John Barth - Letters

Half a canto therefore — and no more, and not without sympathy — to the “Bladensburg Races.” The battle is joined; men begin to die. Unbelievably, the Americans have not blown the Bladensburg bridge; it must be seized at once. For the last time, Ross wavers — homespun militia or not, it seems to him a very large number of Yankees over there, defending after all their own capital city — and for the fifth, sixth, seventh time Cockburn cries Attack, attack. Between artillery blasts from the American earthworks the British race across the bridge and take cover; lacking artillery themselves, they open up on the Americans’ second line of defense with Congreve rockets fetched in from the fleet. Marvelously inaccurate but fearsome to behold, the Congreves fall among the soldiers, the horses, the crowds of spectators come out from Washington and Georgetown to see the show. The rockets are easily and quickly launched, from a simple tube; flight follows flight of them, sputtering and shrieking, as the bright British bayonets move toward the front line — and suddenly all is panic. Horses whinny and bolt, onlookers scream and run; the whole center breaks, and the left, and the right, and the second line, not a quarter hour after the first redcoat crosses the bridge. Cannon are left behind unspiked, muskets thrown away; the swift trample the slow; Madison’s party is swept back in the general rout. General Ross looks astonished: the battle has not yet properly commenced, and the Americans run, run, run for their lives. Some will not stop till they reach Virginia, or western Maryland. Everyone runs!

Almost everyone. For who are these rolling in like an alexandrine at the canto’s end, kedging forward against the shameful tide? Jérôme Bonaparte’s old comrade Joshua Barney, with his stranded flotillamen and the 12- and 18-pounders from their scuttled ships! All morning they have ransacked the navy yard for mules and ammunition; the sailors themselves are harnessed to the guns, which they hurriedly place now across the turnpike almost at the District of Columbia line. They know how to aim (no deck so steady as terra firma); they know how to stand and fire (no place to retreat to on a boat, till your officers decide to turn the thing around). Now whole companies of British die, who had survived the horrors Goya drew. Ross’s advance is stopped; Barney’s marines even mount a brief but successful charge against the King’s Own Regiment, driving them back with bayonets and cutlasses and cries of “Board ’em, boys!”—but there is no President’s Own behind them to follow up with a counterattack.

The flotillamen withdraw to their guns, hold on aggressively yet awhile against the regrouping, readvancing, reencircling British. They begin to die now in numbers themselves; they cling to their line for yet another salvo and another, even when their ammunition wagons (driven by scared civilians under contract) desert them. Under Winder’s orders then, reinforced at last by Barney’s own, they spike their guns and go, leaderless. For (also at his own orders) they must leave their wounded commodore behind. Barney has taken a musket ball in the hip, and concealed the wound till he falls. He will die of it after the war, en route to settle in Kentucky like Odysseus wandering inland from the sea. Now he is discovered by his old adversary Admiral Cockburn, who has suspected all along where such accurate resistance came from. “I knew it was the flotillamen!” he cries to Ross. The general pays his respects and forthwith paroles his wounded enemy. The two old sailors congratulate each other on the most effective fighting of the day (those rockets were Cockburn’s idea); the admiral orders the commodore fetched back to Bladensburg for medical care and release, then rejoins Ross to pursue the battle.

But the battle is done. British casualties, most of them from Barney’s naval gunnery, are twice those of the Americans, who are not present to be killed. Catching up with them is out of the question; it is an oven of an afternoon. “The victors were too weary,” Cockburn reports later, “the vanquished too swift,” for evening out the casualties. The redcoats rest. As the sun goes down a fresh party is brought forward to enter the city, which Ross expects to be better defended by a regrouped American army.

But the invaders march down Maryland Avenue unopposed toward the Capitol. Not only have the defenders fled; they have looted as they flew: had Dolley Madison not seen to it that George Washington’s portrait was evacuated from the President’s House, it would as likely have fallen to American looters as to British, as did Madison’s dueling pistols. The President’s butler has packed a few last valuables, left the front-door key at the Russian ministry, and gone in search of his employers. Save for one volley from Robert Sewall’s house on Maryland Avenue and 2nd Street N.E., there is no resistance whatever. Sewall’s house is quickly fired with rockets. A few blacks stand about to watch; there are no other Washingtonians in evidence. In vain, as the building burns, Ross orders drumrolls to call for a parley; he is still more inclined to indemnify than to burn. There is no one to reply. No interim authority has been delegated, no orders have been given, no provisions made. Admiral Cockburn is delighted: nothing for it now but to proceed with their business!

But, Muse, before you sing the sack of Washington, say: Can you see, from the heights of Helicon, where is our ancestor all this while, my son’s and mine? For this Marylandiad is no history book, but the epic of Andrew Cook at the midpoint of his life. He was up all night: has he slept through the day’s most epical set piece? Was he lost in the confusion of battle like Stendhal’s Fabrizio at Waterloo? It is past eight; that glare in the east is the Washington Navy Yard, fired by its retreating commandant; those explosions are the fort at Greenleaf Point, ditto. Now it is nine: British demolition teams have broken into the Capitol, chopped its woodwork into kindling, piled up chairs and tables in the Senate and the House, added buckets of rocket powder; Cockburn has seated himself in the place of the Speaker of the House, gaveled for order, and put the mocking question to his men: Shall this harbor of Yankee democracy be burned?

Where is A. B. Cook IV?

Why, Henry, there he is, there in the doorway, just entered from the lobby, his throat so full of a heartfelt, self-surprising nay that he can scarcely keep it in! Like Madison, whose near-blundering into British hands he has earlier observed from across the lines of battle, Andrew has been a mere spectator of the Bladensburg debacle. He has not been impressed with Ross’s generalship: after so much prodding and vacillation, the man in Andrew’s opinion made a foolish and bloody decision to attack frontally across that bridge (no doubt in his surprise to find it intact). He could as easily have forded the river upstream and fallen on the Americans’ flank while Cockburn fired his Congreves into their front; British casualties needn’t have been so high. Nevertheless, Andrew has felt personal shame at the panic and rout of the American militia, and contrariwise such admiration for Josh Barney’s resistance that with Cockburn’s permission he has accompanied the wounded commodore back to the Bladensburg tavern pressed into service as a field hospital. It is Andrew who, when Barney complains that Ross’s soldiers don’t know how to bear a stretcher properly, finds four willing sailors from the rocket squad to relieve them, and suggests they soothe their patient en route with fo’c’sle chanteys.

It is not simply Barney’s physical courage that Andrew is moved by, but his particular brand of patriotism: complex, at times self-interested (it was Barney’s vanity, piqued by the promotions of others before himself, that led him earlier to resign his commission in the U.S. Navy for one in the French), but strong and unambiguous where it matters — by contrast, say, with the contemptible soullessness of Secretary Armstrong, or his own confusions, equivocations, blunderings. In this, Barney seems to Andrew a rougher-cast version of Joel Barlow; indeed, they could pass for brothers both in appearance and under the skin. When the commodore thanks him for his attentions and asks whether he hasn’t seen him somewhere before — perhaps in William Patterson’s house a dozen years ago? — Andrew fakes a cockney accent and denies it.