Le Grand Brule.
“It appears to me that there is no danger in leaving Canada in Sir John Colborne’s hands for the present, and that his powers are amply sufficient for all emergencies that may arise.”
While in Upper Canada vigilance committees had merged into military organizations with much intended secrecy, in Lower Canada matters went with a higher hand. In the former, “shooting matches,” where turkeys took the place of Loyalists, were fashionable with the more advanced Reformers; sharp-shooting practice went on, with an occasional feu de joie in honour of Papineau when some courier brought an enthusiasm-begetting letter from below. Mr. Bidwell, an “incurable American in mind, manners, and utterance,” gave his legal opinion that trials of skill such as these were not contrary to law. It was found, too, that bayonets were much the handiest weapons in hunting deer; from humane desire some hunters added these to their rifles, so that such monarchs of the forest as came in their way could be speedily put out of misery.
But in Montreal and elsewhere the rebels drilled on the military parade grounds and complained bitterly if interfered with, and officers of the troops would make small knots of amused audience near them. The bulk of these patriots were boys, but they did not like to hear themselves so called; they were tired of the times of peace, when sons bury their fathers, and were ambitious for the times of war, when fathers bury their sons. One of them challenged an officer, demanding satisfaction for such a “remarque insultante,” and two more jostled a soldier on sentry, trying to take his musket from him. His officer advised, “If the gentlemen come near you again, you have your bayonet; use it, and I will take the consequences.” For, withal hoping it was but an effect of humour, which sometimes hath his hour with every man, instructions were not to force matters by any hasty act. The only result of this incident was another private challenge, an exchange of shots, and Sir John Colborne’s disapproval, all part of the excitement surrounding the Doric-Liberty riots, when the patriots were ambitious to be “fils de la victoire” as well as “fils de la liberté.”
On his way to the famous Six Counties meeting, Papineau narrowly escaped a thrashing from a noted pugilist who would willingly have championed England had not a party of officers on “board the boat, bound for a fox hunt, interfered.” The officers did not scruple to ride at and rout with their whips the parcel of young boys, who, armed with duck guns, met Papineau as escort at Longueuil, the lads fleeing in all directions, while Papineau made his disappearance unostentatiously down a byway.
In after years Longueuil was a favourite haunt for Papineau. He would sit for hours in a small rustic arbour built upon a point of land where he could look upon a wide and beautiful view, pondering on the things that might have been had Sir John Colborne not been the man he was.
As early as the 14th of October matters were thought so ripe for insurrection that the troops were kept ready in barracks for a minute’s notice, and a loyalist meeting—a sure forerunner of disturbance—at which Campbell Sweeny was one of the ablest speakers, was held. By afternoon Loyalists and Canadians had come to blows, and fought, off and on, into the night, the former thenceforth called the Axe-handle Guards, from their weapons on that occasion. On the following day a young officer named Lysons was sent to Toronto to ask Sir Francis Bond Head for as many troops as he could spare. He could spare all, except the detachment at Bytown. Garrison artillery was turned into field artillery, with guns, harness and horses newly bought; and Sir John Colborne, apparently the right man in the right place, was appointed commander of the forces. Asked what Cromwell had done for his country, an old Scotch laird once answered, “God, doctor, he gart kings ken they had a lith in their necks.” Colborne at once set about assuring Canadian rebels that they were made on the same anatomical principles as kings. He was not likely to make a plaything of Revolution. This old and tried soldier had been in New York ready to sail for home, not a little wearied after his Upper Canadian experiences, when he received his new command. He lost no time in repairing to Quebec to organize and appraise his available forces. He armed the Irish colonists; what they would do was the question, for there was much sympathy among them for the oppressed Canadians, but Garneau sarcastically remarks that Colborne possibly appreciated the versatility of that race.
Hitherto the military in Canada had been left unsupported by their own authorities. Colborne felt them to be something after the pattern of the standing army in the Isle of Champagne, which consisted of two, who always sat down; and he proceeded to make those under him stand up. He asked for reinforcements from home, his policy being of the kind which dictated the display of the British fleet in Delagoa Bay but lately—to frighten, overawe, to show the case to be hopeless, and so save further demonstration from the disaffected. By his detractors he has been accused of taking measures to force premature revolt, knowing that to allow the movement to ripen it would become a grand combination of force which he would be unable to resist. Calumny of this kind was common and not confined to one side of politics, as witness the theory that Mackenzie was in the pay of the British Government to stir up rebellion.
It was a master-stroke of policy, said the cavillers, to force the first encounter in Montreal; and thence was traced the line of disaster which followed. Among the scuffles—“troubles sérieux”—was the famous one between the Doric Club and the Sons of Liberty. Warrants against the chief malcontents followed, including Papineau, Morin, O’Callaghan and Nelson. Arrests in the rural districts were resisted strongly. After the Governor (Gosford) had proclaimed martial law, the clash of arms began to be heard. Lieutenant Ermatinger of the Royal Volunteer Cavalry and some twenty men were despatched to St. John’s, via Longueuil and Chambly, to arrest Davignon and Demarais, two noted malcontents. Ermatinger did his work quietly, put irons on their hands and feet and ropes about their necks, and after placing them in agonizing positions on the boards of the waggon in which they were to be conveyed to Montreal, began his return. Their appearance of complete defeat struck the young lieutenant as possibly a wholesome lesson to others; so instead of returning by a direct route he took them where the display would not be lost. Near Longueuil he was warned by a woman that a rescue party awaited him on the road. Disregarding her, he went on till some three hundred men, armed with the usual long guns, in a field on their right, and protected by the high fences, proved her to be correct. Shots were exchanged, Ermatinger himself was wounded in face and shoulder with duck-shot, and a plucky little Surgeon-Major of Hussars (Sharp) in the leg. Some half-dozen others of the Loyalists were disabled, and they began to make good their retreat. Sharp, in spite of his wounds, managed to cover it. The waggon upset prisoners and constables, and as there was neither time nor inclination to pack them in again, the escape was due rather to accident than to rescue. Meantime a party of regulars awaited Ermatinger’s return at the ferry, ready to escort the expected prisoners to gaol; the civil force was so inadequate that he and his men had in fact been doing the work of special constables. Shots in the distance, then the stragglers wounded or whole, told their story, and it was deemed expedient to send a stronger force. A detachment of Royals, Royal Artillery, and some cavalry, comprising a few of those wounded the day before, went back to the scene, commanded by Wetherall. Tracks of blood in the fields, an overturned waggon and a dead horse, wayside houses and barns with shutters and windows nailed tight but hearth-fires still burning, told of conflict and hurried departure. Not an inmate or weapon was to be found, but a pedestrian said he saw women and children and some armed men farther on. The cavalry in advance gave chase to some thirty armed horsemen, who, after leading their pursuers over very rough riding, took to the woods, leaving behind only one solitary footman, who at once gave himself up. The infantry then were ordered into the woods, and the cavalry drew up along its edge, twenty or thirty shots were exchanged, and this time they were rewarded with seven prisoners.
The miscarriage of the first attempt made the rebels ironical. Ermatinger’s followers, called the Queen’s Braves, were portrayed as “decamping across the fields, leaving Messieurs Davignon and Demarais to their farmer rescuers, ... one of the gallant soldiers first discharging his pistol, ... but his hand trembling with fear did no other execution than graze the shoulder of M. Demarais.... The disciplined mercenaries of tyrants were far from invulnerable when opposed by men resolved to be free.”
St. Denis and St. Charles were seats of discontent and determined resistance. A combined movement was therefore resolved on, one command under Lieut.-Colonel Wetherall, one under Lieut.-Colonel Hughes, and the whole under Colonel the Honourable Charles Gore. A magistrate’s general address preceded this action, accompanying the order of the Lieut.-General commanding. “Should our language be misunderstood, should reason be slow to make itself heard, it is still our duty to warn you that neither the military force nor the civil authorities will be outraged with impunity, and that the vengeance of the laws will be equally prompt and terrible. The aggressors will become the victims of their rashness, and will owe the evils that will fall upon their heads to their own obstinacy. It is not those who push you to excess who are your true friends. These men have already abandoned you, and would abandon you again at the moment of danger, while we, who call you back to peace, think ourselves to be the most devoted servants of our country.” D. B. Viger’s name heads the list of magistrates, a signature which made some eyes open wide.
But, in an evil moment, the Nation Canadienne persevered in its trial of strength; Papineau, at its head, proclaimed himself “a brilliant leader and a constellation of moral excellence,” and his proclamation declared that “all ties were severed with an unfeeling mother country, that the glorious fate of disenthralling their native soil from all authority, except that of the brave, democratic spirit residing in it, awaited the young men of all the colonies.”
Meanwhile the Church issued its pastoral letter, never having countenanced either Papineau or his followers. The premier Bishop had ended his personal exhortation by proposing the health of the Sovereign, and his brother Bishops and all the clergy had risen and drunk the toast respectfully. His mandement was accepted with few exceptions. At the parish church of St. Charles the greater portion of its masculine hearers left the church cursing, and the Abbé Blanchet, curé of the parish, was a patriot who took no trouble to hide his sentiments.
At St. Charles the rebels had seized the château, substantial and built on old French models, of M. Debartch, seigneur of the manor. He fled for his life on horseback, while General Storrow Brown regaled his followers on the seigneur’s good beef and mutton, after which they cut down the trees and made the house into no bad imitation of a fortress. M. L’Espérance, whom they courted as a colonel, refused to act. They told him to leave the parish at once; he tried to do so, and then they took him prisoner, contributing $236 of his money to their exchequer. They loop-holed the walls, and made their barricades in the form of a parallelogram on the acres which lay between the river Richelieu and the hill at the foot of which the house stood. The tree trunks were banked with earth, a tidy fortress in appearance, but a trap from which there was no escape in case of defeat, practically of no strength against the loyalist guns. But no outside strength of position availed where such miserable management prevailed within. General Brown had lost an eye in one of the late affrays in Montreal; he was now thrown from his horse on the frozen ground and severely injured. He had but a handful of men to resist attack, for he had sent out a number the night before on various errands. They had not returned, and the few with him were wretchedly armed. By the time the troops arrived he himself was in the village, trying to beat up recruits; and when the firing began without him he took the precaution to remove himself still farther. The unhappy followers he had forsaken were being killed or, trying to escape, taken; every building but the château itself was burned and the barricades demolished. The fields were by this time covered with flying women and children. One woman, who evidently had not time to save herself, was found dead, after the battle, in the midst of the smoking ruins of her dwelling.
There were two cannon within the fortress, but they were only used twice. Wetherall posted his men on the small hill, got his guns into place and began to play on the insurgents, who were left no egress but by the river. They managed to gall him, one party making a sortie; the firing was kept up for an hour but ever grew fainter, while the balls from the field-pieces made great breaches in the rude earthworks, and the undisciplined, unofficered defenders were deeper in confusion. Then came the cruel advance with fixed bayonets, and all who did not ask for quarter received none; the Richelieu was on the other side of them, and “many leaped into the lake who were not thirsty.” “The slaughter on the side of the rebels was great,” wrote Wetherall; “I counted fifty-six bodies, and many more were killed in the buildings and the bodies burnt.” The rebel record reads not at all like this, and ends, “One hundred of these brave men took shelter in a barn filled with hay and straw. The Royal butchers set fire to it and burned them alive. One hundred were drowned in crossing the Richelieu. The village of St. Charles was entirely burned by the soldiers during the attack; those of the inhabitants who escaped the flames perished in the woods from the effects of fright and cold.... The prisoners that fell into their hands were inhumanly treated, and many of the wounded murdered in cold blood.” But, as a brother officer records, “Nothing succeeds like success. Colonel Wetherall was lauded to the skies.”
“We understand the capture of St. Charles was effected with great ease,” says a correspondent in a tone admiring the burning and complete destruction; “no loss of consequence to the troops.” “As soon as possible after the action, the troops, with the greatest humanity, began to bury the bodies of the killed, the scene truly deplorable, wives and daughters ransacking among the bodies for those to whom they wished to pay the last rites.” The Montreal Courier said that hot shot had been used.
In Montreal the welcome to the troops was, as might be expected, extravagantly joyful: “It was an interesting sight to see the hundreds who crowded on the wharf to witness it. The cavalry landed first, two of them carrying the liberty pole and cap erected at St. Charles at the meeting of the Six Counties, with its wooden tablet bearing the inscription ‘À Papineau par ses citoyens reconnaissants,’ the former fragment of the spoils looking sadly like a fool’s cap upon a barber’s pole. The artillery followed, with the two little guns taken at St. Olivière in addition to their proper armament. After them rode the commanding officer, followed by the bands of the Royals and the infantry, the first company of which followed the prisoners, thirty-two in number.”
“The pole, it was hoped by some, would be deposited in that proud fane of British glory, where the tattered ensigns of extinguished rebels in Ireland and of blood-hunted Covenanters in Scotland wave over the tombs of sleeping monarchs in melancholy conjunction with the virgin standard of Bunkers Hill and the trophies of such days as Trafalgar, Cape Vincent, and Waterloo!”!!
It had been intended that the other half of the force, under Colonel Hughes, Colonel Gore accompanying it, should appear before disaffected and mutinous St. Denis simultaneously with Wetherall’s appearance at St. Charles. But the gods of war were not with them as with the others. Torrents of rain, pitchy darkness, rain turning to snow, men and horses sinking in mud, harness breaking, knee deep in water or winding along trails did the column bound for St. Denis find itself, while a few broken bridges were the only drawback to the victorious Wetherall. Four miles away, they surmised their plight and slow approach had led to a warning to their enemies and time for preparation. For eleven hours they toiled, at the rate of a mile and a half an hour, the mud pulling off the men’s boots and moccasins. The cavalry were kept busy driving away parties who were destroying the bridges, all of which had to be repaired before the gullies and streams could be crossed and the howitzers carried over. A most useful man was Cornet Campbell Sweeny, of the Mounted Dragoons, who prevented much damage and was alert in securing early intelligence. They heard the church bells ring the alarm—in rebel language usually called the tocsin—and they found a welcome awaiting them from some eight hundred men armed with a scant stock of good and bad guns, pikes, pitchforks, and cudgels.
Before Colonel Gore left he had sent on young Lieutenant Weir, in plain clothes, to prepare for the advance. He was to meet the troops at Sorel, but failed to do so, as they had taken a byroad known as the Pot-au-Beurre to avoid St. Ours, a stronghold of the rebels. This Weir did not know. He took a calèche, and insisted that the man should drive him by the very road which it was impolitic to take. He gave up this calèche, being urged by a Frenchman to take one driven by himself. Weir believed the man’s assertions, engaged the calèche for the balance of his journey, and was driven straight to Nelson’s quarters. When he arrived there and was stopped by the rebel sentry he boldly asked where the troops were. This was the first intimation to the others that the troops were expected. Tied hand and foot, he was put into a cart and removed under escort. As Weir was at once arrested he had disappeared before his friends’ arrival. Among the preparations Nelson immediately set his son Horace and his pupil Dansereau to make bullets.
At the outskirts another skirmishing party gave the troops a brisk salute, and from nine in the morning till four in the afternoon the struggle lasted. Success in resistance seemed so uncertain that Nelson persuaded Papineau to retire and save the person most sacred to the cause. “It is not here you are most useful,” said he; “we shall want your presence at another time.” Papineau argued that his retirement at such a moment might be misinterpreted, but eventually agreed that his rôle was more that of orator than soldier—to breathe fire-eating words rather than to stand the fire of Colonel Gore’s guns. Nelson then rode out to reconnoitre, was afraid he would fall in with the advancing column, and came back at a hard gallop. In the meantime Captain Markham at the head of his men was pushing on, taking house after house, till he reached a stockade across the road which fenced off the large stone building, four stories high, where Nelson had ensconced himself, with other houses so situated as to strengthen its position. The howitzer now came into play; one of the houses was taken, and attention was turned towards securing a large distillery near by. Captain Markham, severely wounded in the knee and with two balls in his neck, still kept with his men; but they, too, began to fall. The previous night’s toil, the cold and hunger, told on them; ammunition began to run out, and the insurgents received additions to their numbers from the neighbouring villages. One of the defenders was Père Laflèche, who had been soldier before priest and now combined his callings. He was telling his beads when he first caught sight of the troops, and in a twinkling exchanged his rosary for a musket. “Hue donc!” he cried, and a ball sped to the death of an advance guard. Another, David Bourdages, son of a celebrated patriot, kept two boys busy loading for him for nearly two hours; he then tranquilly lit his pipe and began again, still smoking. The chronicle says that nearly every shot dealt death. At that rate of computation a simple problem in junior mathematics would show that Bourdages alone could have comfortably despatched half the attacking force.
Meanwhile Weir, hurried off in Nelson’s cart, complained to his captors of the tightness of the cords which bound him. Captain Jalbert, two men, Migneault and Lecour, with the young driver Gustin, who formed his guard, disputed with him; he insisted, they assailed him, and he jumped out of the cart and underneath it to escape their blows. He was fired at twice with pistols, and had sabre cuts on his head and hands, the latter hacked away, as, tied together, they vainly attempted to screen the former. Dragged from beneath the cart the butchery was finished, and the body was secured under the water of the Richelieu by a pile of stones.
With the troops it had become a question how to manage a retreat. There was no ambulance, there were seventeen wounded, and it was decided to remove Captain Markham only. The circumstances demanded that they should so be left, but their comforts were attended to as far as might be. The rebel chronicles say that the troops deserted their wounded.
The insurgents had turned from the defensive to the offensive, and came out to dislodge some of their enemies in rear of a barn; a galling fire was kept up from the fortified house, and Captain Markham, in transit, was again wounded, as was also one of his bearers. The rebel fire was dexterous and precise; the retreating party had to cross a frozen ploughed field, and Captain Markham was put in the only cart and sent to the rear. Hughes needed all his cool address to conduct the rear guard, for the inhabitants seemed to swarm from every direction. Thus hampered they only removed themselves some three miles when, exhausted, in a freezing atmosphere, their gun-carriage broken down and frozen in the ground, they spiked the gun and threw its remaining ammunition in the river. They kept on their march till daylight, by which time the men were nearly barefoot, for their moccasins were cut by the rough ice and frozen earth; their horses were lamed, and the lighted villages through which they passed made them apprehensive of attack. At daylight a halt was called, and the men, half dead through fatigue and hunger, lay wherever they could find a place in the barns of a deserted farmhouse. A young officer who in the plight of darkness the night before had got a lantern, stuck it to a pole and sent it on ahead of the men as a guiding star, now turned his attention to a search for potatoes—which he found and boiled in sufficient quantity to allow each man three or four before the weary march was resumed.
Nelson had had his triumph; a short-lived one, for he at once had to follow the advice so recently given by him to Papineau, that one’s discretions are one’s best valours. According to a manuscript letter historically quoted, the English commander had more faith in the dictum of a priest than in his own guns. Perhaps a submission gained by obedience to a higher authority than military force might be of greater service to the crown they served. Wetherall sent for the curé of St. Denis—as soon as “il voyait qu’il n’avait pas a faire à des enfants”—and besought him to tell his people that if they did not succumb they would be tormented in even a worse place than Lower Canada; that if they persisted, he would refuse them burial. The last was a former expedient to ensure an appearance of loyalty. Many graves were to be seen in old gardens or by the wayside along the south coast, outside of consecrated ground, the graves of “Canadian rebels;” rebels who, during the Revolution of 1776, had taken part with the Americans, thinking that by so doing they would hasten the coming of “the old folks back again.” “You smell English,” said one of them on his death-bed, raising himself to give his curé a scowling defiance on this his one strongest conviction, and, turning to the wall, died, outside the Church but true to France.
After the curé’s menace, “which succeded à merveille,” the men on whom Nelson had counted were reduced one half, a story confirmed by Colonel Gore’s later despatch, wherein he also says, “I was accompanied by Mons. Crenier, the parish priest, who gave me every information in his power.” The Colonel revisited St. Denis with an increased force, but found the place abandoned; Nelson had escaped with Papineau and others, although there were many signs of greater defences having been made. So the troops marched on to St. Charles with their rescued howitzer. Montreal was now put in a state of defence; stockades surrounded it, and only a few gates, well guarded, were left open.
There were two searches now to be made, one for the body of Weir, another for the bodies, living or dead, of Papineau, Nelson, and others, the heads of the first two being valued at $4,000 and $2,000 respectively. The melancholy duty of searching for Weir was given to a lieutenant of the 32nd, Griffin, who, conducted to the place by a young girl who had witnessed the hiding of it, found the body. Several of the fingers were split, an axe, some said a spade, having been the last weapon used upon him. He had taken breakfast with Nelson and was well treated throughout by him. On leaving the house, Nelson, in Weir’s presence and after begging him not to be refractory, had commanded the men to treat him with all possible attention, but on no account to allow him to escape. Their tale was that the sound of the firing, as they travelled from the point of attack, so excited Weir that in his struggles he loosened the binding of one of his arms, and springing from them ran. They overtook him, and the appearance of his body told the sequel. It was taken to Montreal for burial with military honours, in which regulars and volunteers took an equal share. To the patriot eye this natural action was making “a vile use” of an “unfortunate occurrence,” to “waken the old British horror against Frenchmen, Jacobins and blood-thirsty revolutionists.” As a set-off to this peculiar view of a terrible act there is the following sentence anent the second occupation of St. Denis, by a Tory paper: “We are not sanguine enough to expect that any regular opposition will be attempted.”
“Jock Weir, remember Jock Weir!” now became the war-cry of his incensed comrades.
The hunt for the leaders began in earnest. Papineau, a lawyer of some repute, was then a man of about forty-eight years, of good average height, inclined to corpulency, certainly not the figure to imagine under small haystacks or at full length in ditches. His face was strongly marked with those features which proclaim a Jewish ancestor somewhere; dark very arched eyebrows, hair nearly black, the eye dark, quick and penetrating; an exterior of determination and force in keeping with the well-stored mind, conversational power, cultivation and gentlemanly address which marked the man. His eloquence had passed into a proverb. An unusually precocious Canadian child always had said of it, “C’est un Papineau.”
His followers had every excuse for their worship, and thought him equal, perhaps superior, to Washington. His father, “le père des patriotes,” who had not let his patriotism go the length of severance from Britain, frowned on the more advanced son, still keeping to feudal tenure and the Catholic religion as the priests taught. The Code Papineau junior had not much feudalism in it, and politics may be said to have been the son’s religion.
So also did Robert Nelson say that feudal nonsense was abolished forever, and the Church of not much more account. He and his brother Wolfred had their own interpretation of their relative’s saying that “England expects every man to do his duty.” Mrs. Wolfred Nelson’s grandfather, le Marquis de Fleurimont, was one of the French officers wounded in September, 1759; afterwards he took the oath of allegiance, and was again wounded in the repulse of Montgomery before Quebec. These Frenchified Englishmen seem to have been born for something better than treason, stratagem and spoils; they took none of the last and found the first two meant prison and expatriation. Wolfred Nelson was by far the best looking of the leaders, tall, with handsome features, and had moreover a brave and manly disposition. His proclamations were wonderfully worded, his Athanasian rendering declaring the Canadian Republic to be “one and indivisible.” Colonel Gore sought to take these prominent men, having heard that they were secreted at St. Hyacinthe. Accordingly a young officer and a picked party were told off, their sleighs without bells being timed to arrive after dark at the house where the leaders were supposed to be. The guide brought the sleighs there somewhere near midnight, and they found the usual comfortable French quarters, solid barns with yards and outbuildings. A chain of sentries was posted round the place and through the buildings; a knock brought madame, a most charming old lady, to the window; they were very welcome, and she showed them not only over the house, but she kept them seeking in many corners they would not have found for themselves, in cellars where stores of winter vegetables and fruit lay in rows, cupboards full of treasures, in cavernous depths beyond rafters which promised a reward for search, but only revealed much bacon and ham, flitches “the manifest product of a high-caste gramnivorous pig.” But Papineau, on the watch, had had time to get to a deep ditch which ran back into the fields, whence he made his way to a small bush near by. From there he escaped to the States; but Nelson was taken and lodged in Kingston gaol. Years afterwards, at an evening party, after his return from France, the charming, white-haired Papineau said to a gentleman who had been the soldier so prominent in the search, “I hear you are the officer who came to call on me at Madame ——’s, in ’37. You little know how nearly you took me.... You did your work admirably, for, though we were on the watch, I had only just time to run away down that wet ditch before your sentries met.” Among the effects then seized were many papers of value to the captors, one of them a letter from Papineau, finishing, “Continue to push it (the rebellion) as vigorously as you can,” and another, a schoolboy letter from Nelson’s son, a lad of fourteen, somewhat after the manner of Tom Sawyer: “I wish that it (the rebellion) will do well and without any noise, which I hate very much—except with the other side. I believe that the prediction of that man Bourgeoi will be accomplished, which is that the province will be all covered with blood and dead bodies.” A Montreal newspaper deplores “the fattening of Nelson for the gallows,” and considered that “death on the scaffold was the best example such a father could give to such a child.”
And yet Dr. O’Callaghan could write from over the border, “If you are to blame for the movement, blame then those who plotted and continued it, and who are to be held in history responsible for it. We, my friends, were the victims, not the conspirators; and were I on my deathbed I could declare before heaven that I had no more idea of a movement of resistance when I left Montreal and went to the Richelieu River with M. Papineau than I have now of being bishop of Quebec. And I also know that M. Papineau and I secreted ourselves for some time in a farmer’s house in the parish of St. Marc, lest our presence might alarm that country and be made a pretext for rashness.... I saw as clearly as I now see the country was not prepared.” Dr. O’Callaghan, the fidus Achates of Papineau, the editor of the Vindicator, was not likely to have been as innocent as he afterwards remembered himself.
Another who managed to hide safely but nearer home, after the battle of St. Charles, was George Cartier. With his cousin Henri he passed the winter at the house of Antoine Larose, in his native village of St. Antoine, and the person destined to be his father-in-law was in hiding not far off. The future Sir George, to make sure of a quiet resting-place, wrote, and had published in a Montreal newspaper: “George E. Cartier, advocate, a young man of great ability and talent, was found frozen in the woods by his father. He might have served his Queen in the highest councils of his country had he not been brought up in a line of politics which led to his untimely end.” He read his self-description and epitaph, and handed it to his cousin, remarking, “At present, my dear Henri, we can sleep tranquil.” But he reckoned, not without his host, who was incorruptible, but without his host’s servant-maid. The maid had an admirer, and the admirer grew jealous of the two young men who enjoyed advantages superior to those granted him, made a scene with his fiancée, threatened to inform on them and to denounce M. Larose to the authorities for harbouring rebels. So the two young men, nephews many times removed of the celebrated Jacques, had to decamp to the less confined neighbourhood of les États Unis. In after years, when Mackenzie with questionable taste treated the episode of the rebellion as a comedy, he met M. Cartier, in parliamentary obstructive debate, and twitted him that they had both been “out” on the wrong side, and that the Government had shown its appreciation of the comparative values of their heads. He referred to the price of a thousand pounds set on his own, and only three hundred on that of the young man whose sudden demise from hunger and cold in the woods of Verchères had spoilt “une brilliante carrière.”
Naturally, Montreal was now in a highly excited state, distracted at defeat and elated at victory; openly rejoicing or inwardly chafing, as the case might be. The specie in the Bank found its way for safe keeping to Quebec, ammunition, arms and soldiers began to arrive, volunteer battalions were formed; the gaol was crowded with prisoners; the outlets of the city were barricaded, and a general hum of expectation was in the air.
Detachments of the 1st Royals under Colonel Wetherall, of the 32nd and 83rd under Maitland and Dundas, the Volunteer Montreal Rifle Corps under Captain Leclerc, and a strong squadron of horse with six pieces of artillery, fully served, under command of Major Jackson, one sunny day defiled through the streets with colours waving and bands playing. The field battery, rocket troop and all the transports were on runners, for it was now the 15th of December and the snow was deep. The Commander-in-chief, the generally popular and much-feared hero of Waterloo and a hundred other fights, Sir John Colborne, with his richly caparisoned staff and escorted by two hundred Dragoons, brought up the rear of this imposing display.
They proceeded to the western extremity of the island, past the ruins of two old forts and the smaller remains of a larger one, all telling of former war times. At the expansion of the river, caused by its narrow outlets, was the Lake of the Two Mountains, where one of the hills, in summer clothed with richest verdure to the water’s edge, was called Calvary. Within its shadow lay St. Eustache, St. Benoit, and Ste. Scholastique; any of them might have been named Golgotha, so soon were they to become the place of skulls. “Le Grand Brûlé” was so named before “le vieux brûlot” was to rechristen it with fire and blood, for a forest fire had swept it at the end of the last or the beginning of this century; the “Petit Brûlé” was near Ste. Scholastique—names significant to the dwellers there of a fate worse than burning by forest fire.
St. Eustache, most picturesque of the early French settlements, was built on a tongue of land. At that day it consisted of a square of handsome stone houses, comfortable and well finished, in which the wealthy but discontented owners lived; hard by were the manor-house, the presbytère and convent, and in the centre stood the parish church, its two towers topped by spires as glittering as the “panoply of war” then in full sight ready for the attack. The people of this village, between five and six hundred, were enthusiastic Liberals, disaffected French—traitors, rebels or patriots, according to the point of view. Sir John Colborne saw them in strong colours, and was determined on their downfall, extermination if necessary. The defence was under Dr. Chénier and Girod. The latter, a misguided Swiss adventurer, had figured in several of the South American revolutionary wars, and later was a protégé of Perrault the philanthropist; his career was one of singular folly; he loved to appear in buccaneer style, affected the manner and language of a dictator, and accented his doings by usually riding a fine grey mare as his charger, which he had stolen from M. Dumont, a loyal Canadian. The parish priest, M. Paquin, assisted by his vicar, who read Colborne’s proclamation—a document not to be misunderstood and not of a cheerful tenor—succeeded in persuading the peasants to return to their homes in peace, that nothing but disaster awaited them if they persisted, and as a result of such persuasions but one solitary person was left to represent an insurgent garrison. But some fifteen hundred from about the Brûlé soon replaced them, some regularly armed, but most of them unarmed. M. Paquin now sent for Chénier, expostulated with him and showed how his undertaking was perilous and hopeless. Chénier was moved to tears, but he maintained that the news of Wetherall’s victory at St. Charles was false; he was resolved to die with arms in his hands. He and Girod turned the ecclesiastics out of their house, making it another point of defence and the church into a citadel. Many of the prudent were by now wending their way towards Montreal; some arrests followed; and those who remained and found themselves unarmed were assured by Chénier, “Be easy about that; there will be men killed. You can take their muskets.”
A habitant from l’Isle Jésu brought word of the approach of the troops, and soon Sir John Colborne’s two thousand men stood in the valley which looked made but for the place of peace. The whole force, field pieces, rocket mortar and train waggons, covered two miles of roadway. The advance guard would have reached there with the habitant had not the ice been unsafe, causing the men to make a detour to Ste. Rose, thereby increasing the march by six miles. The water had been open two days before, but to prove that it would bear, Colonel Gugy—“a tall, majestic-looking gentleman who expressed himself in a beautiful manner”—galloped from shore to shore. About noon all had arrived, and as they neared the village and took up position their numbers and character must have impressed the unhappy people with the hopelessness of the coming conflict. The usual desertions began, until Chénier, looking at one road full of his enemies and another full of his retreating countrymen, addressed the few who remained with him: “My brothers, behold advancing before you, to burn and destroy your beautiful homes, the servile mercenaries of the despotic Government which has enslaved your country.” And they in return cried the old cry, “Liberty or Death.”... “We will never desert our wives and little ones.” Officers in charge of divided squads put in a state of defence the manor house, the presbytère, the convent and one villager’s house, while Chénier, in person taking command of from sixty to eighty, many of whom were still without arms, went to the church, where the women and children had already fled. The last, for further safety, he placed in the vaults underneath. The doors were then barricaded, and the windows removed to convert the openings into loopholes. Thus did they await the coming annihilation, “nor,” said a British officer afterwards, “did they quail as our overwhelming force approached; they raised one loud and shrill terrific cheer, and then all was still as death till the cannonading and musketry began.” The field battery opened fire; but there was no reply. At first it was supposed that the place had been abandoned; but as another brigade came down the village street a rattling fire poured from the church. It was evident they meant to show fight. The howitzers tried to batter down the barricaded doors, but without effect. Colonel Jackson, of the artillery, asked for a surrender. The answer “was plucky but idiotic;” they pooh-poohed the offer, and among other preparations took a cannon to the top of the steeple. Then Jackson set his own gun, blew the steeple and all that was in it down, and those below who ran out of the doors were bayoneted. An officer who went into one of the empty houses close by upset a stove and placed on the coals all the combustibles he could find. In a moment the line of fire lengthened, and under cover of the smoke Colonel Wetherall and his men came at the double down the street; cavalry and still another regiment surrounded the village to prevent chance of escape, with a further precaution of a corps of volunteers spread out on the ice to pick off any unfortunate should he get through such a double line. The envelopment of fire was completed. The church and houses were now all ablaze. Driven by the flames the unhappy defenders abandoned one position for another, only to find the second worse. At the back of the church a small door leading into the sacristy had been forced, and the soldiers, groping their way through smoke and darkness, led by Colonel Gugy, were shot at by the few who remained. Gugy was one of those wounded. The staircase was gone, and another officer lighted a fire beneath the altar, got his men out, and the cessation of shots within told the success of his work. The simultaneous fire pouring on the French from all sides was liking boiling water on an anthill. Men half-roasted, with bullets already lodged in their miserable bodies, women creeping from the crypt, found that what flame and bullet had spared the bayonet could finish. Chénier and the few remaining, mad with despair, leaped from the windows into the graveyard, and fought there anew with all the desperation of a forlorn hope. A ball brought the leader down; but rallying his sinking strength he rose, to be again shot, until, with the fourth bullet, he rose no more—the blackened semblance of a man. He died “comme un héros digne de la Grèce antique.” In the mêlée a few managed to escape, but for a moment only; those who made for the ice were picked off there, and those who fell on their knees and begged for quarter heard “Jock Weir, remember Jock Weir.” By half-past four the work was finished. Cannon and musketry had ceased, but the houses still burned; the churchyard and the convent were heaped with dead, and the wounded, burning alive, received now and then a merciful shot or a stab from a bayonet. The village swine added yet another horror. “Pshaw,” said a Scotch volunteer to a squeamish comrade, “it’s nothing but French hog eating French hog.” Pathos was added to horrors, when it appeared that the pockets of some of the youngest of the insurgents were full of marbles—toys turned to missiles.
The air was insufferable, but in spite of it loot and pillage went on. At Montreal, in the clear atmosphere of a Canadian December night, the bright belt of illuminated sky told as plainly as telegraph that the expedition had been a success. “Such a scene,” wrote a correspondent to the press, “was never witnessed. It must prove an awful example. The artillery opened fire at half-past one. Everything was over, except the shooting of a few fugitives, by half-past three.”
Quite a different view of the case is found in official despatches. Sir John Colborne writes to Lord Glenelg, 30th March, ’38: “On the evening in which the troops took possession of St. Eustache, the loyal inhabitants of that village and neighbourhood, anxious to return to their homes and to protect the remainder of their property, followed the troops; and I believe it is not denied that the houses which were burnt, except those that were necessarily destroyed in driving the rebels from the fortified church, were set on fire by the Loyalists of St. Eustache and Rivière du Chêne, who had been driven from the country in October and November.” And in a despatch from Glenelg to Lord Durham, June 2nd, ’38, we find: “Having laid that despatch before the Queen, Her Majesty has commanded me to desire Your Lordship to signify to Sir J. Colborne, that while she deeply laments that any needless severities should have been exercised by one class of Her Majesty’s subjects against another, Her Majesty is gratified to learn, as she fully anticipated, that her troops are in no degree responsible for any of the excesses which unhappily attended the defeat of the insurgents at St. Benoit and St. Charles, but that in the harassing service in which they were engaged they maintained unimpaired their high character for discipline and training.”
Certainly some of her officers did their best to make up for “needless severity.” Colonel Gugy and Colonel Griffin afterwards were unwearied, and in a measure successful, in their mediations between exasperated nationalities. The former persuaded many at the time to return to their houses, and priest and layman alike commended him in his rôle of pacificator. Colborne appointed Colonel Griffin military magistrate, with civil powers, in the County of Two Mountains, and in that office he protected the weak, raised the fallen, and did much to assuage the necessary horrors of civil war.
When the curé Paquin had begged the people to give in, Chénier’s wife added her entreaties, saying there was no disgrace in surrendering to such a superior force. But her husband had only fondly kissed her, repeating that well-worn sentence, “La garde meurt mais ne se rend pas,” bade her good-bye and sent her to a place of safety. One tradition has it that a greater ordeal than farewell and death awaited her. The usual terrors of the law were expended upon her scorched remnant of a husband; the mutilated quarters lay tossed about in the house of one Anderson, near the battlefield, and she was not allowed to bury them. After a burial of some fashion she had the hardihood to seek the remains, disinter and secrete them, and when opportunity came, in the refuge of a friend’s garret, sew the parts together and have them buried properly. The edge of romance is dulled when we read that there was more of the hot head and mulish foot about Chénier than the hero; but to the present day there is a local phrase, “Brave comme Chénier.” The day after the battle Colborne’s chief officers declared that they were obliged to despatch Chénier. A patriot dame standing by said none but an English soldier was capable of killing a wounded man. The Abbé Paquin declares that the mutilation of the body and the removal of the heart were incidents in the post mortem, held by the desire of the surgeons, to ascertain the precise wound of which he died, and the historian De Bellefeuille corroborates his assertion. This scarcely accounts for parading the heart about on the point of a bayonet, and it is also pertinently asked, “Depuis quand ouvre-t-on les corps des soldats tués sur un champ de bataille pour savoir de quoi ils sont morts!”
Terrified at the fate of St. Eustache, the inhabitants of St. Benoit turned out to meet Sir John, a white flag displayed from every window. At Ste. Scholastique they carried their emblems of submission in their hands, white flags and lighted tapers, sinking on their knees in the roadway as they presented them. At Carillon they did the same. Like the three hundred men of Liége, “all in their white shirts and prostrate on their knees praying for grace,” the crowd through which Colborne passed presented the appearance of two distinct assortment of souls, “... of the elect and of the damned.” There were but few of the elect in this case. Arrests were made and the torch was applied, although Christie says “He dealt with much humanity, dismissing most of them.” Of Colborne it might be said, “Where he makes a desert, calls it peace.” The Glengarry Highlanders met the troops at St. Benoit, and in the succeeding burnings, according to Gore’s own words, “were in every case, I believe, the instruments of infliction;” such irregular troops were not to be controlled. “Many of those who served as volunteers,” says Christie, “were persons who had been exceedingly ill-treated by the patriots while in the ascendant.”
The ironical Bishop Lartigue now found it well to write another pastoral. After all the carnage was over the voices of the clergy generally were uplifted, this time thanking God that peace was restored. “How now about the fine promises made by the seditious of the wonderful things they would do for you?” asks this terrible bishop. “Was it the controlling spirit of a numerical majority of the people of this country, who, according to the insurgents, ought to have sway in all things, that directed their military operations? Did you find yourselves in a condition of greater freedom than before, while exposed to all sorts of vexations, threatened with fire-raisings, loss of goods, deprivation of life itself, if you did not submit to the frightful despotisms of these insurgents, who by violent, not persuasive means, caused more than a moiety of all the dupes they had to take up arms against the victorious armies of our sovereign?”
No sooner had rebellion come to a head and French blood flowed than France remembered where Canada was, and quickly learned much about her. People were asking in wonderment what all the trouble could be. The Gallican remembered his cousin-several-times-removed, and set about helping him. One journal advised volunteers and auxiliaries, and another made the oft-repeated comparison between Canada and Ireland. Engraved copies of Papineau’s portrait adorned windows, and biographical sketches of him appeared in the newspapers. Le Journal des Débats did not confine itself to printed sympathy, but suggested that arms and ammunition should be smuggled into Canada and volunteers enlisted to go there to help.
This sympathy spread far afield in Europe. At the Russian Emperor’s birthday fête at New Archangel the Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Naval Forces gave a splendid banquet, at the close of which “a collection was made for the unfortunate patriots of Canada.” Without exception, every one present contributed, with a result of 22,800 francs; and what is more, this sum was forwarded to its destination by the Admiral himself. We hope he had more definite geographical ideas than had the nearer French. Given a letter to post to Quebec, before rebellion had brought it and its people prominently forward, a post-office clerk in Paris gravely asked if it should go via Panama or Cape Horn.
And then France remembered that those who had returned at the time of the Conquest said “it was very cold over there.”