Eric Flint - 1812 - The Rivers of War

Not hardly.

Apparently Ridge heard the chuckle. John had stayed close to him throughout the charge out of the swamp, and the quick retreat back into it.

He gave the younger man a crease of a smile. "Amazing, isn't it? But it only worked because they aren't stupid."

John nodded. The attack had caught the British completely by surprise, and had inflicted a lot of casualties on them. But John's own experience in the swamps on the night of the twenty-third had taught him how dangerous British soldiers could be, once they were planted and ready to fight. There were still at least twice as many enemy soldiers on that road as there were Cherokees. If Ridge had tried to stand and slug it out, they'd have started getting butchered.

"What now?" he asked.

Ridge was peering through the trees at the British column on the road. John, doing the same, could see British officers racing up and down, bringing order to their troops. Faster than he would have imagined possible, the enemy was forming a line to defend their flank.

"We'll just wait a bit," Ridge answered. "Let Houston do whatever he's going to do first, and then we'll see what things look like. If they come at us, here in the swamp, we'll rip them. The same would happen to us, if we were stupid enough to charge back out there against that line."

It made sense to Ross. So, he took the time to reload his pistol. He'd even hit an enemy soldier with the round he'd fired during the charge, he thought.

That wasn't much of an accomplishment, of course. Not at point-blank range, against a mass of men caught with their backs to the river. John added the experience to the long list he was compiling, which was proving to him that there was something ultimately absurd about war.

Or, at least, the way men talked about it.

Why did men boast so, about a field of endeavor whose greatest achievement was to do the crudest thing imaginable, in as simple a way as possible? No Cherokee woman, after all, would have bragged that she'd made the ugliest garment in the world, using the fewest possible stitches.

"Shall we charge them, Colonel Houston?" Lieutenant Pendleton asked eagerly. "We bloodied 'em good!"

Sam took a moment from his study of the enemy to glance at the young dragoon officer who was standing next to him.

He was tempted to say, Do I look like an idiot? The British, their charge having been broken, were forming a line about one hundred and fifty yards away. He was amazed at the speed and precision with which they'd done so. Sam knew perfectly well his own regiment would have made a dragged-out mess of the business, if they could have even managed it at all after suffering such casualties.

And he could practically feel the savage eagerness of the British soldiers to see him marching toward them. Oh, they'd get some of their own back, then! Surely they would.

"No, Lieutenant. Face facts-that's the first thing an officer has to learn. Those are regulars over there, and we aren't. So we'll not be so foolish as to try matching them line against line. Tell the men to start digging in and form a breastworks, and tell the three-pounders to hold their fire unless the enemy advances. They'll be getting low of ammunition, anyhow. We'll just stand here. That's really all we need to do. If we keep the enemy away from the commodore's guns, we've done our job."

It was almost comical, the way Pendleton's face fell.

" Now, Lieutenant."

"Yes, sir." Pendleton raced off.

Well. Slouched off hurriedly. But Sam wasn't inclined to chide him over his posture. Now that the immediate danger was past, he was worrying about Driscol and his men.

Were they still alive? If so, they were trapped back there-and Sam didn't dare charge to their rescue as long as the British had that line across the road. If the enemy broke his charge, which they most likely would, there'd be nothing between them and Patterson's guns.

"Why is everything so quiet now, Robert?"

Somehow, she'd still managed to keep her face expressionless. But Ross thought the lines of the face itself were tighter than any drum he'd ever seen.

"The assault's been beaten off," he said, trying not to sigh. "For the moment, at least."

He suspected that his own face was as tightly drawn as Tiana's. Under the circumstances, for the moment was a meaningless phrase. Ross knew the battle plan Thornton had been following. The thing either had to be done quickly, or there was no point in doing it at all.

The tree was starting to shed bark, under that softly but steadily pounding fist. Gibbs was genuinely amazed. He'd never seen Pakenham able to restrain himself to such a degree in a battle.

Wellington, he knew, would have been pleased to witness Pakenham's unwonted control. The duke had won the Peninsular War because he'd always been able to contain himself, when the need be. Something few of his immediate subordinates could have managed.

Including Gibbs. If he'd been in command here, despite his own great doubts about the prospects, the men would have started across Chalmette field at least an hour earlier.

They might have even carried the day. Who was to know? Leading a charge was so much easier than being the commander who had to order it-or refrain from doing so.

Another piece of bark fluttered to the ground.

"Come at me, blast you," Jackson hissed. He was back on the line now. He didn't need a glass to see the British formations, hundreds of yards away. Not when all he had to do was look across the bareness of Chalmette field.

He'd cover that beautiful empty field with red-coated corpses, if they came across. He knew it as surely as he knew the sun would rise on the morrow.

TheRiversofWar

By the time Colonel Rennie and his Forty-third Light Infantry came ashore, Rennie already knew the expedition on the west bank was in danger of disintegrating. He'd seen enough from the barges while crossing the river to know that much. The continuing sound of gunfire from the north told him that Thornton was stalled somewhere upriver.

The delay in ferrying all the troops across had badly scrambled the original plan of action. Instead of hitting the enemy with a solid mass of two thousand men, they'd been forced to feed their troops into the action piecemeal. Thornton and his Eighty-fifth were already engaged before Rennie's men had even finished climbing into the boats.

As soon as all the men were ashore, Rennie started the march. He was so preoccupied with the situation to the north that he completely failed to realize there was still an active American battery on the scene. The first thing he saw as his column entered the wide area in the swamps where Morgan had constructed his feeble breastworks were the British soldiers manning the overrun American battery by the riverbank.

The men were waving a banner. A bit frantically, it seemed. Perhaps they were coming under attack.

Rennie started to order the column to step up the pace when the bastion he'd overlooked on the far left of the field erupted with cannon fire. An instant later, round shot was ripping into the head of his column.

Perfect grazing shots, too.

"What a bloody fucking mess," he snarled.

"Give it to 'em again, boys! Give it to 'em again!" Charles Ball was bouncing about as if he were a ball in truth. "Forget those bastards over there!" He waved his cutlass at the British battery across the field, somehow managing to make it a derisive gesture. "We've already pounded them silly. Keep your feeble minds on these new bastards!"

Ball's derision notwithstanding, Driscol kept his eye on the enemy battery. True enough, in the time that had elapsed since the main force of the Eighty-fifth marched off to the north, Driscol's men had won the artillery duel that had followed. They'd dismounted one of the enemy's six-pounders from its carriage and battered the crew of the twelve-pounder so badly that it had been out of action after the first few minutes. But the last six-pounder was still intact, as far as he knew.