad of my back, I rolled over half a dozen times, till I thought myself a sufficient distance from the verge of the precipice to get upon my legs, and it will easily be believed I was in no hurry to return to my former position.

I then set on foot a series of experiments to ascertain the width of the Falls, by throwing stones across, but by some extraordinary fatality they seemed to drop from my hand into the enormous cauldron that boiled and smoked below. Next day I came armed with an Indian bow, but the arrows met with no greater success than the stones – they, too, dropt as if impelled by a child's force; and it was not till after I looked at the Falls in every aspect that I convinced myself that they were such a stupendous work of nature as they really are. The fact is, there is nothing at hand to compare them with, and a man must see them often, and from every different point of view, to have any proper conception of the nature of them. I never heard of any one except Mrs. Boyle Corbett who was satisfied with seeing the Falls from her bed-room window while dressing for dinner; but I have often been amused, while staying at the hotel there, to see a succession of respectable people come from Buffalo to Chippawa by steam, take the stage that stops an hour at the Falls, dine, and see them, and start for Queenston, quite convinced that they had seen everything worth seeing in the neighborhood. Getting tired of the inactive life I was leading, I applied to get into the field, and it luckily so happened that another medical man had as great a desire to quit it as I to get into it; accordingly, an exchange was soon agreed upon – he being duly installed in the Chippawa hospital, and I receiving the route to join the Army before Fort Erie.

The leaguer before Fort Erie had been always called the "Camp," and I certainly expected that, like other camps, it would have been provided with tents; but in this I was mistaken. It was rather a bivouac than a camp, the troops sheltering themselves under some branches of trees that only collected the scattered drops of rain, and sent them down in a stream on the heads of the inhabitants, and as it rained incessantly for two months, neither clothes nor bedding could be kept dry. I, though a young soldier, showed myself an old one, for my friend Tom F – having rather a better hut than his neighbors, I took up my quarters there, and his bed being raised on forked sticks, I placed my own under it, so that the rain had to penetrate through his bed clothes and mattress before it could reach me.

This arrangement did admirably for some time, till one night we were visited by the most tremendous thunder storm I ever witnessed in this or any other country, and accompanied with a deluge of rain, that might have done credit to Noah's flood. The hut was very soon swimming, and I was awoke by my bed being overflowed, and started up to get out, but the water that flooded the floor softened the earth in which the forked sticks that supported Tom's bed were driven, and it falling forward jammed me in among the wet bed clothes, where I was nearly drowned, till Tom starting to his feet allowed me to raise the wreck and crawl on all-fours from under it.

I may here remark what has always struck me as a great deficiency in the military education of the British Army – they are too much taken care of by their officers, and never taught to take care of themselves. In quarters their every motion is under the surveillance of their officers – the Captain and Subaltern of the day visit them each twice a day, and the Commanding Officer and one or other of the Majors frequently, to say nothing of the Surgeon and the Captain of their Company, who, if he (as sometimes happens) is a man possessed of a spirit of fidgetty zeal for the service, actually harasses them to death by his kind attention to their wants.

It must be certified that their room is duly swept and cleaned, their bedding regularly made up and folded, their meals properly dressed, and it is not even left to their own discretion to eat them when dressed, but an officer must see and certify that fact.

Their shaving, their ablutions, their cleaning their shoes and clothes, all come under the same strict supervision, so that at last they get into the notion that their comfort, cleanliness, feeding and clothing, all are the duty and business of their officers, they having no interest in the matter, and that what they are not ordered to do for their own relief they may leave undone. In the sister service this is not so. A sailor will mend his clothes, will leave his hammock properly fitted, his bedding properly made, and his comforts so far as depends upon himself, properly cared for, whether his officers order it or not. The result of all this excessive care and attention is that you make men mere children. When the soldier leaves his clean comfortable barracks in England and is put into the field, where he has few or none of the accommodations he had at home, he is utterly helpless, and his officer on whom he leant, is just as helpless when a new state of things arises, as he can possibly be. All this was most fully illustrated before Fort Erie. The line might nearly as well have slept in the open air. The incorporated Militia, on the contrary, erected shanties, far superior, in warmth, tightness and comfort, to any canvas tent. De Watteville's regiment, which was recruited, chiefly from the prison hulks, consisted of all the nations of Europe, but all of them had served in the armies of Napoleon, and all of them had there learned how to make the best of a bad bargain. These, though they had not the skill in the axe inherent in their brethren of the Militia, took down hemlock boughs (a species of the pine, "pinus canadensis,") and cutting off the tails of them, made thatched wigwams, perfectly weatherproof; and though they could not equal the Canadian Militia in woodcraft, they greatly excelled them in gastronomic lore; and thus, while our fellows had no better shift than to frizzle their rations of salt provisions on the ends of their ramrods, these being practical botanists, sent out one soldier from each mess, who gathered a haversack full of wild pot herbs, with which and a little flour their ration was converted into a capital kettle of soup.

I shall have occasion to show hereafter how easily those camp habits may be acquired; meantime I have only to remark that, were they generally understood, an army might often be kept in the field in an infinitely more serviceable condition than it now is, and the prevalence of ague and dysentery in a body of men exposed to hardship and privation, if not totally arrested, might at least be very much diminished. I lately saw a very clever article on this subject by Sir J. E. Alexander of the 32nd Regt., now quartered at London, U.C., and I wrote him a very long and a very prosy letter thereanent. My positions, if I remember aright, were, first – That every Regiment in Canada should be made a Light Infantry Regiment, insomuch as they ought to be taught to understand and obey the bugle; secondly, that they should be taught the use of the axe, without which a Regiment is absolutely helpless in the woods, and this might be done by making them chop their own firewood, and giving them the money that is otherwise given to the contractor: and thirdly, that they should be taken into the woods for a month every summer, with a party of woodsmen to teach them how to erect shanties, cut fire-wood and provide for themselves in such a situation. Even the Commissariat Department (the most important in modern warfare) may be dispensed with by able woods-men. Sir William Johnson marched his Regiment, who were all woods-men, from the Mohawk River to Fort Niagara, through the woods, requiring no other support, on that long line of march, than their rifles were amply sufficient to supply them with.

When I arrived at Fort Erie, I found myself appointed to the very service I would have chosen had I had the right of choosing. A corps of six flank companies was organized under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Drummond, of Keltie, then commandant of the 104th Regiment.

Colonel Drummond was everything that could be required in a soldier; brave, generous, open-hearted and good natured, he added to all these the talent of a first-rate tactitian; and if at times eccentricities broke out through all these, any one who knew him must have agreed with his clansman, and I believe kinsman, Sir Gordon Drummond, that "all these eccentricities would one day mellow down into sound common sense, and that Keltie would be an honor to the service." Alas! his prophecy was destined never to be fulfilled – that was his last campaign, and he fell in it as a brave man and a soldier would wish to fall, a death far less to be pitied than envied. But I am anticipating. We were divided into three brigades – let not the old soldier suppose that these were such brigades as are generally in the army. Our force never amounted to 9,000 men, including artillery, cavalry and militia, and these took their tour of piquet duty in rotation, so that we had one day of duty, were relieved the next, and on the fourth again took our turn. This, all things considered, especially alarms and skirmishes, when we all turned out, was pretty hard work, but we were in high spirits, and it never affected us. One of the great drawbacks of the service in Canada was that we got the rubbish of every department in the army. Any man whom The Duke deemed unfit for the Peninsula was considered as quite good enough for the Canadian market, and in nothing was this more conspicuous than in our Engineer Department. Without the semblance of a battering train, it was deemed expedient to besiege Fort Erie, and the ground was occupied, parties sent in advance, and batteries ordered to be constructed. Our first essay in this line was a battery on the main road leading to the Fort, which was to breach the strong stone building in the centre of it, on which were mounted, if I recollect rightly, one iron 24-pounder, one 18-pounder and two brass field 24-pounders. I have never seen before or since, any like them, but they were of the time of George II., and were admirable guns in the field, though not quite the best that could be used for breaching the wall of a fort. A brass and an iron mortar were afterwards added to this most efficient battering train; the latter, however, having no bed, was placed in one of oak, which it split almost as often as it was fired. After much skirmishing with the enemy and the covering parties, the battery was at last opened, and gentle reader! if ever you saw what is termed hopping bowling at cricket you may have some idea how our fire operated. I very much doubt if one shot in ten reached the rampart at all, and the fortunate exceptions that struck the stone building at which they were aimed, rebounded from its sides as innocuous as tennis balls.

The fact is the distance had been miscalculated, and we were attempting to breach a wall at a distance that it was scarcely possible to hit it. The enemy knew their distance better, and managed to pitch shot and shell among us in a way that was anything but pleasant.

I remember one day while I was in the battery, admiring our abortive attempts to do any mischief, while a gun of the enemy was practising with the most admirable precision on us, Mr. K., of the Glengarries, lounged into the battery, and casually asked the Commanding Engineer how far we were from the Fort. He replied about seven hundred yards. Mr. K. said he thought double the distance would be nearer the mark; – this brought on a dispute, which Mr. K. offered to settle by either cutting a fuse or laying a gun for the supposed distance. To this it was replied that both the powder and the fuses were bad, and no faith could be had in them. Mr. K. then asked leave to lay the 24-pounder, and the Engineer, with a sneer, looking at his green jacket, observed, that there was some difference between a rifle and a 24-pounder; however, Mr. K. then himself on the trail of the gun, brought out the coign further than it had been before, and from the orders he gave to the artillery even, showed, at least, that he knew the words of command in working a gun. The presiding Engineer, seeing the elevation he was taking, asked him if he was aiming at the truck of the flagstaff of the Fort. He replied, no – the site of the embrazure would be high enough for him. The gun was fired, and the ball entered the sand bags about a foot below the mark. He then asked leave to try a second shot. He laid the gun with great care, and took a long while to do it, – at last he gave the word "fire," away went the ball, and driving the sand up from the site of the embrazure, took the enemy's gun on the transom, and capsized it. "Pray, sir," said the Engineer, "where might you have learned to lay guns?" "At Woolwich," was the reply, "where I was three years Serjeant Major of Artillery."

It was then resolved that another battery should be erected some hundreds of yards in advance, and to the right of the first. Accordingly, our brigade was sent out to drive the enemy's piquets out of the wood in our front, and establish parties to cover the workmen.

This duty was performed in good style, but with considerable loss on our part, for in a wood the advancing party always acts to disadvantage, as the retreating can fire from under cover, and retreat in the smoke; whereas the advancing party must necessarily expose himself somewhat, the quantum of exposure depending much on his knowledge of his business in advancing in such a way as will give his antagonists as little chance as may be of taking a steady aim at him.