When Men Grew Tall, or The Story Of Andrew Jackson

The breeze from the river tears the smoky veil aside; and lo! that noble fortification of sugar hogsheads is heaped and piled in ruins. The General’s solid shot go through and through those hogsheads of sugar, as though they are hogsheads of snow. Five of the thirty English guns are smashed. The proud work of Sir John Burgoyne presents a spectacle of desolation, while the English who serve the batteries go flying for their lives. Not all! The three-score dead remain – the only English whose honor is saved that day!

Sir Edward’s cheek is white as death. He blames Sir John Burgoyne, who has erred, he says, in constructing the works. Sir John did err, and Sir Edward is right. Forty years later, the same Sir John will repeat the same mistake at Sebastapol; which shows how there be Bourbons among the English, learning nothing, forgetting nothing.

As the English skulk in clusters, and ragged, beaten groups for their old position beyond the General’s long reach, the fear of death is written on their faces. It will take a long rest, and much must be forgotten, e’er they may be brought front to front with the General again.

Among the hunting-shirt men are exultation and crowing triumph. Only Papa Plauche is sad. During the fight, the cotton bales in front of Papa Plauche and the “Fathers” are sorely knocked about. As though this be not enough, what must a felon hot shot do but set one of them ablaze! The smoke fills the noses of Papa Plauche and his “Fathers,” and makes them sneeze. It burns their eyes until the tears the “Fathers” shed might make one think them engaged upon the very funeral of Papa Plauche himself.

In the tearful sneezing midst of this anguish, a vagrant flying flake of cotton, all afire, explodes an ammunition wagon to the heroic rear of Papa Plauche and the “Fathers,” and the shock is as the awful shock of doom.

The fortitude of Hercules would fail at such a pinch! Papa Plauche and the “Fathers” actually and for the moment think on flight! But whither shall they fly? They are caught between Satan and a deepest sea – the ammunition wagon and the English! Also to the right, plying sponge and rammer, are the pirate Barratarians who are as bad as the English! While to the left is the General, who is worse than the ammunition wagon.

“It is written!” murmurs Papa Plauche; “our fate is sure! We must perish where we stand!” Papa Plauche extends his hands, and cries: “Courage, my heroes! Give your hearts to heaven, your fame to posterity, and show history how ‘Fathers of Families’ can die!” From the cypress swamp a last detachment of reënforcements emerges, and meets the beaten English coming back. General Lambert, with the reënforcements, is shocked as he reads their broken-hearted story in their eyes. “What is it, Colonel?” he whispers to Colonel Dale of the Highlanders. “In heaven’s name, what stopped you?”

“Bullets, mon!” returns the Scotchman. “Naught but bullets! The fire of those de’ils in lang shirts wud ‘a’ stopped Caesar himsel’!”

CHAPTER XVI – THE EIGHTH OF JANUARY

BACK to his negroes and mules and carts and scrapers goes the General, and sets them to renewed hard labor on those immortal mud walls which he will never get too high. Those cotton bales, so distressing to Papa Plauche and the “Fathers,” are eliminated, at which that paternal commander breathes freer. The hunting-shirt men, with each going down of the sun, resume their nighthawk parties, which swoop upon English sentinels, taking lives and guns.

The English themselves are a prey to dejection. The foe against whom they war is so strange, so savage, so sleepless, so coldly inveterate! Also those incessant night attacks sap their manhood. They build no fires now, but sit in darkness through the nights. A fire is but the attractive prelude to a shower of nocturnal lead, and the woefully lengthening list of dead and wounded tells strongly against it. To even light a cigar after dark is an approach to suicide; and so the English wrap themselves in blackness – very miserable! Their earlier horror of the hunting-shirt men is increased; for they have three times studied backwoods marksmanship from the standpoint of targets, and the dumb chill about their heart-roots is a testimony to its awful accuracy.

The General, who reads humanity as astronomers read the heavens, is not wanting in notions of the gloom which envelops the English like a funeral pall.

“Coffee,” says he, at one of those famous war councils of two, “in their souls we have them beaten. They will fight again; but only from pride. Their hope is gone, Coffee; we have broken their hearts.”

The reports of the General’s scouts teach him that the English will put a force across the river. In anticipation, he dispatches Commodore Patterson, with a mixed command of soldiers and sailors, to fortify the west bank. Commodore Patterson emulates the General’s four-foot mud walls and throws up a redoubt of his own, mounting thereon twelve eighteen-pounders taken from the Louisiana.

He tries one on the English opposite. The result is gratifying; the gum pitches a solid shot all across the Mississippi and into the English lines.

Eight days pass by in Indian file, and Sir Edward Pakenham with his English feels that, for his safety as much as his honor, he must attack the General, whose mud walls increase with each new sunset. The General foresees this, and has reports of Sir Edward’s movements brought him every hour.

On the morning of the eighth the General’s scouts wake him at two o’clock and say that the English are astir. He is instantly abroad; the word goes down the line; by four o’clock every rifle is ready, each hunting-shirt man at his post.

The weak spot, the one at which Sir Edward will level his utmost force, is where the General’s line finds an end in the moss-hung cypress swamp. It is there he stations the reliable Coffee with his hunting-shirt men. To the rear, as a reserve, is General Adair with what Kentuckians the good, unerring offices of those night-prowling hunting-shirt men have armed at the red expense of the English.

In the center is the redoubtable Papa Plauche and his “Fathers.” The “Fathers” are between the pirates Dominique and Bluche and Captain Humphries of the regular artillery.

Papa Plauche is rejoiced at being thus thrust into the center.

“For my heroes!” cries Papa Plauche, in a speech which he makes the “Fathers,” the center is the heart – the home of honor! “On us, my Fathers, devolves the main defense of our beloved city, where sleep our wives and children. Wherefore, be brave as vigilant – vigilant as brave!”

Papa Plauche’s voice is husky, but not from fear. No, it is husky by reason of a cold which, despite certain woolen nightcaps wherewith the excellent Madam Plauche equipped him for the field, he has contracted in sleeping damply among the stubble and the river fogs.

Six hundred yards in front of the General’s mud walls, and near the river, are a huddle of plantation buildings. The English, he argues, will mask a part of their advance with these structures. The forethoughtful General prepares for this, and has furnaces heating shot, to set those buildings blazing at the psychological moment.

Also, in response to a comic cynicism not usual with him, he has out the brass band of Papa Plauche, with instructions to strike up “Yankee Doodle” as the first gun is fired. The band, in compliment to the General, has been privily rehearsing “‘Possum up a Gum Tree,” which it understands is the national anthem of Tennessee, and offers to play that.

The General thanks the band, but declines “‘Possum up a Gum Tree.” It will not be understood by the English; whereas “Yankee Doodle” they have known and loathed for forty years.

“Give ‘em ‘Yankee Doodle,’” says the General. “Since they are so eager to dance, we’ll furnish the proper music.”

Sir Edward is as soon afoot as is the General. He finds his English steady yet dull; they will fight, but not with spirit. As the General assured the conferring Coffee, the hunting-shirt men, with their long rifles like wands of death, have broken the English heart.

The English are to advance in three columns; General Keane on the right with Rennie’s Rifles, in the center Dale’s Highlanders, on the left, where the main attack is to be launched, General Gibbs, with three thousand of the pride of England at his back. General Lambert is to hold himself in the rear of General Gibbs, with two regiments as a reserve. As the columns form, there are eighty-five hundred of the English; against which the-General opposes a scanty thirty-two hundred. And yet, upon those overpowering eighty-five hundred hangs a silence like a sadness, as though they are about to go marching to their graves.

The solemn fear in which the English hold the hunting-shirt men finds pathetic evidence. As the columns wheel into position, Colonel Dale of the Highlanders gives a letter and his watch to the surgeon.

“Carry them to my wife,” says he.

“I’ll peel for no American!” and twenty-four hours later he is buried in that cloak.

The English stand to their arms, and wait the breaking of day. Slowly the minutes drag their leaden length along; morning comes at last.

With the first streaks of livid dawn, a Congreve rocket flashes skyward from Sir Edward’s headquarters. The rocket is the English signal to advance. In a moment, General Gibbs, General Keane, and Colonel Dale with his “praying” Highlanders are in motion.

The signal rocket uncouples thousands upon thousands of fellow rockets; the air is on fire with them as they blaze aloft in mighty arcs, to fall and explode among the hunting-shirt men.

“Toys for children, boys,” cries the General, as he observes the hunting-shirt men watching the flaming shower with curious, non-understanding eyes; “toys for children! They’ll hurt no one!”

The General is right. Those congreve rockets are supposed to be as deadly as artillery. Like many another commodity of war, however, meant primarily to fatten contractors, they prove as innocuous as so many huge fireflies. The hunting-shirt men laugh at them. The battery of eighteen-pounders, wherewith the English second that flight of rockets, is a more serious affair.

As the sun shoots up above the cypress swamp and rolls back the mists of morning, the English make a gallant picture. The dull yellow of the stubble in front of the General’s line is gay with splotches of red and gray and green and tartan, the colors of the various English corps.

The hunting-shirt men, however, are not given much space for admiration; for, with one grand crash, the big guns go into action and the red-green-gray-tartan picture is swallowed up in powder smoke. Also, it is now that Papa Plauche’s band blares forth “Yankee Doodle,” while those anticipatory hot shot set fire to the plantation buildings. As the latter burst out at door and window in smoke and flames, Colonel Rennie and his riflemen are driven into the open. The conflagration gets much in the English way, and spoils the drill-room nicety of Sir Edward’s onset as he has it planned.

Colonel Rennie, being capable of brisk decision, makes the best of a disconcerting situation. When the flames and smoke from those fired plantation buildings drive him into the open before he is ready, he promptly orders a charge. This his riflemen obey; for the inexorable Patterson, across the river, is already upon them with those eighteen-pounders, and his solid shot are mowing ghastly swaths through the rifle-green ranks, tossing dead men in the air like old bags. With so little inducement to stand still, the riflemen hail that word to charge as a relief, and head for the General’s mud walls at double quick.

The oncoming Colonel Rennie and his English are met full in the face by a tempest of grape, from Major Humphrey and the pirates Dominique and Bluche, which throws them backward upon themselves. They bunch up and clot into lumps of disorder, like clumps of demoralized sheep in rifle-green. At that, Commodore Patterson serves his eighteen-pounders with multiplied speed, and the great balls tear those sheep-clumps to pieces, staining with crimson the rifle-green. The English marvel at the artillery work of the General’s men, whose every shot comes on, well aimed and low, bringing death in its whistling wake.

They should reflect: The theory, not to say the eye, which aims a squirrel rifle will point a cannon.

Colonel Rennie, when his English recoil, keeps on – face red with grief and rage.

“It’s my time to die!” says he to Captain Henry. “But before I die, I shall at least see the inside of those mud walls.”

Colonel Rennie is wrong. A bullet finds his brain as he lifts his head above the breastworks, and he slips back dead in the ditch outside. Major King and Captain Henry die with him, pierced each by a handful of bullets.

When the English flinch and Colonel Rennie falls, the bugler – a boy of fourteen – climbs a tree, not one hundred yards from the General’s line. Perched among the branches, he sounds his dauntless charges. The General gives orders to let the boy alone. And so the little bugler, protected by the word of the General, sings his shrill onsets to the last.

Finally an artillery-man goes out to him.

“Come down, my son!” says the cannoneer. “The war’s about over!”

The little bugler comes down, and is at once taken to the fatherly heart of Papa Plauche, who declares him to be a sucking Hector, and is for adopting him as his son on the spot, but is restrained by thoughts of Madam Plauche.

Sir Edward’s main assault, with General Gibbs, meets no fairer fortune than falls to Colonel Rennie by the river. Confusion prevails on the threshold of the movement; for Colonel Mullins with his Forty-fourth refuses to go forward. Later he will be courtmartialed, and dismissed in disgrace. Just now, however, the recreant makes a shameful tangle of the English van. As a quickest method of setting the tangle straight, General Gibbs, as did Colonel Rennie, orders a charge. The column moves forward, the mutinous Forty-fourth on the right flank, led by its major.

General Gibbs advances, brushing with the shoulder of his corps, the cypress swamp. Behind the mud walls in his front, the steady hunting-shirt men are waiting. The General is there, to give the latter patience and hold them in even check.