1824: The Arkansas War: Chapter Twenty

Arkansas Post
October 6, 1824

    The closer the Comet got to Arkansas Post, the worse it got. Even Robert Ross, with his years of experience in the bloody and often savage Peninsular War, had never seen anything quite like it. The pursuit Driscol had launched after the battle had been utterly pitiless. Of course, a few of the boats fleeing from the disaster had managed to get through Ball’s blockade at the confluence. Days from now—assuming they weren’t ambushed by the Choctaws they’d ravaged on the way upriver—a relative handful of the freebooters would make their escape to Alexandria or New Orleans.

    But not many. Not many at all. Perhaps one or two hundred, all told, of the roughly fifteen hundred men Robert Crittenden had led to disaster in front of Arkansas Post.

    Bodies were scattered all along the banks of the Arkansas, most of them on the south bank, for miles downstream. A few were perched on snags in the river itself. There would have been still more the day before, Robert knew. Some of the predators in the river were large enough to pull entire corpses into the water, and almost all predators would scavenge if given the chance.

    Alligators, he’d expected to see, but he’d also seen at least two types of fish large enough to do the work. One of them resembled the catfish he’d seen in New Orleans, except grown to enormous dimensions; the other had been similar in appearance—from a distance, anyway—to a sturgeon of some sort.

    “Yup, giant catfish,” one of the gunners confirmed. “They’ll eat anything, if it ain’t movin’. T’other fish was what they call an alligator gar in these parts, General. Big damn things. Can get to ten foot, maybe even more. They not too dangerous, though, long’s a man’s still kicking. It’s the gators you gotta watch out for.”

    Naturally, birds were everywhere. By now, a day after the slaughter, they’d already stripped much of the flesh from the corpses. What was left would be finished by small scavengers, insects. Worms, eventually. By next year, there’d be nothing but skeletons left, and most of those bones would be scattered.

    From the middle of the Arkansas where the Comet was steaming upriver, it was usually impossible to determine the cause of death. Those might have been simply victims of some sort of fast-spreading plague rather than violence. But there’d been two corpses that had quite obviously been slain by human hand. One of them had been hung upside down from the fork in a dead tree leaning over the river. His facial features had been removed along with his scalp and his arms severed at the elbows. He might have blessed that last indignity, under the circumstances, since at least he’d have bled to death quickly.

    The other such corpse… Eliza had retreated from the open deck then, back into the blessed gloom of the boat’s interior. She’d been quite pale. Robert’s son had given the men on his gun crew a look that was half-reproach and half sheer horror.

    “Hey, look, David, wasn’t us,” the black soldier said, uncomfortably. “That was Cherokee work, or maybe Creek. They be settlin’ a lot of old grudges. Cain’t say I blame ‘em much.”

    “I was told the Cherokee were civilized,” David hissed.

    Charles Ball happened to be standing nearby, close enough to hear the remark. He chuckled, very harshly. “Which Cherokees, boy? You talkin’ about John Ross, his sort? Oh, he be very civilized. I visited him at his house in Tahlequah. Twice, now. Could almost call it a mansion. Books everywhere, and nice linen on the table.”

    The black general’s smile had little humor in it, and his black dialect seemed to deepen with every sentence. “Oh, very civilized. That’s cause he got upwards of fifteen slaves to keep him in proper comfort, so’s he can study them books. But them out there—”

    Ball jerked his head toward the bank. “Those be what they call the traditionalists out there, doin’ the killing. Cherokees who stick to chiefs like Duwali—‘The Bowl,’ he’s also called—and Tahchee. They be right savage, sometimes.”

    His smile thinned and lost any humor whatsoever. “’Course, on t’other hand, they don’t got no slaves. Hardly none, anyways. And they right friendly to us niggers, ‘cause they ain’t tryin’ to bleed us dry and they smart ‘nough to know we their best chance at keepin’ their old ways.” He jerked his head again, this time upward, indicating the banner flying from a mast above. “They got no problem with that red, white and black-striped flag of Arkansas. It be the civilized Cherokees who gonna squawk and scream about it, and make threats. Not that we goin’ pay no attention to them. Sure as Creation not after yesterday.”

    “Be quiet, David,” his father said softly. “I can assure you that was not the first man I’ve ever seen impaled. It was a common enough sight in Spain. White men everywhere you looked—perpetrators and victims both—and the only sign of civilization was that they’d generally use a prepared stake of some sort rather than the sharpened end of a severed sapling.”

    His son fell silent then, a bit abashed. Only a bit, of course, which was fine with Robert.

    “No, I don’t approve,” he continued, more softly still. “But if you plan to be a soldier, be prepared to see such sights. The rules and laws of war are just a veneer, that we insist on so strongly because the veneer can crack so very, very easily. Never think otherwise.”

    Arkansas Post was worse. Much worse.

    Only a day after the battle, the corpses of the men who been trapped and butchered on the peninsula were piled up in heaps. Fairly tidy heaps, now, since they’d been moved there to clear ground for the shallow mass graves that were starting to be dug by Arkansas soldiers. But the tidiness simply served to underscore the sheer scale of the slaughter. Hundreds of corpses scattered on a level are bad enough; the same hundreds stacked like so much firewood are considerably worse.

    But the worst of all was the fort itself.

    Seeing the decorations hanging from the walls, like so many ornaments, Robert sighed.

    “As I feared. Oh, Patrick, will you never put that damned road to rest?”

    There were at least sixty corpses hanging from the walls. The only reason there weren’t more was simply because there was no more room. Another three dozen or so were hanging from three long A-frame gallows that had been erected on the flat ground by the river.

    No sign of torture, thankfully, though Robert wasn’t surprised at that. Torture wasn’t Driscol’s way.

    It hardly mattered. Close to a hundred men, hands tied behind their backs and hung from the neck was plenty bad enough. Even the absence of torture was a relative thing. The men pitched off the walls might have had their necks mercifully broken—most of them, at least—but all of the men hanging from those low A-frames had simply strangled to death. Garroted, for all intents and purposes.

    It remained to be seen, but Robert was now fairly certain that the only prisoners the army of Arkansas had taken after the battle were the two men who’d been seized by the Comet. And he wouldn’t be at all surprised to see them hung on the morrow, once they were turned over to the man called the Laird of Arkansas.

    Not a bad cognomen, actually. For all of Patrick’s devotion to the most radical modern political philosophies, there had always been that streak in him that was purely medieval. Savage Scot clan medieval, at that. No Camelot, here.

    Patrick was waiting for him at the pier.

    Alone. No aides or soldiers anywhere within thirty yards.

    Robert understood. “Please wait here, Eliza. David. General Ball, I’d appreciate a private moment with General Driscol.”

    Ball inclined his head. Two soldiers extended a gangplank and Robert marched onto the shore.

    “I’ll have no part of this, Patrick,” were his first words. “Either you agree—I’ll want your word on this—that we abide by the rules of war, henceforth, or I shall simply return to Ireland immediately.”

    In a familiar gesture, from so many years ago, Driscol lowered his head slightly. Like a bull, preparing a charge.

    But instead of the harsh proclamations Robert expected, concerning the hypocrisies and perfidies of gentlemen, Patrick simply smiled.

    It was not much of a smile, granted. But Robert remembered that also. A face so square and craggy that it led many to compare the man to a troll did not, after all, lend itself well to cheery and insouciant expressions.

    “Oh, leave off, Robert.” Patrick twitched his arm slightly, as if he had started to point back at the fort with its grisly decorations. “You think I’m still exorcizing the ghosts of 98?”

    Before Robert could answer—and the answer would have been yes—Patrick shook his head.

    “Leave off, I say.” This time he twitched the other arm, the left arm that ended above the elbow. “I buried that bloody road in County Antrim at the Chippewa, along with my arm.”

    He took a slow breath. “Well, most of it, anyway. But what was left…” He shrugged. “I figure that went with your own arm, that I ruined at the Capitol.”

    “Then why—”

    The familiar glower was back. “Gentlemen. Robert, I have no doubt at all you have much to teach me concerning the science of war. But what you know about the training of soldiers—the real training I’m talking about, not that petty business with drill and the manual of arms—is what any gentleman knows. Which is absolutely nothing, because you do not know the men.”

    This time, when he moved his remaining arm, the gesture was as full and complete as the arm itself. A stiff finger pointed to the corpses hanging from the walls and moved slowly across.

    “I didn’t do this—or that killing across the river—for my own sake. Robert, did you ever—once—ask yourself how you teach a man to be a soldier, who has no memory of any victories at all? Not in his life, not in his father’s, not in his grandfather’s—not in any generation so far back as he can trace them. Which, in the case of my soldiers, is usually not more than two, and those on the distaff side.”

    Ross straightened. “Well. Ah…”

    He cleared his throat. “Well. No, actually. I haven’t.”

    The glower faded, replaced by that crack of a smile. “Didn’t think so. You take it for granted—no reason not to—that even the lowliest recruit to British colors—be he never so drunken, never so indigent, never so stupid, and never so shiftless—has endless memories to hold him up. He goes into his first battle knowing that his forefathers, perhaps as lowly as he, still managed to triumph. Over and over again. If he didn’t know the names before he enlisted, he learns them soon enough. Start with Crecy, almost five hundred years ago, and now you can end with Waterloo. In between, there are how many dozens?”

    Robert thought about it. “I’d have to sit down and write them up, actually. Couldn’t really do it proper justice, off the top of my head.”

    “Yes, you would. So would a French general. So would a German. And their soldiers.”

    Driscol paused, for a moment. “Yesterday—he accepted this morning—I issued my first field commission. To a black boy named Sheffield Parker. Splendid lad, I’m thinking. I have considerable hopes for him. How many victories does he have, d’ye think? A lad who watched a mob of white men beat his father to death—with impunity—on a street in Baltimore, in broad daylight. I happen to know, in his case, because I investigated his history. Such as it is. I couldn’t do the same for most of the black men in my army—and they constitute over nine out of ten—but you’d find the story was much the same. Add into the bargain as many generations as they can remember, which are precious few, of men who had to watch their women debauched—again, with complete impunity—by slave masters.”

    Ross was silent.

    “How many victories, Robert?”

    “One. Yesterday’s. Fine—but there was still no reason—”

    “Yes, there was. I can’t train men to control their violence until they learn—learn down to their toenails and fingernails—that they can unleash it as furiously as any men alive. Never letting them run wild, mind you. This was no barbarian frenzy. But they know—now—that they can do it. And if they can do it once, they can do it again. As many times as it takes.”

    He took a deep breath, slow breath, and let it out just as slowly. “That said, once is enough. I’m glad you’re here, Robert. So very glad, to be honest. And I accept your condition. Was planning on it, anyway.”

    Whatever else, Patrick Driscol had never been a liar. And if he was far more likely to sneer at the phrase “word of honor” than use it, Robert Ross had met precious few men in his life who took the heart of the thing more seriously and earnestly.

    “Well. Fine.”

    And then it was time for the smiles, and the handshake—even the embrace.

    “Eliza! David! Come down! I’d like to introduce an old and very dear friend!”