Recollections of the War of 1812

by William Dunlop

"The fishermen that walked upon the beach Appeared like mice."

This immediately gave me a notion of the height I was perched upon; a sense of sickness and giddiness came over me, and, like Edgar, I prudently resolved—

"I'll look no more, Lest the brain turn, and the deficient sight Topple down headlong."

But I did not make my retreat in a manner quite so dignified as could have been wished, for in coming down the bank I had unslung my sword, and was carrying it in my hand; it I pitched backwards over my head, and throwing myself first on the broad of my back, I rolled over half a dozen times, till I thought myself a sufficient distance from the verge of the precipice to get upon my legs, and it will easily be believed I was in no hurry to return to my former position.

I then set on foot a series of experiments to ascertain the width of the Falls, by throwing stones across, but by some extraordinary fatality they seemed to drop from my hand into the enormous cauldron that boiled and smoked below. Next day I came armed with an Indian bow, but the arrows met with no greater success than the stones—they, too, dropt as if impelled by a child's force; and it was not till after I looked at the Falls in every aspect that I convinced myself that they were such a stupendous work of nature as they really are. The fact is, there is nothing at hand to compare them with, and a man must see them often, and from every different point of view, to have any proper conception of the nature of them. I never heard of any one except Mrs. Boyle Corbett who was satisfied with seeing the Falls from her bed-room window while dressing for dinner; but I have often been amused, while staying at the hotel there, to see a succession of respectable people come from Buffalo to Chippawa by steam, take the stage that stops an hour at the Falls, dine, and see them, and start for Queenston, quite convinced that they had seen everything worth seeing in the neighborhood. Getting tired of the inactive life I was leading, I applied to get into the field, and it luckily so happened that another medical man had as great a desire to quit it as I to get into it; accordingly, an exchange was soon agreed upon—he being duly installed in the Chippawa hospital, and I receiving the route to join the Army before Fort Erie.

The leaguer before Fort Erie had been always called the "Camp," and I certainly expected that, like other camps, it would have been provided with tents; but in this I was mistaken. It was rather a bivouac than a camp, the troops sheltering themselves under some branches of trees that only collected the scattered drops of rain, and sent them down in a stream on the heads of the inhabitants, and as it rained incessantly for two months, neither clothes nor bedding could be kept dry. I, though a young soldier, showed myself an old one, for my friend Tom F—— having rather a better hut than his neighbors, I took up my quarters there, and his bed being raised on forked sticks, I placed my own under it, so that the rain had to penetrate through his bed clothes and mattress before it could reach me.

This arrangement did admirably for some time, till one night we were visited by the most tremendous thunder storm I ever witnessed in this or any other country, and accompanied with a deluge of rain, that might have done credit to Noah's flood. The hut was very soon swimming, and I was awoke by my bed being overflowed, and started up to get out, but the water that flooded the floor softened the earth in which the forked sticks that supported Tom's bed were driven, and it falling forward jammed me in among the wet bed clothes, where I was nearly drowned, till Tom starting to his feet allowed me to raise the wreck and crawl on all-fours from under it.

I may here remark what has always struck me as a great deficiency in the military education of the British Army—they are too much taken care of by their officers, and never taught to take care of themselves. In quarters their every motion is under the surveillance of their officers—the Captain and Subaltern of the day visit them each twice a day, and the Commanding Officer and one or other of the Majors frequently, to say nothing of the Surgeon and the Captain of their Company, who, if he (as sometimes happens) is a man possessed of a spirit of fidgetty zeal for the service, actually harasses them to death by his kind attention to their wants.

It must be certified that their room is duly swept and cleaned, their bedding regularly made up and folded, their meals properly dressed, and it is not even left to their own discretion to eat them when dressed, but an officer must see and certify that fact.

Their shaving, their ablutions, their cleaning their shoes and clothes, all come under the same strict supervision, so that at last they get into the notion that their comfort, cleanliness, feeding and clothing, all are the duty and business of their officers, they having no interest in the matter, and that what they are not ordered to do for their own relief they may leave undone. In the sister service this is not so. A sailor will mend his clothes, will leave his hammock properly fitted, his bedding properly made, and his comforts so far as depends upon himself, properly cared for, whether his officers order it or not. The result of all this excessive care and attention is that you make men mere children. When the soldier leaves his clean comfortable barracks in England and is put into the field, where he has few or none of the accommodations he had at home, he is utterly helpless, and his officer on whom he leant, is just as helpless when a new state of things arises, as he can possibly be. All this was most fully illustrated before Fort Erie. The line might nearly as well have slept in the open air. The incorporated Militia, on the contrary, erected shanties, far superior, in warmth, tightness and comfort, to any canvas tent. De Watteville's regiment, which was recruited, chiefly from the prison hulks, consisted of all the nations of Europe, but all of them had served in the armies of Napoleon, and all of them had there learned how to make the best of a bad bargain. These, though they had not the skill in the axe inherent in their brethren of the Militia, took down hemlock boughs (a species of the pine, "pinus canadensis,") and cutting off the tails of them, made thatched wigwams, perfectly weatherproof; and though they could not equal the Canadian Militia in woodcraft, they greatly excelled them in gastronomic lore; and thus, while our fellows had no better shift than to frizzle their rations of salt provisions on the ends of their ramrods, these being practical botanists, sent out one soldier from each mess, who gathered a haversack full of wild pot herbs, with which and a little flour their ration was converted into a capital kettle of soup.