Legendary Tales of the Highlands (Volume 3 of 3) / A sequel to Highland Rambles

by Sir Thomas Dick Lauder

With these words the General left them, and the columns moved on through the wood, in the order he had signified to them. They had now possessed themselves of better guides, and they were thus enabled to make their march more direct, and as they had already cleared their front of enemies, the leading troops were soon up at the entrenchments. Here they were surprised to find a regular breast work, nine or ten feet high, strongly defended with wall-pieces, and having a very impregnable chevaux de frise, whilst the whole ground in front was every where strewed thickly over with huge newly felled oak trees, for the distance of about a cannon-shot from the walls. From behind the chevaux de frise, the enemy, in strong force, commenced a most galling and destructive fire upon the assailants, so as to render the works almost unapproachable, without certain destruction, especially without the artillery, which, from some accident, had not as yet been brought up. But the very danger they had to encounter seemed to give the British troops a more than human courage. Regardless of the hail-storm of bullets discharged on them, with deliberate aim, from behind the abattis, whilst they were fighting their laborious and painful way through the labyrinth of fallen trunks and branches that opposed their passage, they continued, column after column, to advance, dropping and thinning fearfully as they went.

The Highlanders beheld this slaughter that the enemy was making of their friends—their blood boiled within them. In vain Colonel Grant and Major Campbell galloped backwards and forwards, along the line, using every command and every argument that official authority or reason could employ to restrain and to sooth them, till their time for action should arrive. With one tremendous shout, they rushed forward from the reserve, and cutting their way through the trees with their claymores, they were soon shewing their plumed crests among the very foremost ranks of the assailants. But so murderous was the fire that fell upon them, that their black tufted bonnets were seen dropping in all directions, never to be again raised by the brave heads that bore them. Their loss, before they gained the outward defences of the fort, was fearful; but the onset of those who survived was so overwhelming, that it drove the enemy from these outworks, and compelled them to retreat within the body of the fort itself.

Now came the most dreadful part of this work of death. The garrison, protected by the works of the fort, mowed down the ranks of the besiegers with a yet more certain and unerring aim. Under the false report that these works were as yet incomplete, scaling ladders had been considered as unnecessary. The Highlanders, gnashing their teeth like raging tigers caught in the toils, endeavoured to clamber up the front of them, by rearing themselves on each other’s shoulders, and by digging holes with their swords and bayonets in the face of the intrenchments. Some few succeeded, by such means, in gaining a footing on the top. But it was only to make themselves more conspicuous, and more certain marks for destruction; and they were no sooner seen, than their lifeless bodies, perforated by showers of bullets, were swept down upon their struggling comrades below. By repeated and multiplied exertions of this kind, Captain John Campbell succeeded in forcing his way entirely over the breastwork, at the head of a handful of men; but they also were instantly despatched by the multitude of bayonets by which they were assailed. Four hours did these gallant men persevere in the repetition of such daring attempts as I have described—all, alas! with equal want of success, and with increasing slaughter, till General Abercromby ordered the retreat to be sounded. To this call, however, the Highlanders were deaf; and it was not until Colonel Grant, after receiving three successive orders from the General, which he had failed in enforcing, threw himself among them, and literally drove them back from the works with his sword, that he could collect and bring away the small moiety that yet remained alive, of that splendid regiment with which he had marched to the attack. More than one-half of the men, and two-thirds of the officers, were lying killed or wounded on that bloody field.

Colonel Grant had hardly gathered this remnant of his men together, when he hastened back over the ground where the contest had raged, to search eagerly for some of those whom he most dearly loved, and for the cause of whose absence from this hasty muster he trembled to inquire or investigate. The enemy, though victorious, had been too roughly handled to be tempted to a sally, for the mere purpose of annoying those who were peacefully engaged in the sad duty of carrying off their wounded or dying comrades. The Colonel was therefore enabled to make his way over the encumbered field without molestation, and with no other interruption than that which was presented to him by the prostrate trees, which, however, seemed to him to offer greater obstruction to his present impatience, than they had done during his advance with his corps to the attack. The scene was strangely terrible! It might have been imagined by any one who looked upon that field, that all Nature, even the elements themselves, had been at strife. Slaughtered, and mutilated, and dying men lay in confused heaps, or scattered singly among the overthrown giants of the forest, those enormous trees which had been so recently rooted in the primeval soil, where they had stood for ages. Colonel Grant looked everywhere anxiously around him. Many were the familiar faces that he recognized, but their features were now so fixed by the last agonizing pang of a violent death, as cruelly, yet certainly, to assure him, that they could never again in this world recognize him. The last spirited words of high and courageous hope, so recently uttered by many of them to him in their anticipation of triumph, still rang in his recollection, and as he tore his eyes away from them, the tears would burst over his manly cheeks as the thought arose in his mind, that words of theirs would never again reach his ears. He moved hurriedly on, endeavouring to suppress his feelings, but every now and then compelled to give way to them, till his attention was absorbingly attracted by descrying the dark form of an Indian, who was seated on his hams, beneath the arched trunk and boughs of a huge felled oak. It was the Eagle Eye.

He sat motionless as a bronze statue, with the drapery of his blanket, hanging in deep folds from his shoulders. His features were grave and still, and apparently devoid of feeling; but his eyes were turned downward, and they were immovably fixed on the countenance of a young man, who lay stretched out a corpse before him. His head was supported between the knees of the red man, whilst the cold and stiffened fingers of him who was dead, were firmly clasped between both his hands. The body was that of young Donald Campbell of Inverawe.

“God help me!” cried the Colonel, clasping his hands, and weeping bitterly. “God help me, what a spectacle!”

“Why should you weep, old man?” said the Eagle Eye, with imperturbable calmness. “My young brother has gone to the Great Spirit, like a great warrior as he was. Who among his tribe shall be ashamed of him? Who among warriors shall call him a woman? I could weep for him too, did I not know that the Great Spirit has taken him to happiness, from which it were wicked in me to wish to have detained him for my own miserable gratification. But he is happy! He has gone to those fair, boundless, and plentiful hunting-grounds that lie beyond the great lake, where he will never know want, and where we, if our deeds be like his, will surely follow him. But till then, the sunshine of the Eagle Eye has departed, and night must surround his footsteps, since the light of his pale-faced brother has departed!”

“This is too much!” said the Colonel, quite overwhelmed by his feelings. “Help him to bear off the body. It must not be left here.”

The Eagle Eye arose in silence, and gravely and solemnly assisted the Highlander, who attended the Colonel, to lift and bear away the body, and they had not thus proceeded more than a few paces in their retreat from the works, when the weeping eyes of the Highland commanding-officer, and the eagle gaze of the red warrior, were equally arrested, at the same moment, by one and the same object. This was the manly and heroic form of Major Campbell of Inverawe. He sat on the ground, desperately wounded, with his back partially supported against the body of his horse, which had been killed under him. His eye-balls were stretched from their sockets, and fixed upon vacancy, with an expression of terror, greater than that with which death himself, riding triumphant as he was over that field of the slain, could have filled those of so brave a man. Colonel Grant was so overcome, that he could not utter a word. He was convulsed by his emotions. The Eagle Eye laid down the body of Donald opposite to his father, and silently resumed his former position, with the youth’s head between his knees. The father’s eyes caught the motionless features of his son, and he started from his strange state of abstraction.

“My son!” murmured the wounded Inverawe. “So, it is as I supposed,—he is gone! But I shall soon be with you, boy. God in his mercy help and protect your poor mother!”