“Sir John now told us to lose no time in attending to fourteen small cannon that were looking down at us from the top of the incline where the priest’s house stood. Losh! if they’d fired their one wooden cannon it would have smothered the half of us. Yes, a wooden cannon it was, hooped in iron, and if you’d seen the stuff we took out of it afterwards at Montreal—for Sir John was bound to keep it and send it to England—horse-shoes, smoothing irons, nails, balls, and every kind of rubbish. It was a twelve-pounder, easily handled, and some of the men drew it to Montreal. Then we were told to feed ourselves. And we did. We stole right and left, and there wasn’t a chicken left alive; it was a turkey here and a duck there; hens, anything we could catch; fence-rails were piled and a camp-fire made. We covered the geese and fowls with clay, thrust them into the fire, and when the clay cracked they were ready, for feathers and skin came off with it. Some would snatch a wing, others a leg; and man, there was some could stand a whole bird, inside and out. But hungry as I was, I couldn’t stomach it. Three others and I went to a little store near by, where we got some brown bread and some cheese on the counter; we found a cupboard in the cellar, and in it a nice ham, a box of bottled ale turned up, and we took a bottle apiece. Then we went and sat behind the house, and had a good English supper of it; and it had to last us till we got to Montreal.
“‘Now, then,’ said Sir John, when we were all through, ‘set fire and burn it.’ And we did. He was still thirsting to revenge Jock Weir. It was Jock Weir here and Jock Weir there, but he told us to spare the priest’s house—which we did. We were young, and it was a kind of a frolic to us; but oh, those women and children! I wake in the night and think I hear them yet. Losh! I’ll never forget it—a woman with a child under each arm, others tugging at her skirts. But we did them no harm; we only burnt everything up. The Colonel told them they needn’t be afraid; but what was the good of stopping when their homes were to be burnt! They went off to the woods, and, man! it was terrible—terrible. We got to Beauharnois at two in the morning, and we had it afire by six; left at eight, and were in Montreal by noon. Here we had our barracks in the emigrant sheds. Sir John took a great notion to us. ‘I’ll drill you, you Glengarry men!’ And he did. We were devoted to him, and obeyed almost before he spoke—when there was anything to do. So he drilled us that day for about two hours on the ice, and you should have seen some of those poor kiltie regulars! You know, Sir John was a good man, but he was a rough ’un, and he wanted everything just as he said. But losh, man, it was a shame to drill them for two hours on the ice. The poor rogues threatened they would go home—the 93rd they were, afterwards in Toronto. They wore kilts, but we had trousers, blue with red stripe; we did have red coats, too, but it’s all true about the way we came home on horseback, and with plug hats, too, and in fact with anything we could lay our hands on. There was a great deal of talk about it, I believe; but Sir John made us return the things afterwards. One big fellow, at Beauharnois, saw a beautiful sofa going into the fire, so he seized it and said he would have it. He heaved it out, but losh, man, when the orders came to march on to Montreal he didn’t know what to do with it, and had to chuck it into the river. We were two weeks in Montreal, and we stood guard at the executions. It was a dreadful sight to see men hung up in a row, all dropped at once. Yes, there was a ‘movable gallows,’ and a very tidy thing it was. It was put up in an hour, and when the execution was over, the Colonel said, ‘Go drill those men;’ when we came back, in an hour, there was no sign of it left. An attempt at rescue was feared, and they said Papineau himself was there to see—a tall, middling stout man, a regular Frenchman, and they said it was Papineau. We were well treated, fed whenever there was anything to eat, and properly paid at the end. So Sir John came to the barracks one morning, and says he, ‘You Glengarries can go now, for all the good you are!’ And that was just what we wanted.”
“The ghost of a goose is a curious sight,
A strange enough phantom at best,”
but when it is that of a military goose, and history records not whether goose or gander, biography becomes delicate writing. In ’37, not only were men warlike and women sympathetic, but the very geese flew to arms. “Confoun’ a’ questions o’ dates,” says the Noctes; confoun’ a’ questions o’ sex—the goose of the Coldstream Guards must not be forgotten; the black-coated laity thought they possessed many such. This lineal descendant of the fabulous Roman bird was born and brought up in the citadel at Quebec, which may be the reason that it despised the estate of oie des moissons and aspired to that of anser ruficollis upon a battlefield. One day, in its morning walk on that historic ground, it left the flock forever, stepped up to the sentry, paced back and forth with him on his beat, gravely ducking at every arch, and when rain came on and he turned into the sentry-box goosie got in too, poked out her head, and kept at attention until the corporal came with the relief. The ensuing ceremony met with her approbation, as did the new guard; she gave one last look at the retreating figure, and began her walk up and down with the new. Thereafter, the sentry order always finished, “In case of fire alarm the guard, and take care of the goose.”
’Twould offend against taste in ordinary cases “To tell how poor goosie was put out of pain
(And the plucking and basting we need not explain);”
and how this innovation on Follow-the-Drum in after years made the voyage home with her regiment and continued her duties in Portman Street barracks, till a military funeral finished her course, belongs to the history of Her Majesty’s forces. That she was a goose is proved by record of her characteristics; anser canadensis is a clamorous bird, and armed humans underneath his flight are made aware of his presence by his noisy gabble—if silent he would never be discovered. It is said the prudent fair ones of the flock keep a chucky-stone in the mouth during travel, in order to guard against temptation. Therefore, as the Great Grey Goose of the West was a gander and gabbler, the silent sentry, the goose militant of the Coldstream Guards, must have been a goose, and is a Deborah.
When we come to the details of Mackenzie’s life, his attitude towards wife and bairns and mother and theirs towards him would disarm even his political critic. There is the meeting of the two old schoolmates, Isabel Baxter and Mackenzie, without recognition, the brief courtship, and a life of mutual devotion. There is baby Joseph Hume, whose early death saddened the father’s life; and there is the pathetic entry in his diary, after his rebellion had entailed banishment: “My daughter Janet’s birthday, aged thirteen. When I came home in the evening we had no bread; took a cup of tea without it, and Helen, to comfort me, said it was no better on the evening of my own birthday.”
They drank the cup of poverty together, father, mother, grandmother and children. For twenty-four hours at a stretch there was no food, fire or light; and after such a fast the father would go forth shivering to collect a small due or meet a friend willing to share a sixpence. The younger children never ceased to cry for food; the others suffered in silence. We read of the servant, one of the true-hearted Irish, and she is content to starve with the rest. Despite poverty, the father continued to wear a watch, once the property of his eldest daughter, whom he sincerely mourned for twelve years with an almost superstitious veneration. We find him telling his son to cheer up, not to despond; that there are green spots in the desert of life; that after darkness comes light. And even in this dreadful plight there are moments when the tragic becomes serio-comic. There is a night when the plaintive sounds from the darkness about him urge him to make one more assault upon the cupboard that he knows is empty—no, not quite empty; there is a book, and by the embers of their dying fire he reads the title, “The Dark Ages,” and he and all indulge in a hearty laugh, and then go supperless—nay, breakfastless and dinnerless—to bed.
The family did not follow him into exile immediately, but his devoted wife reached Navy Island a few hours before the dramatic moment when Drew arrived and the Caroline became a torch. Like Deborah, she, too, might have said, “I will surely go with thee, notwithstanding the journey shall not be for thine honour.” The general belief is that, though loyal to him and a staunch Reformer, she by no means sympathised in his ultra opinions and combustive action. She remained for two weeks in that dreadful place, made flannel cartridge-bags, slept in a rough log shanty on a shelf covered with straw, where the walls were poor protection from wet and cold and but a thin partition from the unholy clamour of the desperate crowd about her, and tried to inspire her husband and his followers by an example of courage and freedom from fear. Then ill-health obliged her to leave, and when accompanying her to the house of a friend in Buffalo Mackenzie was arrested for breach of the neutrality laws. Scylla and Charybdis, the devil and the deep sea, a dilemma with the orthodox number of horns, lose all strength as similes at this point of the small hero’s career.
The devotion of Mackenzie’s mother, like that of most mothers, begins at the date of his birth. She was her husband’s senior by nineteen years and old for a first experience of motherhood. The husband’s death followed soon after, and then came the vows which her Church prescribed for the orphaned infant’s baptism, a struggle with misfortune, and a determination to keep a roof over their two heads. Strange to say, both grandparents were Mackenzies,—one Black Colin, or Colin Dhu—and both Loyalists who fought for the Stuarts.
In 1801 there was a grievous famine, and one of the earliest memories of “the bright boy with yellow hair—wearing a blue short coat with yellow buttons,” is that of his mother taking the chief treasure of her kist, a plaid of her own clan tartan and spun with her own hands when a girl, to sell for bread. As he lay in his bed and watched her take it out—not with tears we may be sure, Mrs. Mackenzie was no crying woman—did this earnest of future days of want and care shadow the equally heroic spirit of the child. The priest-grey coat of his father had to follow. “Well may I love the poor, greatly may I esteem the humble and the lowly, for poverty and adversity were my nurses, and in my youth were want and misery my familiar friends,” he wrote later. Divine worship was held in that family of two, and it was a daily prayer that the rightful monarch might be set upon the throne, with the saving clause—prophetic glimpses of a Family Compact—that he might have able and wise counsellers, added.