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.”