CHAPTER 48

The ironwork Driscol’s men had embedded in their breastworks did stall the British charge just that extra bit. The last round of canister, fired from Ball’s guns at point-blank range, wreaked havoc on the regiment again.

By now, it was a badly battered regiment. But the enemy had arrived and were finally at the throats of their tormentors, and they’d have blood, by God.

Colonel Rennie started up the last little slope, just behind the front rank of his soldiers. Two canister balls ripped open his left thigh, severing the femoral artery. He stumbled and fell, blood gushing like a fountain.

A young officer stooped over him, his face pale and tight.

“Help me up!” Rennie shouted.

“Sir—your leg. We must—”

“Get me up, damn you, or I’ll see you hang! Get me up!”

The officer did as he was commanded. The colonel took two steps and was knocked down by a soldier who was falling back. The man’s chest had been torn open by a pike blade. It was a hideous wound.

“Get me up!” Rennie shouted again.

The officer did as he was told. Rennie stood, and started to raise his sword. But the blood loss from a severed femoral is enormous, in a very short time. His face suddenly turned white, his eyes rolled up, and he collapsed in a heap.

The young officer’s desperate attempt to staunch the mortal wound would have been hopeless, even if the body of another soldier falling back from the rampart hadn’t knocked him aside and left him pinned for half a minute before he could get back to his stricken commander.

The fight at the line of the guns was as ferocious a hand-to-hand melee as any Driscol had ever known. Hundreds of men, stabbing and hacking each other with bayonets, pikes, and the motley assortment of blades the Iron Battalion had managed to acquire.

Charles Ball proved as adept with his cutlass as with his tongue. Not that he ever stopped using the first.

“Give it to ’em, boys, give it to ’em good!”

Henry Crowell was astonished to see a British soldier clamber over the writhing body of another soldier who’d gotten impaled on the ironwork. So astonished that he didn’t even feel any fear when he saw the man was preparing to leap at him with his bayonet extended.

The big teamster’s position as spongeman for his gun crew was just in front and to the right of the twelve-pounder. Henry stepped back a pace and shifted his grip on the sponge staff he’d been using to swab out the cannon and ram in another ball. When the redcoat came flying at him, he just swatted him aside. He had the reach on the man and, as strong as he was, the fact that the ramrod’s tip was covered with tightly wound fabric simply didn’t matter. The British soldier, stunned by the impact, slammed into two other redcoats who were struggling over the ironwork. The invader’s musket sailed out of his hands, and the only damage the bayonet did was spearing yet another British soldier in the calf as he tried to get over the barricade.

There was something insane about it all. Despite his immense strength, the teamster was fundamentally a gentle man. He’d hardly been in any fights in his life, and those only when he was a boy.

But this wasn’t really a “fight,” in any sense of the term that Henry understood. It was just a huge, crazed melee where hundreds of men who didn’t even know one another were doing their level best to commit murder and mayhem.

Even a racial element was absent, to give it any logic. A lot of the men coming at him in red uniforms were West Indians, as black as he was.

Yet another British soldier clambered over the same poor fellow stuck on the ironwork. If this kept up, the man would be killed by his own mates, driving his chest further and further onto the dull ornamental spearpoints.

Some part of Henry’s mind felt sorry for him. Most of it, though, was concentrated on the task at hand. By now, so many men of the Iron Battalion were pressing forward to help repel the enemy that he realized he couldn’t keep using the sponge staff as a club.

Well enough. Blunt and relatively soft though the end was, it would make a usable spear. In Henry’s big hands, anyway.

So he didn’t let this new soldier finish his preparations. While he was still in a crouch atop his mate’s back, readying his bayonet, Henry thrust forward and smashed his face.

All the men of the battalion were fighting ferociously, but Driscol could already tell that it wouldn’t be long before they were overwhelmed. They were outnumbered, first of all, by something like three to one. Then, except for Charles and his veterans, almost all of Driscol’s men were still amateurs at this business, and the British soldiers who were attacking them were professionals.

Henry Crowell was handling it well, but few of Driscol’s men had either Henry’s strength or his quick wits. They were valiant enough, in their awkward way. But valor goes only so far in a battle. If it weren’t for the breastworks, they’d have been driven under already—and those breastworks, though very well made, were still nothing more than hastily erected field fortifications.

So be it. He’d still gut them before he went down. Driscol drew the pistol from his waistband.

Slightly behind him and to either side, James and John Rogers looked at the pistol in Driscol’s hand, and then looked at each other.

With three quick little jerks of his head, James silently laid out the plan.

I’ll fend them off. You keep the crazy one-armed Irishman from getting killed.

John nodded. He shifted the grip on his war club.

The Cherokees had finally reached the edge of the woods. Major Ridge stopped to examine the scene, and John Ross came up next to him. Peering through the last line of trees, he could see the battle at the Iron Battalion’s bastion. It looked more like a man-to-man free-for-all than what John normally thought of as a “battle.”

Ridge had a thin, grim smile on his face.

“Our country, this is. I was worried a little.”

It took John a couple of seconds to realize what Ridge meant. Against regular soldiers, in formation on an open field, there would have been little point in having the Cherokees launch a charge. Even with over half of them armed with guns, they’d have had no chance at all.

Here, though . . .

Yes. Cherokee country, when it came to war.

“How soon?” John whispered.

Ridge glanced to both sides. As dense as the cypress was, of course, he couldn’t see very far.

“Two minutes, maybe. Long enough for everyone to get into position.”

John nodded toward the melee, a little over a hundred yards off. “They may not last two minutes.”

“Then they’ll die. We’re not charging out there one at a time.”

There seemed no answer to that. So, John took the time to check his pistol and make sure his sword was loose in the scabbard. He considered drawing the sword before he charged, but dismissed the idea. Charging into battle with a weapon in each hand might look good on a painting. In real life, it’d be far too dangerous. He decided he’d fire the pistol, then throw it like a club, then draw and use his sword.

Hopefully, he’d get the expensive pistol back after the battle. Not that it really seemed to matter much. He might very well be dead within the next few minutes, anyway.

Sam was rather proud of the way he brought order to his victorious regiment, formed them into something you could call a “line” if you squinted real hard, and were prepared to be generous, then started them marching across the field toward Driscol’s embattled battalion.

It was neatly done. At the moment, though, he was trying to figure out exactly how he’d have his men fire a volley that wouldn’t kill as many Americans as British. Driscol’s men and the enemy were now completely tangled up, fighting hand to hand.

He’d figure that out when they got there. From what he could tell at the distance, Driscol’s men were on the verge of collapse. They’d all die, anyway, if he didn’t arrive in time.

The line at the breastworks started to crumble. Not because any man of the battalion ran, but simply because the British finally started breaking through.

A British officer sabered down a gunner and sprang into the bastion. Driscol stepped forward, leveled his pistol, and shot the man through the heart. Then he stooped and picked up the saber to meet a British soldier who’d butted aside another gunner and was coming at him with the bayonet.

That was as far as either Driscol or the soldier got. John Rogers wrestled Driscol off and James Rogers, as neatly as you could ask for, deflected the bayonet thrust and clubbed the soldier down.

“Just stay out of it,” John hissed into Driscol’s ear after he pinned him to the ground. “You don’t want to get my sister mad if you get killed.”

Rogers was a phenomenally good wrestler. Driscol gave up after five seconds, realizing he was hopelessly outclassed.

He stared up at the Cherokee. “What difference would it make? I’d be dead.”

John scowled. “Who cares? If I wasn’t.”

“Now!” shouted Ridge.

He leaped out of the line of trees and began racing toward the bastion. He wasn’t bothering with a pistol at all. General Jackson had given him a new sword when he arrived at New Orleans, and the Cherokee chief was mightily partial toward it.

John Ross did his best to keep up with him. It was a little amazing how fast the stocky and powerfully built Ridge could run.

But it was only a hundred yards. Even as relatively sedentary a Cherokee as John Ross was in good enough condition to make that distance without becoming winded. Major Ridge and most of his warriors wouldn’t even be fazed.

“Quick march!” Sam bellowed.

He was tempted to call a charge. Driscol and his men were going under, now.

But Sam simply didn’t dare. Over the course of the march from Washington to New Orleans, Driscol had been able to give Houston’s regiment some basic training. But they weren’t trained well enough—especially as excited as they were now—to be able to shift easily from a charge to a volley formation. Once he started them charging, they’d keep going until they piled into the British.

Then he saw dozens of Cherokee warriors swarming out of the woods from the other side of the Iron Battalion’s position, and realized it was all a moot point. By the time Sam got his men into volley range, the battle at the bastion would have become a three-sided melee. Any volley he fired would do as much harm as good.

He felt an immense sense of relief. Whatever happened, at least his friend Patrick Driscol wouldn’t die because Sam didn’t get there in time.

They were a hundred yards off. Close enough, for men who’d spent the last three months marching and training.

“Charge!”

Sam sped in front of his troops, leading the way with his sword. He wasn’t even thinking about the Iliad. He just wanted to get there and hammer the bastards bloody.

Henry Crowell fell back, the last man of his crew to do so. He covered the retreat for the rest of them now, holding the sponge staff in the middle and using both ends to bat away British soldiers.

“The major’s down!” somebody shouted. It was almost a scream.

Henry looked over his shoulder and saw that it was true. One of the two Rogers brothers was on top of him, apparently trying to shield him from receiving another wound. The other brother had clubbed down a redcoat and was facing three more. James, he thought. The two looked so much alike it was hard to tell them apart.

Henry was stunned at the ease with which James destroyed the three soldiers. His war club, lighter than a sword, flicked back and forth. Batting aside a bayonet; bloodying a face with a shift of the same stroke; deflecting another thrust—crushing that man’s skull with a full, powerful backhand blow; leaping aside; striking again—a broken arm, there—then leaping back to finish the man who was wiping blood from his eyes.

He didn’t think it had all taken more than a few seconds.

But he could see that it wouldn’t matter. The British weren’t exactly pouring through the line yet. It was more like they were seeping through, one or two or three at a time. But the seepage was happening in more than a dozen places, and more were coming into the bastion every second.

Half of them, it seemed like, were heading toward Driscol. Those veterans knew how to kill a snake. Cut off the head.

He glanced around quickly. His mates could handle themselves now, he thought.

They’d have to.

Shouting something himself—he never knew what—Henry started running toward Driscol.

“John!”

Rogers’s head twisted away from the major, whom he still had pinned to the ground. James had a grin fixed on his face, like he always did in a fight. But the expression had no humor in it at all.

Looking past him, John could see a small wave of redcoats coming.

“Just stay here,” he hissed. Then he relinquished his hold on Driscol, and jumped up to join his brother.

Major Ridge cut down a redcoat with his sword. The man never saw it coming, he was so intent on getting into the bastion. The powerful blow struck just below the neck and the blade went inches into his chest.

With a jerk every bit as powerful as the cut, Ridge extracted the blade. Took two steps, and cut off a British soldier’s arm.

John Ross stopped, took one quick breath, and leveled his pistol.

He wasn’t worried about missing. He was firing into a mass of redcoats, so tightly packed it would take a miracle not to hit one of them.

As soon as the shot was fired, he flung the pistol at the same mass. Couldn’t miss, again.

Then he drew his sword and made to follow Ridge. The chief had already sabered another enemy soldier.

On the other side of the bastion, Sam faced a soldier who’d seen him coming. By the time he got to him, the man was in position and had his bayonet ready.

Sam’s training with a bayonet had been rudimentary, at best, and he’d never been trained on how to fight a bayonet with a sword. So be it. He’d just—

A musket went off. The British soldier dropped his own weapon, clutching his leg and stumbling to the ground.

Turning, Sam saw Lieutenant Pendleton. The youngster had already lowered his gun and was charging forward with the bayonet.

“The blazes you will!” Sam shouted. He raced to get in front of Pendleton.

James killed two more British soldiers before John could get there. A third redcoat’s bayonet sliced open his rib cage. He twisted aside just enough at the last moment to keep the blade from penetrating the chest wall. So the injury wouldn’t be fatal. And while it was bleeding badly, no arteries had been severed.

Still, it was spectacular-looking wound—and James gave out a shriek to match it. Half a scream of pain; half a war cry.

His face distorted with fury, he started to strike down the enemy soldier, now off balance from the bayonet thrust.

He didn’t need to. His brother did it for him.

Five more redcoats were coming, their bayonets leveled.

Frantically, Driscol scrambled across the ground toward the saber he’d dropped when John tackled him. He was half crawling on his knees, half slithering like a snake, moving as fast as he could with only one arm.

With a shout of triumph, he made the final distance with a lunge and clasped the hilt of the sword.

Neither James nor John noticed him. Facing odds of five to two, they were paying attention to nothing except their immediate enemies. The bayonets were almost there, coming like the talons of a dragon.

Ridge clambered over the body of a British soldier who’d been impaled on the iron fencing that the Iron Battalion had incorporated into their fieldworks. Then, he sprang into the bastion beyond. He could see a knot of British soldiers to his right, charging with their bayonets, with half-a-dozen more coming to join them.

Since that seemed to be the center of the fight, he headed that way, after taking just a moment to wipe his hand on his uniform to dry his grip on the sword hilt.

That moment was enough to allow John Ross to get into the rampart behind him. It wasn’t hard, really. The impact of the Cherokees had sent most of the British on that side of the bastion reeling aside.

Ross followed Ridge into the howling chaos.

Sam and his men slammed into the milling British soldiers almost directly opposite to the side of the bastion the Cherokees had already reached.

And with the same result. By now, any semblence of order in the enemy regiments had collapsed. The redcoats had been reduced to a milling mob. Ready and willing to fight—even clambering over the breastworks eagerly—but with even less in the way of formation and discipline than Sam’s own men.

Under those circumstances, most of the advantages professional soldiers enjoyed against amateurs had vanished. True, as a rule, each British soldier was more adept with a bayonet than each American soldier. But that didn’t matter. There wasn’t enough room in that press of men to use any weapon properly. In truth, a knife was probably more useful than anything else, and Sam saw that a lot of his men had dropped their guns and were using their dirks.

He made no attempt to bring order to the melee. It would have been a hopeless endeavor—and he was far too concerned with getting into the bastion himself.

As big as he was, Sam made it up the slope by the simple expedient of leaping from one enemy body to another. Some of them were dead. Some weren’t. He didn’t care, either way. They were just stepping-stones. He had to get in there.

Henry arrived just as another three British soldiers joined the five who were now fighting the Rogers brothers. Because of the angle from which he came, they never saw him until it was too late.

There was room, here. He gripped the sponge staff like a huge club and swung it mightily. The redcoat he struck went sailing into the others, stabbing one of them in the back of the thigh with his bayonet.

The man screeched and, in sheer reflex, drove back the butt of his musket. Henry had broken an arm; that butt stroke broke the man’s jaw.

Two of the other redcoats were knocked reeling. James Rogers took advantage of the opening to kill one of them with a savage blow to the skull. The soldier’s shako was sent flying straight up, as if propelled by a rocket, while the head beneath turned into a mass of blood.

John Rogers slew the other. A quick belly strike followed by a short, sharp head blow that caved in the soldier’s temple.

Two more were coming. Henry swung the sponge staff again, in a sweeping backstroke. He knocked the first into the second, and that man went flying to land—

On Driscol.

Just as he started rising to his feet, the saber in his hand, Driscol was knocked back down again.

Thinking he was being attacked, seeing nothing but the red of the uniform, he twisted frantically on the ground so he could bring the saber into position. Cursing, again, the fact that his left arm was missing. He couldn’t thrust himself erect without letting go of the sword.

Not a chance that he’d do that. He got just far enough away from the enemy who was lying next to him to place the tip of the sword against his chest. Then, with a powerful thrust, he sent it right into his heart.

The British soldier’s eyes opened, his mouth opened—and a gush of blood like a small fountain came spewing out into Driscol’s face.

He was blind, now. Had no choice. He dropped the sword to wipe off his face.

James killed another. Then staggered. He’d lost enough blood from his wound to make him a little light-headed.

The concerned glance his brother gave him lasted just long enough for a British soldier to take advantage. Finally, there was a gap in the armor of that terrifying, two-headed Cherokee killing machine.

Driscol cleared his eyes just in time to see a bayonet slide into John Rogers’s belly. Moving as if time were slowed, the blade slid all the way through and emerged from his back, just above the waist.

Staring at the blood spilling off the tip of the bayonet, Driscol knew that John Rogers was a dead man. Even if no vital organs had been pierced—which was almost impossible, given the location—he’d die of infection from that sort of abdominal wound.

John knew it himself. The redcoat started to pull the blade out, but John grabbed the barrel of the musket with his left hand and held the bayonet where it was, with an iron grip.

Then, screamed. Not words. Just an incoherent cry of pain and rage that was enough to galvanize his body and spirit for one last strike.

The enemy soldier was too stunned by the sight to think of dropping his weapon. So his head was still within range, when John’s war club came around like the scythe of doom.

The soldier died twice, since James crushed the other side of his skull as he fell to the ground. Then, looking at his brother, collapsed on the ground with the bayonet still held in his body by that final grip, he issued a scream of his own. The sound was so loud and so piercing that it froze, momentarily, the four British soldiers who were still coming toward him.

Driscol drove to his feet, the saber back in his hand, and went at one of them. Before he could get there, Henry Crowell had swatted the redcoat away.

He went for a second. But some Indian—Major Ridge, he thought—was there to cut him down.

The third, then. But that redcoat was already turning to face a new threat. Before he could get his bayonet into position, Sam Houston’s sword went into his throat.

There was still a last. But he was surrendering, now, dropping his musket and raising his hands.

James Rogers was standing not more than six feet in front of him. He screamed again, leaping forward—a panther would have envied that scream—and shattered the man’s skull.

There was nothing to cover the grief. No last deathblow that might remove the pain.

Staggering a little, more from sorrow than weariness, Driscol came over to John and dropped beside him on one knee.

Rogers was still alive, although Driscol could tell that he was going fast.

Still, he had enough life left to give Driscol a sly little smile.

“Know anything about Cherokee ghosts?” John asked, half whispering and half choking out the words. Blood was oozing from his mouth.

Numbly, Driscol shook his head.

“You don’t want to, either. So you be good to my sister, or I’ll haunt you.”

His brother was kneeling next to him now, on the other side.

“You heard?” John whispered.

James nodded. Patrick thought that, from the dull expression on his face, James felt as numb as he did.

John smiled, then, and closed his eyes. He started to say something else, but died halfway through the second word.

Driscol thought the word was “forget,” although he wasn’t sure. The first had been “don’t.”

Sam swallowed, and looked away. He remembered the first time he’d ever seen John Rogers, on John Jolly’s island. John and his brother had been swimming in the river. They’d both looked like seals, so swift they were.

Remembering, suddenly, that he was the commanding officer, Sam gave the area a quick and nervous inspection, his eyes ranging everywhere.

But there was no danger, not any longer. That group of British soldiers who went after Driscol and the Rogers brothers had been the last gasp of the assault. Their mates had already been falling back while it happened.

There were no British soldiers left in the bastion. None who were alive and uninjured, at least. There were quite a few corpses and wounded men.

Henry Crowell came up to him, still holding the sponge staff he’d used as a maul. “Sorry about your friend, Colonel.”

“Yes. Thank you, Henry.”

Sighing, Sam started to sheath the sword. Then, realized it was covered with blood. For a moment, he looked down at the corpse of the man whose blood it was, wondering if he could wipe it clean on his uniform.

But that would be just . . . horrid.

“Here, sir,” Henry said softly. Looking, Sam saw that Crowell was extending the end of his sponge staff. “This’ll do, well enough.”

So it did.

With the sword finally sheathed, Sam went over to the breastworks. Henry came with him. They had to move three corpses aside to clear a good view. Two enemy, one of their own.

They did the work rather gently. Sam could have clambered onto the bodies, the same way he had when he came into the bastion. But now that the battle was over, that seemed unbearably wicked.

The enemy was leaving the field, moving back toward the barges that had ferried them across the river.

All of them. Gauging the numbers as best he could, Sam estimated that at least two-thirds of the British soldiers would make their escape. But those were the broken pieces of regiments, now, no longer fighting units. They weren’t racing away in a rout, the way the Kentucky militiamen had done at the start of the battle. But they weren’t maintaining much in the way of formation, either. Those were soldiers who’d been beaten, and beaten badly enough that they wouldn’t be fighting any more this day.

“Do you think it’s over, sir?” asked Henry. “I mean the whole thing.”

Sam shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. But since we’re guessing . . . Yes. I think it’s over. If we could beat them back here, why would they ever think they could get across the field at Chalmette?”

The only man who really mattered, at the moment, was the one man who didn’t have to guess.

Pakenham sighed, when he saw the Forty-third and the West Indians join the Eighty-fifth in its retreat. “Robert was right,” he said, speaking very softly. He was really just talking to himself.

Ignoring his cluster of aides, Pakenham left the riverside and strode to a place where he could look out over Chalmette field.

He’d always known the danger of that clear, open field. But now, having witnessed that horrible American artillery in full action, and the determination of the soldiers behind the guns, he could see it as it would be. Covered with the corpses of his soldiers. A carpet of redcoats from one end to the other.

We’d have lost two thousand men, I think, before we were driven back. And I doubt we’d have inflicted more than a hundred casualties on the enemy.

No reputation is worth such a cost.

He even managed a wry little smile. In all likelihood, it’d have been a posthumous reputation anyway. Here lies the gallant fool, Major General Edward Pakenham, Knight of the Bath.

Admiral Cochrane came up. Pakenham gave him a cold, hard glance.

“There will be no battle on Chalmette field, Admiral. I’ll start pulling out the men tomorrow morning.”

Cochrane nodded. The admiral was too smart a man not to realize that he’d pushed the army as far as it would go.

“Yes, I understand. I was thinking . . . We might finally catch Jackson napping, you know. If we move fast.”

Pakenham chuckled. “You’re quite a good strategist, Admiral. So long as you’ll agree to leave the tactics to me. Yes, I was thinking the same thing myself all morning, as I punished an innocent tree. By all means. Let us give Mobile another try.”

After the silence had lasted long enough, Robert Ross left the square to deal with his bladder. When he came back, hearing the silence still, he ordered another pot of tea. Tiana was back at the table.

“Would you care for some, my dear?”

“No.” She was finally starting to cry. “I think he’s dead.”

“I think he’s very much alive. That’s what that silence means.”

It meant something else, too; little to Tiana but a very great deal to Robert Ross. That silence—continuing, and continuing—meant that thousands of his men would live to see another day, with all their limbs and organs intact.

Perhaps he should take up another line of work. He was beginning to think like a bloody parson.

Tiana didn’t shed many tears, for it wasn’t her way. And by late afternoon she was smiling half the time, in any event.

Word had come back. A runner sent by Houston to Tiana herself. Ross was surprised that such a young man enjoying such a splendid victory should have been so thoughtful.

Patrick was still alive. He hadn’t even lost any more limbs, amazingly enough.

She ordered pastries, too, for anyone who wanted to sit at the table and chat.

Chat with Ross, not her. The other half of the time, her eyes blue and empty, she was staring at the river. Houston’s runner had also told her about the death of her brother.

Although Tiana herself did not participate in the conversation, a number of New Orleans matrons took her up on the offer of pastries. Most of them, speculatively eyeing the perhaps-eligible British officer whose uniform had sent them screaming away in the morning.