Thuella’s helm to run confusion about his enemies, and quite another to contemplate a fight on dry land. It was, as his Irish lieutenant would say, a horse of a different colour, and Cornelius Killick was not sure he liked the colour.
He hated the fact that the land was such a clogging, cloying platform for a fight. A ship moved guns much faster than wheels, and there was nowhere to hide at sea. There, in the clean wind, a fight was open and undisguised, while here any bush could hide an enemy. Killick was keenly aware that he had never trained as a soldier, nor even experienced a battle on land, yet he had made the offer to Commandant Lassan, and so, in this chill wind, he was preparing to offer battle if the British Marines came.
Yet if Cornelius Killick had doubts to plague his confidence, he also had compensating encouragements. With him were the six twelve-pounder guns that had been swung out of the Thuella’s hold and mounted on their carriages. Their solidity gave Killick an odd comfort. The guns, so beautifully designed and yet so functional in their appearance, offered an implicit promise of victory. The enemy would come with muskets and be faced with these weapons that Napoleon called his ‘beautiful daughters’. They were Gribeauval twelve-pounders, brute killers of the battlefield, massive.
To serve those guns Killick had sixty men; all of them trained in the use of cannon. The American knew well what fate the British might give to a captured privateer’s crew, so Killick had not ordered his men to give battle, but had instead invited their help. Such was their faith in him, and such their liking for him, that only two dozen men had declined this chance. Thus Killick would be served this day by volunteers, fighters all. How could impressed troops, led by arrogant, dandified officers, Killick asked himself, defeat such men as these?
A wind stirred the pines and drifted the fire’s smoke towards the village. No one was visible on the far ramparts of the fort, nor did any flag show.
‘Maybe the bastards won’t come today.’ Lieutenant Docherty poured himself some of the muddy coffee.
‘Maybe not.’ Killick leaned to the fire and lit a cigar. He felt a sudden pang that he should be forced to this unnatural fight or else lose his ship. He could not face losing the Thuella. ‘But if they do come, Liam, we’ll shock the bastards out of their skins.’ That was Killick’s third advantage; that he had the surprise of ambush on his side.
An hour later the first message arrived from Point Arcachon. Killick had posted four scouts, each one mounted on a lumbering carthorse, and the news came clumping northwards that Marines had landed safely and were already advancing along the tangle of sandy tracks that edged the beach.
‘Did they see you?’ Killick asked the gun-captain who brought the message.
‘No.’ The man was scornful of the Marines’ watchfulness.
Killick stood and clapped his hands. ‘We’re moving, lads! We’re moving!’ The Thuella’s crew had waited with the guns at a point midway between the beach paths and the inland road. Now Killick knew which route the British were taking and so the guns had to be manhandled westwards to bar that route.
Other messages came as the guns were shifted. A hundred and fifty Marines had landed; they had neither artillery nor horses, and all marched north. Other men had followed the Marines ashore, but they had stayed on the beach. The scouts, all four of them, came back to the ambush site.
Henri Lassan had chosen the place, and chosen well. The guns were sited at the edge of a pine wood that topped a shallow ridge that jutted into a spreading, flat expanse of sand that edged the dunes of the beach. Two cottages had stood in the sandy space, but both had burned down in the last few years and their charred remains were all that broke up the area across which the Marines must march.
The gun emplacement also offered Killick’s men protection. The twelve-pounders were shadowed by the pines, so that the grapeshot would blast, obscene and sudden, out of the darkness into the light. And even if the Marines were to counter-attack and brave the maelstrom of fire that would be slashing diagonally towards the sea they must climb a crumbling bank of sand that was six feet high and steep enough to demand the help of hands if it was to be negotiated.
Twenty men went back for the gun limbers, while the rest of Killick’s men prepared the big guns for battle. The barrels had to be shifted on the carriages from their travelling position into the fighting stance, then trunnions must be clamped with iron capsquares as powder and grapeshot were rammed into cold muzzles. The grapeshot was adapted from the stocks taken from the Thuella’s magazine, and each canvas-wrapped bundle of balls would be propelled by four pounds and four ounces of French powder that came in a serge bag shaped to the cannon’s breech. Vent-prickers slid into touch-holes to break the powder bags, then tin tubes filled with finely mealed powder were rammed down to carry the fire to the charge.
Killick stooped at the breech of one gun. He squinted through the tangent sights, set for point blank range, then gave the brass handle of the elevating screw a quarter turn. Satisfied, he went to each of the other guns and stared down the sights to imagine the tangling death he would cause to flicker above the clearing’s sand. The guns’ mute promise of terrible power gave Killick a welcome surge of confidence.
‘The Commandant thanks you, Cornelius.’ Lieutenant Liam Docherty had warned Commandant Lassan that the British had landed. ‘He wishes you joy of the meeting.’
Killick gave his swooping, bellowing laugh as if in anticipation of victory. ‘They’ll not be here for six hours yet, Liam,’ he paused to light a cigar, ‘but we’ll kill the sons of devils when they do come, eh?’
‘We will indeed.’ For Liam Docherty the coming battle would be one tiny shard of the vengeance he took on the British for their savagery in suppressing the rebellion of the United Irishmen. Docherty’s father had been hanged as a rebel in Ireland, casually strung up beside a peat-dark stream with as little ceremony as might attend the death of a rabid dog, and the boy’s mother, rearing him in America, would not let him forget. Nor did Liam Docherty wish to forget. He imagined the redcoats coming into the clearing and he relished the savage surprise that would be unleashed from the six gun barrels.
Some villagers, made curious by the strange happenings to the south, had come into the trees to watch the Americans prepare. Cornelius Killick welcomed them. In the night he had been besieged by fears, by imaginings of disaster, but now, when the shape of the enemy’s approach was plain and the skilful placing of his ambush apparent, he felt sure of success and was glad that this victory would be witnessed by spectators. ‘I wonder what they’d say in Marblehead if they could see us now,’ he said happily to Docherty.
Liam Docherty thought that few people in Marblehead would be astonished by this new adventure of Killick’s. Cornelius Killick had always had the reputation of being a reckless rogue. ‘Maybe they’ll name a street after you.’
‘A street? Why not rename the bloody town?’
Only one thing remained to be done, and that was done with a due solemnity. Cornelius Killick unfurled the great ensign that he had fetched from the Thuella. Its stars and stripes had been sewn together by a committee of Marblehead ladies, then blessed by a Presbyterian Minister who had prayed that the flag would see much slaughter of the Republic’s enemies. This day, Killick promised himself, it would. The flag, drooping in the windless space beneath the trees, would be carried forward at the first gunshot and it would stand proud as the gunners worked and as the enemy fell.
Cornelius Killick and the men of the Thuella were ready.
The beach was strangely deserted when the Marines were gone. The wind was cold as Sharpe’s men tumbled uncertainly through the surf to drag their packs,
