Patum Peperium

Lexington

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The Poet's Coroner

Mr. Peperium

 

 

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“…which party fired first, I cannot exactly say…” 

 

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“We got all over the bay and landed on the oposite shore betwixt twelve and one OClock and was on our March by one, which was at first through some swamps and slips of the Sea till we got into the Road leading to Lexington soon after which the Country people begun to fire their alarm guns light their Beacons, to raise the Country. . . . To the best of my recollection about 4 oClock in the morning being the 19th of April the 5 front Compys. was ordered to Load which we did.”  

--Ens. Jeremy Lister, 10th Regiment

“I, John Robbins, being of lawful Age, do Testifye and say, that on the Nineteenth Instant, the Company under the Command of Captain John Parker, being drawn up (sometime before sun Rise) on the Green or Common, and I being in the front Rank, there suddenly appear'd a Number of the Kings Troops, about a Thousand, as I thought, at the distance of about 60 or 70 yards from us Huzzaing, and on a quick pace towards us, with three Officers in their front on Horse Back, and on full Gallop towards us, the foremost of which cryed, throw down your Arms ye Villains, ye Rebels! upon which said Company Dispersing, the foremost of the three Officers order'd their Men, saying, fire, by God, fire! at which Moment we received a very heavy and close fire from them, at which Instant, being wounded, I fell, and several of our men were shot Dead by one volley. Captain Parker's men I believe had not then fired a Gun. And further the Deponent saith not.”

--John Robbins, Lexington Militia

“At 2 o’clock we began our march by wading through a very long ford up to the middles; after going a few miles we took three or four people who were going off to give intelligence; about five miles on this side of a town called Lexington, which lay in our road, we heard there were some hundreds of people collected together intending to oppose us and stop our going on; at 5 o’clock we arrived there, and saw a number of people, I believe between 200 and 300, formed in a common in the middle of town; we still continued advancing, keeping prepared against an attack through without intending to attack them; but on our coming near them they fired on us two shots, upon which our men without any orders, rushed upon them, fired and put them to flight; several of them were killed, we could not tell how many, because they were behind walls and into the woods. We had a man of the 10th light Infantry wounded, nobody else was hurt. We then formed on the Common, but with some difficulty, the men were so wild they could hear no orders; we waited a considerable time there, and at length proceeded our way to Concord.”

--Lt. John Barker, 4th Regiment

“I went into the tavern, and, after a while, went to sleep in my chair by the fire. In a short time after, the drum beat, and I ran out to the common, where the militia was parading. The captain ordered them to fall in. I then fell in. ’Twas all in the utmost haste. The British troops were then coming on in full sight. I had no musket, having sent it home, the night previous, by my brother, before I started for Concord; and, reflecting I was of no use, I stepped out again from the company about two rods, and was gazing at the British, coming on in full career. Several mounted British officers were forward; I think, five. The commander rode up, with his pistol in his hand, on a canter, the others following, to about eight or ten rods from the company, perhaps nearer, and ordered them to disperse. The words he used were harsh. I cannot remember them exactly. He then said, ‘Fire!’ and he fired his own pistol, and the other officers soon fired, and with that the main body came up and fired, but did not take sight. They loaded again as soon as possible. All was smoke when the foot fired. I heard no particular orders after what the commander first said. I looked, and, seeing nobody fall, thought to be sure they couldn’t be firing balls, and I didn’t move off. After our militia had dispersed, I saw them firing at one man, Solomon Brown, who was stationed behind a wall. I saw the wall smoke with the bullets hitting it. I then knew they were firing balls.”

--Elijah Sanderson in 1824

“I, Edward Thornton Gould, of his Majesty's own Regiment of Foot, being of lawful Age, do testify and declare, that on the Evening of the 18th. Instant, under the Orders of General Gage, I embarked with the Light infantry and Grenadiers of the Line, commanded by Colonel Smith, and landed on the Marshes of Cambridge, from whence we proceeded to Lexington; On our arrival at that place, we saw a Body of provincial Troops armed, to the Number of about sixty or seventy Men; on our Approach, they dispersed, and soon after firing began, but which party fired first, I cannot exactly say, as our Troops rush'd on shouting, and huzzaing, previous to the firing, which was continued by our Troops, so long as any of the provincials were to be seen. From thence we marched to Concord. . . . I myself was wounded at the Attack of the Bridge, and am now treated with the greatest Humanity, and taken all possible Care of by the provincials at Medford.”

--Lt Edward Thoroton Gould, 4th Regiment

 “Last Tuesday Night the grenadier and Light Companies belonging to the several Regiments in the Town were ferried in Long boats from the bottom of the Common over to Phip’s Farm in Cambridge, from whence they proceeded on their way to Concord where they arrived early yesterday. The first Brigade commanded by Lord Percy with two pieces of Artillery set off from here Yesterday Morning at Ten o’clock as a Re-enforcement, which with the Grenadiers and Light companies made about Eighteen Hundred Men. Upon the people’s having notice of this Movement of Tuesday night alarm guns were fired through the country and Expresses sent off to the different Towns so that very early yesterday morning large numbers were assembled from all parts of the Country. A general Battle ensued which, from what we can learn, was supported with great Spirit upon both Sides and continued until the King’s troops retreated to Charlestown, which was after sunset. Numbers are killed and wounded on both sides. The reports concerning this unhappy Affair and the Causes that concurred to bring on an Engagement are so various that we are not able to collect anything consistent or regular and cannot therefore with certainty give our readers any further Account of this shocking Introduction to all the Miseries of Civil War.”--The Boston News-Letter, 20 April 1775

“I have now nothing to trouble your Lordship with, but of an Affair that happened here on the 19th Instant. I having intelligence of a large quantity of Military Stores, being collected at Concord, for the avowed purpose, of Supplying a Body of Troops, to act in Opposition to his Majesty’s Government; I gott the Grenadiers, and Light Infantry out of Town, under the Command of Lieut. Colonel Smith of the 10th Regiment, and Major Pitcairn of the Marines, with as much Secrecy as possible, on the 18th at night; and with Orders to destroy the said Military Stores, and Supported them the next Morning, by Eight Companies of the 4th the same number of the 23d 47th and Marines Under the Command of Lord Percy. It Appears from the firing of Alarm Guns and Ringing of Bells, that the March of Lieut Coll. Smith was discovered, and he was Opposed, by a Body of Men, within Six Miles of Concord: Some few of whom first began to fire upon his Advanced Companys, which brought on a fire from the Troops, that dispersed the Body opposed to them, and they proceeded to Concord, where they destroyed all the Military Stores they could find. . . . The whole Country was Assembled in Arms with Surprizing expedition, and Several Thousand are now Assembled about this Town, threatning an Attack; and getting up Artillery; and we are now very busy making preparations to Oppose them.”

--Gen. Thomas Gage, 22 April 1775

 

“Lieutenant Nunn, of the Navy, arrived this morning at Lord Dartmouth’s and brought letters from General Gage, Lord Percy and Lieutenant-Colonel Smith, containing the following particulars of what passed on the nineteenth of April between a detachment of the King’s troops in the Province of Massachusetts Bay and several parties of rebel provincials. . . . Lieutenant-Colonel Smith finding, after he had advanced some miles on his march, that the country had been alarmed by firing of guns and ringing of bells, dispatched six companies of light infantry, in order to secure two bridges on different roads beyond Concord, who, upon their arrival at Lexington, found a body of the country people under arms, on a green close to the road; and upon the King’s troops marching upon them, in order to inquire the reason of their being so assembled, they went off in great confusion, and several guns were fired upon the King’s troops from behind a stone wall, and also from the meeting house and other houses, by which one man was wounded, and Major Pitcairn’s horse was shot in two places. In consequence of this attack by the rebels, the troops returned the fire and killed several of them. After which, the detachment marched on to Concord without any further happening.”

 --The London Gazette, 10 June 1775

 

 

 

“To the inhabitants of Great Britain:

“Friends and fellow subjects: Hostilities are at length commenced in the Colony by the troops under command of General Gage; and it being of the greatest importance that an early, true and authentic account of this inhuman proceeding should be known to you, the Congress of this Colony have transmitted the same. . . .

By the clearest depositions relative to the transaction, it will appear that on the night proceeding the nineteenth of April instant…the Town of Lexington…was alarmed, and a company of the inhabitants mustered on the occasion; that the Regular troops, on their way to Concord, marched into the said town of Lexington, and the said company, on their approach, began to disperse; that notwithstanding this, the regulars rushed on with great violence and first began hostilities by firing on said Lexington Company, whereby they killed eight and wounded several others; that the regulars continued their fire until those of said company, who were neither killed nor wounded, had made their escape.

These, brethren, are the marks of ministerial vengeance against this colony, for refusing, with her sister colonies, a submission to slavery. But they have not yet detached us from our Royal Sovereign. We profess to be his loyal and dutiful subjects, and so hardly dealt with as we have been, are still ready, with our lives and fortunes, to defend his person, family, crown and dignity. Nevertheless, to the persecution of tyranny of his cruel ministry we will not tamely submit; appealing to Heaven for the justice of our cause, we determine to die or be free.” --Provincial Congress, 26 April 1775

 

 

 

Three Strikes.

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Poet's Coroner

Mr. Peperium

 

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The St. Louis public library is a wondrous thing. With only two exceptions so far, books I run across in my rambles at Amazon.com are in the library’s online catalog, ready to be reserved with a click and picked up a few days later. This gives me two distinct advantages over all you history geeks who are less happily located. First, for my 1% city earnings tax I get access to the very best new stuff (and overdue fines in this burg are almost non-existent). Second, I avoid paying top dollar for those regrettable works, the fist six pages of which read so deceptively well on Amazon.com.

Unfortunately, I failed to peruse the first six pages of T. H. Breen’s The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence. Yes, I know, I should have known better. The title alone is redolent of the rarified atmosphere of the faculty lounge. But my recent reading has helped me understand more deeply just how important economics was—not just taxes but trade, industry, agriculture, the whole shebang—in driving the colonies to their break with England. Charles McLean Andrews’s essays, collected and published under the title The Colonial Background of the American Revolution, make a very good case for that break happening in large part because, after 1763, the thirteen plantations that were part of Britain’s mercantilist system suddenly became thirteen colonies in a worldwide British Empire. So when, based on my past searches, Amazon.com burped up Marketplace of Revolution, I figured it was worth a walk at lunchtime to the Central Express branch.

At least I can take comfort in the fact that the walk did me some good. Like someone you’re meeting for the first time, a new book gives off definite signs. Is this is the start of a beautiful friendship, or just one of those awkward acquaintanceships that make you double-check Caller ID before picking up? In the case of Marketplace of Revolution, the signs were bad from the beginning.

And when I say “from the beginning” I really mean “even before the beginning”. In the first paragraph of the Introduction, we’re told of a gallery in the basement of a former 19^th Century hospital at Williamsburg, Virginia. It houses a collection of 18^th Century British manufactured goods that were imported into the colonies. According to Breen, “These are not the things that usually draw modern visitors to Williamsburg. Such people seem to prefer spending their time among the craftsmen who tell them how a revolutionary generation made various household items such as furniture and candles. Perhaps these products strike tourists as more authentic, or as more American, than do the imported articles displayed in the Wallace Gallery.”

Is it just me, or do you get the same aroma of condescension that hit my mental nostrils? There is a world of loathing compressed into that “Such people”. “[S]eem to prefer” drips with an almost aristocratic disdain for the common herd and our fathomless idiocies. And as for “more authentic…more American” he may as well come right out, call us Bitter Clingers and be done with it.

Actually, the “tourists” he belittles are normal, everyday people trying to give their kids and themselves a glimpse of their nation’s past. If the emphasis of the exhibits is wrong, if the truly illuminating artifacts are hidden in a basement, isn’t that the fault of the folks who run Colonial Williamsburg?

Strike One.

On the next page of the Introduction (yes, we’re still lingering on the veranda of this intellectual house of horrors) we encounter a teapot. Round, with a handle and spout that seem to have been modeled to resemble tree branches, its side proclaims in large letters, “No Stamp Act”. You remember. It’s in dozens of books on our Revolution. What I didn’t know (and, to be fair, I now do know thanks to Professor Breen) is that this teapot was manufactured in England. Yes, some canny entrepreneur saw the unrest across the sea and, since the automobile was still some 150 years in the future, made the next best thing to a bumper sticker. I sincerely hope he cleaned up big. (And the irony of an anti-Stamp Act slogan on a teapot is just too, well, ironic.

Unfortunately, the pleasure of this discovery is quickly overshadowed by Professor Breen’s need to show us he’s one of the Elect. This teapot, he intones, reminds “those who reflect on such matters today that common goods once spoke to power.”

This is a double whammy, and should really count for two strikes. After all, here again we are treated to the towering contempt of the More Aware and Highly Educated. Professor Breen (and, by extension, you the reader) are clearly in that rarified class, that exclusive club that spends its time thinking about the stuff that matters. It’s the NPR effect in printed form. Then we have “speaking truth to power”, a phrase I last heard when Whoopi Goldberg and a bunch of other Hollywood elites gathered to show how courageous they were by bashing President Bush and then taking off in limos for their gated mansions. (Talk about common goods speaking to power…)

Strike Two.

And in case you think I’m being overly sensitive, here’s the windup for the final pitch.

In section One of the Introduction (yes, until now we were still in the preamble to the Introduction) Breen begins to opine about what the Revolution can teach us. One lesson is aimed at, “a current generation which seems uncertain of its ability to construct meaningful political solidarities.” From the Revolutionary generation, according to Breen, this misguided generation can “learn something valuable about overcoming the divisions that compromise our own ability to cooperate effectively for the general political welfare, however defined.”

Ok, let’s unpack this.

First, political solidarities, if constructed, are by definition artificial. They are theoretical models. Paper palaces. Utopias. They are…the product of faculty lounges. Real, workaday people recognizing and following their own best interests—that is the spontaneous brick and mortar of any real political solidarity. One example is, of course, (are you sitting down, professor?) the Tea Party. But I’m betting that’s not the type of solidarity of which he approves, let alone recognizes.

Then we encounter another predictable, shopworn gambit: handwringing about people not getting along. We need to “overcome divisions” and “cooperate effectively”, all for the “general political welfare”. Then comes the really disingenuous part: “however defined”.

Memo to Professor Breen: it is by debating the general political welfare that that welfare is defined—and in that process divisions naturally, inevitably arise. Without those divisions we are either in Paradise (which I doubt) or a Worker’s Paradise (which I fear). I’m sure you have your definition of the general welfare and I’m pretty certain it doesn’t tally with mine. After all, you’re using the same mendacious rhetoric I heard in the Episcopal Church and still hear from the Democratic Party whenever they want to push an agenda no one really wants (“Can’t we all just get along?”). There is no “however” to your definition of the way things should be. Nor is there for mine. As our current president was once so fond of lecturing us, that’s why we have elections.

Strike Three.

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...And then the wheels came off completely.

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Poet's Coroner

Mr. Peperium

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It’s an occupational hazard of biographers. Either they fall out of sympathy with their subject or, more commonly, they become abjectly enthralled. Some years ago Geoffrey Perrett made the second mistake in his study of Ulysses Grant, claiming not that Grant ranked as one of the most outstanding persons of the 19^th Century, but as that century’s single most outstanding person.

By the last fifty-odd pages of War on the Run, Ross falls into a similar error. It is 1776. Robert Rogers has failed to be reimbursed for his expenses during the late war with the French and Indians—largely through the perfidy of jealous superiors and his own bungled bookkeeping. His plans to discover the Northwest Passage have run aground—first for lack of funds (those jealous superiors again), then from lack of interest as the colonies step every closer to independence. His marriage is over. He has been jailed for debt more than once. In the meantime, Rogers has evaded attempts by Patriots and Loyalists to pin him down on exactly where he stands. Of course, just being a half-pay British officer footloose in America would be bad enough. Applying to the royal governor of New York about land grants as that gentleman conducted business from the safety of one of His Majesty’s warships in New York harbor was even more misguided.

Now Rogers has been hauled in on suspicion of espionage. As he strides into the room where General George Washington awaits him, Ross is on the sidelines giving his play-by-play…long before the action has even started.

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The seeds of mutual distrust lay deep: the coastal elites had never accepted the ever prickly Scots-Irishman, often changing the rules and laws right under Rogers’s feet. Washington was involved in a revolution largely controlled by people of his own background, who justified their assertion of leadership by producing Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Patrick Henry; their class would have come far short of filling an urban high school auditorium. To him the nascent democratic populism that would evolve fully flowered with Andrew Jackson and rail against the self-satisfied landed class was deeply unsettling. Washington, who had a great deal to lose to the rabble of the frontier, adopted, for reasons similar to those of the British officer class, a deep disdain for the unheeled immigrants who did not dream of playing by his rules and hacked out a hard livelihood on the colonies’ brutal fringes. Rogers, by contrast, embodied frontier talent and insight and was less dissmissable and much more frightening than mere muscled axe-wielding oafishness; so far from being one more face in the rabble crowd, he was a man capable of weaving unconstructive frontier individualism into formidable formations, a chilly portent to the saltwater quality who thought that it monopolized higher authority and powers of government.

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Ok, let’s all take a breath.

Better?

Good. Now we can proceed. First, I always get suspicious when encountering a slab of analysis this dense with no visible signs of documentation. Where are the quotes from letters and diary entries supporting these statements? There is too much projection going on here, too much seeing what the author wants to see.

How do we know George Washington feared the rabble? I know he looked down on New England soldiers early on in the war, but the embarrassment of having those sentiments accidentally made public, coupled with witnessing New England grit in the field, cured him (heck, his right hand man throughout the war was Nathanial Greene, son of a solid Yankee ironmonger). The populist tide of Jacksonian Democracy—indeed the tide of democracy in any form—was hardly discernable to the men who, eleven years hence, would meet to draft the Constitution. And besides, any segment of society that can produce a Washington, a Jefferson, a Madison and a Henry (not to mention an Adams and a Hamilton) all in about the same generation have a pretty solid claim to a place at the table of power. At this point in the story (page 431), Rogers’s misfortunes have overcome not just Rogers but Ross, and the biographer can’t help seeing the encounter with Washington as just one more raw deal foisted on a noble if unpolished paragon of the American interior.

If Washington feared Rogers, it wasn’t as a harbinger of future Jacksonian Mobocracy, but as a gifted partisan leader whose talents could do the Patriot cause untold damage then and there, on the battlefield as well as in the press and public opinion. His bold exploits had, after all, helped prop up sagging British moral—and excited sheer terror among the French and Indians—in the long years of Anglo-Colonial defeat before 1759.

To deepen the supposed divide between Washington and Rogers, Ross quotes Andrew Johnson, who called the Commander in Chief an “old English gentleman” (achi-machi, who made Andrew Johnson an authority on colonial history?) But actually, Washington and Rogers had far more in common than Ross admits. Like Rogers, Washington’s formal education was painfully slender, a fact that made him uneasy all his life, especially when around the Jeffersons, Madisons and Adamses of the world. Yes, his comment about the charm of bullets whistling, that Ross makes such fun of in another passage, is a sterling example of the nonchalance and bravado that tidewater gentlemen affected. But it was also an honest expression of Washington’s proven physical courage, courage demonstrated on more than one battlefield before and during the Revolution—and another kinship with the legendary ranger. Both men could have swapped stories about perilous wilderness treks. Like Rogers, Washington was keen to develop the potential of America’s rivers and woodlands. And, like Rogers, Washington wanted to do that without undue damage to Indian culture.

The squire of Mount Vernon was a landed proprietor, true, but quite by accident. Had his half-brother lived, George would have been thrown much more upon his own devices—devices that he had been using to excellent effect for years. Unlike Rogers, Washington took care that his exploits were widely known through the medium of his own writings—soon after those exploits were concluded, not years after the peace was signed. Unlike Rogers, Washington translated his wartime fame into a most advantageous match. And unlike Rogers, Washington kept scrupulous accounts of all his expenditures—hence avoiding debtor’s prison.

I could go on, but you get the idea. Ross is the executive editor of American Heritage magazine. I miss Bruce Catton.

 

 

A good book.

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Poet's Coroner

Mr. Peperium

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I was in Europe many years ago with Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway had just written his first novel and Gertrude Stein and I read it and we said it was a good novel but not a great one and it needed some work, but it could be a fine book. And we laughed about it and Hemingway punched me in the mouth.

-Woody Allen, Standup Comic, 1964-1968

 

I want to stop the blog for a moment and pay tribute to the St Louis Public Library.

Whenever Amazon tries to temp me into splurging on the latest new book covering the Colonial, Revolutionary and Young Republic eras of our history, I have no further to go than the St Louis Public Library website. Because I know the book will be there. And I know that, after a short wait (the main branch is undergoing renovation, so reserved books are picked up at a small “express” location), I will be able to judge the new effort myself. All with no financial risk beyond a possible miniscule fine if I don’t watch my due dates.

So when Amazon suggested War on the Run: The Epic Story of Robert Rogers and the Conquest of America’s First Frontier by John F. Ross, reserving a copy was the work of a moment. Rogers and his rangers have been lurking around the edges of my reading for years; a book that put them in the spotlight was just what I had been looking for.

And the story, as promised, is epic. Like Washington, Rogers had to overcome the prejudices of British military establishment. Like Israel Putnam, he grappled with Indians and wild animals. Unlike either, Rogers created an entirely new way of making war that fitted perfectly with the New England wilderness he was born into. Fusing Old World discipline with New World tactics, channeling the chronic individualism and pugnacity of young Scots-Irishmen like himself, Rogers basically invented modern special ops. And he did it in the vast, unforgiving wilderness on either side of the Lake Champlain/Richelieu River corridor that had, by the time he arrived, been a warpath for over a century, aimed directly at the most isolated settlements of Massachusetts, Connecticut and New York.

Rogers’ achievement was to make that warpath run in the opposite direction. The French and Indians had ruled the woods since the 16^th Century. That this alliance proved so enduring should not surprise. Coureurs des bois trapping furs posed far less of a threat to indigenous peoples than sturdy English yeomen clearing forest. The French lived among the Indians, learned their languages and customs, and intermarried. The British grabbed land, fenced off fields and built towns that had a habit of growing into cities. As Ross deftly observes of one French installation, they “built Fort Pontchartrain du Detroit to dominate the river, not the cultures who lived there.” We meet the occasional Englishman like William Johnson who took the French cultural approach. But, as Ross writes, only Rogers emulated his enemy’s tactics. “Throughout the war the only British soldier thinking in the French frame of mind was Rogers, the consummate hunter and lifelong careful student of his prey, whose success lay in providing a mode of warfare that outmatched the other side in its strongest suit.”

So far so good. Ross is the exponent of a way of writing history that I admire very much. Like Noel Mostert, author of A Line Upon the Wind: The Great War at Sea, 1793-1815, who has sailed many if not all the waters he writes about, Ross has a vast knowledge of the geology and topography of the country Rogers marched, sailed, paddled and fought in. He explains in clinical detail the physical and psychological effects of hypothermia and starvation, as well as the stress of combat. Obviously, he was tramped the same trails and camped in the same woods, and he has a gift for making readers feel like they have, too.

And yet somehow, like Woody and Gertrude, I have to say this is a good book. Not a great book. And it needs work. I only hope that, after all that hiking, snowshoeing and mountain climbing, John Ross doesn’t punch me in the mouth.

No, it’s not the predictable elitist guilt over Indians. In fact I was pleasantly surprised that Ross refers to the Ottawa, Iroquois and other nations as “Indians” rather than the more fashionable and cumbersome “Native Americans”. Still, he can’t resist the gratuitous swipe. Discussing a particularly ingenious Indian torture that caused much comment in the newspapers of the day, he writes, “the European mind consistently misinterpreted many Indian acts, missing the complexities of carefully enacted ritual and other behaviors, either misunderstanding or choosing not to comprehend a worldview so remote from their own, a culture whose God sent his son to a torturous death.” Such passages leave us wondering if Ross is misunderstanding or choosing not to comprehend the complexities of his own culture.

But that sort of thing, though predictable, happens far less often than I expected. What really impedes the reader is exemplified in the same passage just quoted above. Read it again. Or perhaps it tripped you up the first time. It certainly did me. That bit about “a culture whose God sent his son to a tortuous death”. Grammatically, doesn’t that phrase refer to the “worldview” of the Indians? Even if it really is grammatically correct, it still sounds, (at least to me) as if it refers to the Indians and not to European culture.

Just to let you know I’m not making this stuff up here’s another example:

Nearly ten miles from Sandusky some Huron sachems and envoys sent by Croghan from Fort Pitt presented themselves…

George Croghan was a deputy superintendant of Indian affairs at Fort Pitt. He had sent envoys ahead of Rogers to prepare a Huron greeting for him at Detroit. Yet the sentence implies that the Huron sachems and the envoys were both sent by Croghan from Fort Pitt—which is not the case. What about a judicious “along with the”, used something like this:

Nearly ten miles from Sandusky some Huron sachems, along with the envoys sent by Croghan from Fort Pitt, presented themselves…

Unfortunately, like exposed tree roots on a forest path, these sorts of glitches interrupt the narrative far too often.

Finally, like jagged millennia-old alluvial rocks hidden cunningly beneath the roiling, storm-tossed visage of some wanton wilderness cataract, crouching, patiently waiting, ready to tear the bottom of the boat out from under the unsuspecting reader, there are Ross’ disconcerting excursions into prose that tends somewhat decidedly to the mauve.

For example.

To aid him in the description of just such a wanton watercourse, Ross quotes what he refers to as “The overwrought words of the nineteenth-century Kingston poet Charles Sanger”:

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Again the troubled deep heaps surge on surge,

And howling billows sweep the water dark,

Stunning the ear with their stentorian dirge,

That loudens as they strike the rocks resisting verge.

 

Perhaps Ross thought he was on solid ground denigrating a nineteenth-century poet. Nineteenth-century-poets, especially North American ones who don’t have the good fortune of being Poe, Dickinson or Whitman, are easy pickings. Their stuff is ipso facto “overwrought” because they’re, well, nineteenth-century. And this one has the added baggage of being, well, Canadian, right?

Actually, the four lines above show a solid technical skill. Internal rhyme, onomatopoeia, a deft trochee that stuns us at the beginning of the third line, and the use of a concluding hexameter to drive home the relentlessness of the water’s thunder, all work effectively. I even like the new coinage, “loudens”. Is the passage energetic? Yes. But then, Sanger is describing something energetic. I suppose to our staid, early 21^st-century tastes, formed in the more rigorous poetic school of Eminem and Snoop Dog, the passage could seem a tad excessive. But what renders Ross’ “overwrought” comment such a cringe-maker is his next observation:

With its immense sweep and the ledges of murderous white water, the St. Lawrence embodied the uncontrollable wildness of the continent of unimaginable proportions.

The reader wants to put his hand on the author’s shoulder and advise him to look after that log in his own eye. In Ross’ effusion it’s hard not to hear a faint echo of Conrad’s “implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention”. Which, of course, makes the whole thing all the more silly.

Still, the story itself propels the book along. And Ross isn’t all bad. He just isn’t all good, either. And I admit I am enjoying the book immensely. And best of all, I’m not out of pocket $30.00 plus tax. Thank you, St. Louis Public Library.

Now, when is that renovation going to be finished?

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Happy Halloween

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Poet's Coroner

Mr. Peperium

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Trafalgar: “England confides that every man will do his duty”

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Poet's Coroner

Mr. Peperium

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When one is writing about the Royal Navy of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries it is difficult to avoid understatement; it is difficult to do justice to one’s subject; for so very often the improbable reality outruns fiction.

 …My point is that the admirable men of those times, the Cochranes, Byrons, Falconers, Seymours, Boscawens and the many less famous sailors from whom I have in some degree compounded my characters, are best celebrated in their own splendid actions rather than imaginary contests; that authenticity is a jewel; and that the echo of their words has an abiding value.

--Patrick O’Brian, Author’s Note to Master and Commander

 

You can always beat a Frenchman if you fight him long enough. The difficulty of getting at them is sometimes more fancy than fact…When in doubt, to fight is always to err on the right side.

--Admiral Sir William Cornwallis

 

Although in terms of gun power the British were inferior—2,148 as opposed to 2,568 for the Combined Fleet—in tactical terms they were certainly at an even greater disadvantage, the Franco-Spanish Fleet boasting an additional six ships of the line (which later greatly enhanced the effectiveness of their cross-fire) not to mention the numerically superior (albeit less well trained) manpower—nearly 30,000 strong compared to Nelson’s force of little over 17,000.

--Alan Schom, Trafalgar: Countdown to Battle

 

It is as Mr. Pitt knows, annihilation that the Country wants—and not merely a splendid victory of twenty-three to thirty-six—honorable to the parties concerned, but absolutely useless to the extended scale, to bring Buonaparte to his marrow-bones…

--Vice Admiral Lord Nelson

 

The French had once been masters of shipboard artillery, but the Revolution had abolished the privileged stature of naval gunners and their mastery had never been recovered. It now firmly belonged to the British. Colligwood made a habit of telling his gunners that if they could fire three well-directed broadsides in five minutes, no vessel could resist them. Practice had enabled them to do that in three and a half minutes.

--Noel Mostert, The Line Upon a Wind

On every deck on every ship in every fleet, gunners, carpenters, topmen, surgeons, marines and soldiers were preparing for the emergencies that might arise, the wounded that would come, the weapons that would be required. Preparation of the magazines and movement of shot and powder to the guns. The laying-out of medical instruments. Decks sanded to prevent slide by the bare feet of the gunners. One of the seamen aboard Santissima Trinidad, obviously a conscript and new to the ship, was to describe his reaction to the preparation for battle that morning. Watching sailors distributing sacks of sand on deck and throughout the lower decks he asked a boy what it was for. ‘“For the blood” he said, very coolly. “For the blood!” I exclaimed, unable to repress a shudder. I looked at the sand—I looked at the men who were busily employed on this task—and for a moment I felt I was a coward.”’

--Noel Mostert, The Line Upon a Wind

 

Nelson toured Victory to view all of his own ship’s activity, addressing the crew at their stations. There was concern for Nelson’s safety among his officers. The surgeon and his two secretaries…intended to plead with Nelson to remove or at least cover the brilliant decorations he wore, to make him less of a target for French marksmen shooting from high in the rigging. …[S]enior captain of his frigates, Henry Blackwood, when called to Victory for a final conference, went even further and suggested that Nelson move his flag to Blackwood’s frigate, Euryalus, to allow better view of the battle and because of the high value of his life to the country. Nelson considered that a poor example to set.

--Noel Mostert, The Line Upon a Wind

 

At eleven thirty Nelson told his flag lieutenant, John Pasco, to prepare a signal to the fleet. Nelson said, ‘You must be quick, for I have one more to make, which is for “Close Action”. I wish to say, “England confides that every man will do his duty”.’

Pasco had the new and far more efficient system of signals. This code had a vocabulary offering many words that could be transmitted with a single flag bearing a number in the vocabulary book. Other words had to be spelled out letter by letter. Nelson’s demand for haste led Pasco to say, ‘If your lordship will permit me to substitute expects for confides the signal will soon be completed, because the word expects is in the vocabulary, and confides must be spelt.’ Nelson was happy with that. ‘That will do, Pasco, make it directly.’ And Pasco hoisted, ‘England expects that every man will do his duty’, greeted by three cheers from every ship.

The action began near simultaneously with the signal…

--Noel Mostert, The Line Upon a Wind

Having reached the enemy line several minutes before Victory did to windward, the usually phlegmatic Collingwood shouted through the din to his captain, ‘Rotheram, what would Nelson give to be here!’…Collingwood immediately found himself in the unenviable situation of being caught up in a heavy enfilade from three directions.

--Alan Schom, Trafalgar: Countdown to Battle

 

As Royal Sovereign bore down upon the two ships that led the rear line of the Combined Fleet, the Santa Ana and the Fougeueux, Collingwood told his sailors to lie down at their quarters, to reduce casualties on the approach. Fougueux fired the first shot from the French line, hoisting her colors as she did so. She closed up with the intention of preventing Royal Sovereign from going through the line but at ten minutes past noon Royal Sovereign broke through the enemy line. She came up to Santa Ana and fired into her, a broadside with the guns double-shotted. It was done with such precision that the slaughter was terrible. That single broadside killed or wounded nearly four hundred of the Spanish ship’s crew. Royal Sovereign then ranged alongside Santa Ana, so close that the guns were nearly muzzle to muzzle. As Fougueux came up, yardarm to yardarm, she, too, took a broadside. ‘I thought the Fougueux was shattered to pieces—pulverized,’ her master-at-arms later said. ‘The storm of projectiles that hurled themselves against and through the hull on the port side made the ship heel to starboard. Most of the sails and rigging on the port side were cut to pieces, while the upper deck was swept clear of the greater number of seamen working there.

 --Noel Mostert, The Line Upon a Wind

 

A man should witness a battle in a three-decker from the middle deck, for…it bewilders the senses of sight and hearing. There was the fire from above, the fire from below…the guns recoiling with violence, reports louder than thunder, the decks heaving and the sides straining. I fancied myself in the infernal regions, where every man appeared a devil.

--Second-Lieutenant Rotely, Royal Marines

 

Nelson all along had wished to make for the French flagship. The wind had died to a ‘mere breath’. But the British did at least have such wind as there was in their favor. Victory was driven onward by riding the swell. She continued to take heavy fire from three ships, Bucentaure, Santissima Trinidad and Redoutable. As she drew near to Bucentaure, Nelson’s wish and intention were to break through the line astern of the flagship and then to ‘run on board’, meaning to pass through the line and come up alongside the flagship on the other side. But Hardy declared that to be impracticable because of a tight cluster of ships beyond. They could pass close under Bucentaure’s stern, Hardy said, but they could not pass through the line without running on board one of the other ships lying close to Bucantaure. Nelson replied, ‘It does not signify which we run on board of. Go on board which you please: take your choice.’ So Victory, her sails riddled or shredded, passed within thirty feet astern Bucentaure. And as Victory did so a carronade on her forecastle fired one round shot and a keg filled with five hundred musket balls right into the stern cabin windows of Bucentaure. Then, as she drew ahead, the full fifty guns of her broadside, double- and even triple-shotted with balls, blasted upon the French flagship.

The barely two minutes of that entire action left Bucentaure in a practically defenseless state. The destruction within the ship was severe, judging by the dense smoke that poured from her, filling Victory’s own interior, threatening to suffocate her crew, and covering those on the quarterdeck with dust from the shattered woodwork of Bucentaure’s stern. Aboard Bucentaure nearly four hundred lay dead or wounded. This was at one p.m.

--Noel Mostert, The Line Upon a Wind

 

If anyone will picture to himself the destructive effects to be expected from a mass of iron, whose total weight sometimes exceeds 3000 lbs., driven through space with a velocity double that of sound, travelling 1600 feet a second, and suddenly arrested in its course by a penetrable substance which tears and flies into splinters more fatally than the shot itself, he will understand the formidable power of a line-of-battle ship’s first broadside. Instead of frittering away this irresistible force as we used to do then, in the hope of cutting some ropes…or for the mere chance of destroying some important rigging or wounding a mast, the English better taught, concentrated it upon a more certain object, the enemy’s batteries. They heaped our decks with slain while our shot passed over their ships.

--Julien de la Graviere

 

Admiral Lord Nelson had had his ‘pell-mell battle’—as, ironically, both he and Villeneuve had referred to it quite independently—and indeed his war of annihilation, resulting in the greatest British naval victory in history. The French and Spanish, though fighting with undaunted bravery and tenacity, suffered a shattering defeat, destroying French naval morale for decades to come. ‘So much courage and devotion’, Villeneuve afterwards lamented, ‘deserved a better fate.’

--Alan Schom, Trafalgar: Countdown to Battle

[As the smoke cleared away, the storm heralded by the day’s heavy swell finally broke. Battle-shattered Royal Navy vessels struggled to evacuate as many men as possible from foundering French and Spanish ships.]

Haste produced hard decision. A seaman from revenge recounted one painful scene:

A father and son came down the ship’s side to get on board one of our boats. The father had seated himself, but the men in the boat, thinking from the load and the boisterous weather that all their lives would be in peril, could not think of taking the boy. As the boat put off the lad sprang from the ship into the sea and caught hold of the gunwale of the boat, but his attempt was resisted, as it risked al their lives; and some of the men resorted to their cutlasses to cut his fingers off in order to disentangle the boat from his grasp. At the same time the feelings of the father were so worked upon that he was about to leap overboard and perish with his son. Britons could face an enemy but could not witness such a scene of self-devotion: as it were a simultaneous thought burst forth from the crew, which said, ‘Let us save both father and son or die in the attempt.’

The pair were eventually landed at Gibraltar and exchanged with other prisoners. Another British rescue was the ship’s cat, which ran out on the muzzle of one of the lower-deck guns and was plucked off by a British seaman.

--Noel Mostert, The Line Upon a Wind

[Lest anyone suspect the above is merely sentimental, Mostert goes to great lengths to establish the substance behind the heroic, generous image of the British seaman.]

Beyond the tone of evangelical urgency…the portrait of the late-eighteenth-century British sailor that emerges is a fine one of an individual bound by his own distinctive values. Those, formed by the worst and the best in his seagoing life, raised him to his own special niche. One can see him, as a hardy, easy-going type, simple in manner and outlook, equipped with a buoyant spirit that determined his survival. All of that is true enough. Being mostly illiterate, he left few individual accounts of what drove him and his fellows, but there is plenty available from the sources that surrounded him. From all of it we can see that the worst of what he endured yielded much of the best in him.

 --Noel Mostert, The Line Upon a Wind

 

All the men in our ship [the Victory] who have seen him [Nelson] are such soft toads they have done nothing but blast their eyes and cry ever since he was killed.

--British Seaman

 

Napoleon was, without a doubt, one of the greatest military geniuses of all time, but he was also one of the greatest liars, exceeded only by Stalin and Hitler. On the morning of 7^th December, the semi-official government newspaper, Journal de Paris, informed the French people that a great naval battle had taken place off Trafalgar on 19^th (not the 21^st) October, a stupendous battle in which thirty-three British ships, it said, faced the Combined Fleet, including fifteen British ships that were not in fact present that day and another three which did not even exist. The Franco-Spanish Fleet, it continued, had won a spectacular victory resulting in nineteen British ships either having been sunk, burned, wrecked on the rocks or so mauled by gunfire as to be rendered useless…’This report attests brilliantly to the worth of the French Fleet,’ the Parisian paper concluded, though failing to explain why twenty-three battleships of the Combined fleet had suddenly disappeared, and why the French Government refused to celebrate such a splendid victory.

 --Alan Schom, Trafalgar: Countdown to Battle

 

Pitt had the news at three a.m. [November 6^th]. A colleague later described the Prime Minister’s reaction. ‘He observed that he had been called upon at various hours in his eventful life by the arrival of news of various hues; but whether good or bad, he could always lay his head on his pillow and sink into sound sleep again. On this occasion, however, the great event announced brought with it so much to weep over as well as to rejoice at, that he could not calm his thoughts; but at length got up, though it was three in the morning.’

Three days later Pitt attended the Lord Mayor’s Day at Guildhall, where the Lord Mayor proposed his health as ‘the Saviour of Europe’. Pitt rose and said, ‘I return you many thanks for the honour you have done me; but Europe is not to be saved by any single man. England has saved herself by her own exertions, and will, I trust, save Europe by her example.’ He sat down.

‘That was all; he was scarcely up two minutes; yet nothing could be more perfect,’ said Arthur Wellesley, who was present.

--Noel Mostert, The Line Upon a Wind

.

Obama and Pelosi Girl

..

Poet's Coroner

Mr. Peperium

 

(Set to The Walrus and The Carpenter)

 The polls were sinking rapidly,

The country moving Right;

The Press reported all was well

And tried to keep things light—

And this was scarcely odd because

In fact they weren’t that bright.

 

The Libs were pouting sulkily

Because they could not take

The Hope/Change bumper stickers off

Their Beemers. “It would make

The people think we thought we’d made

Some horrible mistake!”

 

The Gulf was oily as could be,

The rigs were all shut down

You could not see a fishing boat

Because none were around

(Because the hole had not been plugged

So no fish could be found).

 

Obama and Pelosi Girl

Were walking hand in hand

They wept like anything to see

A mess they hadn’t planned.

“If people blamed this all on Bush”

They said, “we’d understand.”

 

“If Cap and Trade were passed today

Like Health Care was rammed through,

Do you suppose,” Obama said,

“For us the polls would skew?”

Pelosi Girl said nothing but,

“I blame this all on you.”

 

“O Wackos, come and walk with us!”

Obama did beseech.

“A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk,

On BP’s sludgy beach;

Now where’s my teleprompter gone?

I’m going to make a speech.”

 

The older Wackos looked at him,

“Close Gitmo” ’s all they said.

The older Wackos painted signs:

“Kill Bush” is how they read.

The eldest Wacko didn’t look

At all ‘cause he was dead.

 

But four young Wackos hurried up,

All eager for the show;

Their carbon credits up to date,

Their thinking rather slow.

And this was odd because they went

To schools with names you know.

 

Four other Wackos hurried up

And then another four

And thick and fast they came at last,

Rich, middle class and poor,

In hopes no one would ever call

Them racists anymore.

 

Obama and Pelosi Girl

Walked on a mile or so

Until they found a talking point

Appropriately low—

And all the little Wackos stood

And waited in a row.

 

 “The time has come” Obama said,

“To ration health care now:

Your mom and dad will get a pill—

Or bullet. We’ll allow

The young and strong, like you, to live

‘Long as you scrape and bow.”

 

“That sounds divine,” the Wackos said,

“That means we’ll get control

Of mum and dad’s estates before

They go and blow their roll.

With grad school, drugs and therapy

We’re kind of in a hole.”

 

“We’re taxing that,” Obama said,

“It’s what our plans require.

And from this moment everyone

Makes so much—nothing higher.

“Well, that sounds fair,” Pelosi said.

“Now no one can retire.”

 

“Not even us?” The Wackos cried,

Turning a little red.

“With all that Hope & Change and stuff

Rushing to our head

We thought you’d redistribute cash

From other guys instead!”

 

Obama said, “Did you not vote

For Hope and Change and stuff?

I doubt that would’ve worked so well

Had you not studied fluff.

But history has never been

Your subject. Man, that’s rough.”

 

“It seems a shame,” Pelosi said,

“To play each one a fool.

To have them all abort their kids

And make nice with Abdul

And question all authority—

Except, of course, our rule.”

 

“I weep for them,” Obama said,

“I’ll set up some relief”

Speaking thickly in between

Two slabs of Kobe beef.

“Another stimulus, perhaps,

Or would that strain belief?”

 

“O Wackos,” cried Pelosi Girl

“We’ve had a pleasant run!

And now it’s time to double down!”

But answer came there none—

And this was scarcely odd because

Republicans had won.

 

...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Monmouth

..

Poet's Coroner

Mr. Peperium

..

 

..

If you remember the battle, this is probably the picture that comes to mind. From the brush of Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze, who also gave us Washington Crossing the Delaware, it presents the orthodox version of what happened under a sweltering New Jersey sun on June 28^th, 1778.

 Surrounded by a wave of retreating, disorganized soldiers, a shame-faced Major General Charles Lee slumps in his saddle. An outraged Washington thunders past him, sword raised and face set, determined to retrieve a situation that has slipped well beyond his subordinate’s grasp. His Excellency’s contempt is manifest in his refusal to even look in Lee’s direction. But now that Washington has arrived all is well. In the distance we can see artillery being driven to commanding crests. Before us the wave of retreating troops appears to halt abruptly and fall back upon itself, like the ocean running up against the base of a cliff. Soon they will turn about and, if not exactly beat Sir Henry Clinton’s rear guard, stand toe-to-toe with it in an open field fight and not flinch.

Like all popular conceptions of history, there is much here that is true. Washington did gallop into a disorganized and retreating vanguard and he was astonished and then outraged by what he saw. According to some—not all—eyewitnesses, June 28^th was one of the few instances when Washington unleashed his not inconsiderable temper, this time in a stream of abuse aimed at his second in command, Charles Lee. So far, so good.

 But the situation Washington found that afternoon was largely his own creation, the result of a series of tactful but ill-advised compromises, rampant second thoughts and muddled councils. The fog of war and the passage of two centuries always tend to blur the sharp outlines of events. But the story of Monmouth inspires historians to use words like “murky” and “confused” more liberally than usual. It’s a battle never reads the same in any two books.

In a council of war that young colonel Alexander Hamilton likened to a gathering of midwives, Washington and his generals pondered if and when to strike Sir Henry Clinton’s army as it retreated from Philadelphia to New York City. Lee, who always insisted that Continentals could never stand against British bayonets, advised building a bridge of gold for the redcoats and Germans—anything to expedite their progress northward, out of New Jersey, into the strategically vital but restricted enclave of Manhattan. Others advocated striking a blow, thus setting the stage for compromise. 1,500 men would be sent to pester the enemy’s rear guard. Offered this fragment of a command, Lee rejected it out of hand as beneath his dignity. Further, he expressed his lack of faith in the mission. The baton passed to Lafayette and, as it did, the size of the force increased until it included nearly half the American army.

This was the result of divided councils—and the divided mind of the American commander-in-chief. No decision made at Monmouth ever seemed to be final. Second thoughts led to more and more units being committed until the shadowing force had taken on real substance: about 5,000 men. At this point Lee decided he wanted the command after all. In a remarkable show of flexibility and graciousness, Lafayette stepped aside. In an even more remarkable show of flexibility, Washington turned the command back to Lee. Though dirty, disheveled and eccentric both in dress and habits, as a former British officer Lee was looked upon by Washington and just about everyone else in the army and congress as an indispensible man—just the man for the delicate task of following, harassing and, if opportunity offered, even striking a professional-trained and dangerous foe.

And yet Lee truly believed Americans could never resist European regulars. He honestly wished to build a golden bridge to New York for Sir Henry Clinton. And he was on record as strenuously opposed to the mission he had just asked to lead. In other words, he should never have been entrusted with this assignment. Hamilton later characterized Lee’s behavior at Monmouth as childish. It is difficult to find a nicer word to describe Washington’s grip on his subordinates.

And his plans were no better. Lee was instructed to strike at Clinton without bringing on a general engagement. Plainly, Washington wanted it both ways. And the augmentation of force—with its corresponding chances of a major, decisive action—is probably what convinced Lee he belonged in the van of the army. But if Washington merely meant to harass Clinton, why send almost half the army? If he wanted to draw serious blood, why not send the whole army?

In his defense we should remember that Washington was by nature an aggressive soldier. By 1778 he has spent three years squelching his instincts to strike his enemies, all for the good of the cause he served. Caught between classic Whig fears of a standing army and a militia that only turned out when it felt like it, he limited himself to a Fabian policy spiced with tours de force like Trenton and Princeton. The clear-eyed realist who understood that he must deal with people as they are, and not as he wished them to be, adopted the same attitude towards American military realities. But those realities had shifted. He now led the largest army he had commanded since the Siege of Boston. More importantly, that army had been trained to march and fight like European professionals by a European professional, the Baron von Steuben. At least some of the indecision displayed at Monmouth must be attributed to a passionate man’s struggle between prudence and daring. While yearning to hit hard, he never forgot that the life of his army and the life of the American cause were essentially one and the same thing.

Once Lee finally took the field he discovered that the ground itself presented grave dangers, being cut by three deep ravines, each traversed by a single narrow bridge or causeway. If Clinton chose to turn and fight and if he drove Lee’s men—as Lee himself confidently expected would happen if Clinton chose to fight—any one of those ravines could prove to be a nasty, bloody trap. Further, Lee was confronted with confused and conflicting intelligence. As a professional soldier, of course, he should have been prepared for this sort of thing but today it rattled him. Nevertheless, he managed to set in motion wide flanking maneuvers to left and right, designed to cut off the British rear guard from their main force. Lee’s eccentricities included a mercurial temperament and he started exulting in what looked to him like a deft coup. But Clinton, who had just as professional an eye as his opponent, recognized the threatened envelopment and quickly marched 4,000 re-enforcements to save the situation.

If Washington had given Lee murky instructions, Lee had given his subordinates no guidance whatever—beyond the statement that they should conform their movements to circumstances. So when Lee pulled back part his right wing in the face of British re-enforcement he unwittingly created a circumstance that led his left wing to follow suit. What followed looked a lot like—and may actually have been—a disorderly retreat. Whatever it was, Washington rode into the middle of it.

And here, in the words of Robert Middlekauff, “Washington then did what he always did well—restored control when chaos surrounded him.” Like another general 84 years later at Pittsburgh Landing, Tennessee, Washington didn’t waste time dwelling on the mistakes that had created the crisis that threatened to overwhelm him. He redeemed those mistakes by building a defensive line on the fly and fighting the British to a standstill. It is a glimpse of what made Washington great. Not a an accomplished tactician or strategist, he nevertheless had the personal presence, the force of character, the moral stature—call it what you will—to somehow be the man we see in Leutze’s canvas.

...

Good Friday

..

Poet's Coroner

Mr. Peperium

..

BETWEEN

TWO THIEVES

..

I.

.

We’re three dark animals they’ve finally treed.
For now the man in charge gets what he sought;
An illustration. Perhaps we’ll plant a seed:
Don’t heal or steal or preach. Or don’t get caught.

And so in terror of our good example
One boy in the crowd averts his eyes,
Reads holy books. A look’s not always ample.
Once, a gangling boy upon that rise

I saw what comes of passions lashed to bone
And—knowing all they said I should have known—
I turned with ears unstopped to each extreme.

In three days crows will feast upon these eyes
That saw more of the world than most men dream.
Maybe after eating they’ll grow wise.

.

II.

..

My father was a mercenary Greek,
My mother was a slave. Disinclined
To work I plied my trade till just last week,
A veteran with one leg bound up behind

Living on men’s guilt; Jehovah’s wrath.
I’d limp home past the guard with my own life
Each night to my stupendous cure: a bath
And afterward some absent merchant’s wife

In need of vast attentions. The town I sacked
Room by scented room’s beneath my heel.
I never heard you speak. To be exact
When housewives went to hear you I would steal.

And now you empty out your sacred heart
Who, just before the blow, stayed Abraham.
Graves yawn. The dead are seen to start.
Wind wrestles in the thicket like a ram.

..

..

..

Regrettysburg

Poet's Coroner

Mr. Peperium

A recent post in this space recounted a long-ago game night at the Peperium household. It involved one of those strategy-and-tactics affairs Avalon-Hill put out in the 70’s. Taking place years before the Internet, the game was played on a flat, board-like surface. There were also, I recall, plenty of unit counters and unit arrival schedules and odds tables—all the math required to resolve combat being done on scraps of paper. The subject of the game was even more dated than the manner of play: it re-created the Battle of Gettysburg.

Ok, so it’s not the kind of marital revelation that’s going to lead me to quit golf. But wait, there’s more. The “interesting” part of the post—the part that set the comment thread abuzz and had Crackie quietly rocking on his barstool at his club in barely suppressed mirth—was the revelation that I had “allowed” Mrs. P to be the Confederates. When it was added that Mrs. P won, well, I think Crackie fell off his stool. All our other regular readers (both of them) were probably suffering similarly. After all, they know I spend my precious leisure hours knee-deep in history, usually of a military nature. I mean, the irony of it all, right?

Of course, Mrs. P’s posts are seldom sometimes always thought-provoking (Hon, don’t you have somewhere to go?) This one provoked me to reconstruct what exactly happened on that fatal evening. How, I asked myself, could I have thrown away both my moral and intellectual ascendancy over my new bride? Squandered my chance at having her look up to me as a King among men—and thus any chance of talking her into doing creative things with aerosol cheese? Oddly enough, it was an essay by James McPhearson that provided the answer to those and other probing questions.

In American Victory, American Defeat, McPhearson addresses, among other things, the tendency of some schools of history to a rigid determinism. If the Union won the war, then that outcome must have been inevitable. McPhearson counters this with the notion of historical contingency: Americans won their independence from Great Britain against far more daunting odds than the Confederacy faced in 1861. 40 years before our Civil War the Greeks triumphed over the Turks. A little bit further back, the Greeks managed the same thing against the Persians. The whole thing can be summed up neatly in the reassuring words of the Honorable Gallahad Threepwood: “Chin up. I’ve seen stickier things than this come out alright.” 

In our Civil War one of the stickiest of those things was the Battle of Gettysburg. And after reading McPhearson’s essay I started thinking about what I had done wrong in that game all those years ago. As Mrs. P said, I had done everything I should have done—I had followed the battle plan, right? Thinking about it in the light of McPhearson’s essay it suddenly occurred to me: No, I hadn’t. Not because I had failed to understand the plan, but because there was no plan to understand. In the best tradition of historical contingency Hancock, Howard, Meade and Co had reacted to a fluid situation as it unfolded from moment to moment and won a (limited) victory.

What I had done on the game board was simply seize the famous “fish hook” line. On the first day of battle I hadn’t bothered trying to forestall A. P. Hill’s Third Corps around the Lutheran Seminary or Ewell’s Second north of town around the almshouse. More than that, on the second day I hadn’t thrown Sickle’s Third Union Corps forward to the Peach Orchard to form the infamous salient. I had just occupied the place history told me the battle had been won on: the high ground between Culp’s Hill and the Roundtops.

After all, didn’t history let me know beforehand that the fight on McPhearson’s Ridge against Hill was a losing proposition? And even more emphatically, didn’t history teach that Sickle’s salient among the tree-fresh produce was a near-disastrous mistake? When I marched everything I had onto Cemetery Ridge, Cemetery Hill, Culp’s Hill and the Roundtops, I figured it was all over except the snide remarks.

But when the smoke had cleared the snide remarks, as anyone who reads this blog knows, came from an entirely different quarter.

 Why?

 Historical contingency, of course. In other words, it was the “mistakes” as much as the “brilliant decisions” that won the fight for the Union. Back when I worked on the Ford account (no, I’m not getting off topic) we were charged with telling people about things called “crumple zones”. These were areas built into Ford products specifically designed to progressively collapse, absorbing the shock of a collision and diminishing it before it reached the passengerss of the car. I began thinking of McPhearson’s Ridge on the first day and Sickles salient on the second day—especially Sickle’s salient on the second day—as the military equivalent of crumple zones: giving the Confederate assaults something they had to wade through before they reached the main Union position.

Granted, in both cases that “main Union position” had not been established yet. Cemetery and Culp’s Hills had to be occupied in a hurry with fragments of commands left over from fighting north of town on the first day, and Meade and Hancock had to look pretty slippy on the second day too, shoving whoever he could find into the space where Third Corps should have been. But it’s just as true that the Confederate attacks that rolled over McPhearson’s Ridge and the Peach Orchard paid a stiff price in casualties and daylight. The shadows were getting long on July 1^st when Ewell began contemplating an early evening assault on Cemetery and Culp’s Hills. Likewise, on July 2^nd Law’s brigade approached Little Round Top and it’s fabled meeting with Vincent’s brigade with just a few daylight hours to spare. And while they arrived relatively fresh, the rest of their division—the men who could have provided decisive support—had spent themselves fighting their way through Sickle’s ill-conceived but stubborn (Bigelow’s Battery is just one example) salient.

In other words, with all the hubris of a grad student incautiously asked about his thesis or an actor who’s been given talking points from the latest conference of green scientists, I stood revealed as a historical determinist. Like, who knew?

Happy Birthday, Love

Poet's Coroner

Mr. Peperium

..

Yes, dear readers, it's that time of year again. When I and the little Peperatzzi climb in the ancestral Jeep and head off to the nearest high-end mall to collect the rich gifts that will be flung at the feet of Mrs. P. For once again it is her birthday.

This year's program was somewhat complicated by the fact that, being new to the area, we had no idea where such gifts were to be collected. Never fear. Sir Basil's good Countess steered us in the right direction and, despite a closed highway or three, we won through to an emporium so small and so select that it actually made me pine for those extravagant, three-tiered affairs with acres of parking and seven food courts which are now all in the process of doing the brother-can-you-spare-a-dime routine back up north.

But, of course, this is all a side issue Yes, presents were opened this morning by the fireside, but the real business starts tonight. RKFDIL and Little Bertie will help me whip up the gooiest, chunkiest brownie mix Betty or Duncan can provide (the "from scratch" posts, you'll notice, are all penned by Mrs. P). Once sufficiently cooled--I say sufficiently, because they still need to be warm for the next step in the process to work--we top each slab of brownie with a generous scoop of peppermint stick ice cream that will proceed to melt ever-so-slightly, mingling with the gooey crumbs along the edges of our plates. Then we all do our level best to hide this august assemblage under a top coating a chocolate sauce. This being the sort of thing I used to do for Mrs. P in our old pre-kids/renting-town-house-days, I thought it was a good time to revive the old tradition. Thanks to the recent unpleasantness of Wall Street we have even less money now than we did back then and once again we find ourselves renting. Also, the little Peperatzzi will get a kick out of making the brownies.

You've probably figured out by now that the illustration up top has nothing to do with the subject of this post beyond the happy co-incidence of a word. Well, if you've hung out here long enough you should know that we love indirection. While searching for an image of a sundae that bore some sort of resemblance to what we are planning on tonight, all I could find were nouvelle cuisine monstrosities by Rachel Ray and Paula Dean, all looking more like modern public sculptures than anything you could square your elbows at. So typing plain old "brownie" into the search field, this is what I got.

Beyond the fact that after our sundaes we're all going to strongly resemble this little chap, the picture works somehow. It works in the same oddball, off-beat, conservative-yet-Bohemian way that Mrs. P and I work together. This year has been, as Mark Twain might put it, one damn thing after another, Bun. And the wildest thing is, just like the aftermath of every other hair-bleaching crisis we've been through together, we've ended up in a better place. I'm not saying that at times in the last eight months I haven't thought of toddling off and ending it all in the village pond. But two things always sustained me. First, our village didn't have a pond. And second of all, I knew I'd miss you too much. Happy birthday, Love.

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Manhattan In St. Louis

Poet's Coroner

Mr. Peperium

Ok, about that whole Manhattan fracas.

My simple desire to numb the brain a bit and retreat into the prism of a heavy-bottomed tumbler (I'm describing a kind of glass, not a category of female) was thwarted from the outset. I asked for said beverage, and what should appear at my elbow some two and a quarter minutes later but something that had all the appearances of a heavy-bottomed T crammed with ice and in between that ice the amber outpourings of a bottle of Jim Beam. So far, so G, you say. But I had specifically ordered a Manhattan, and Manhattans, in my admittedly wide experience, usually come to the starting post a tad darker than the main ingredient, due to a generous infusion of dry vermouth.

With words and gestures I tried to make this clear to the servitor at my elbow. Usually, I admit, I would have downed the mixture (if indeed it was a mixture) without comment. I am, as a rule, a man who takes things as they come and would have, in the normal course of things, taken this pale Manhattan in my stride, assuming it to be some local variation on a venerable theme. But I had been sorely tried that day, what with business about the town, and when I had asked for a Manhattan I had in mind the kind of Manhattan where the bourbon and the vermouth vie with one another on the tongue for predominance, each putting forth their best effort to stimulate, and at the same time deaden, the troubled mind.

The whole problem was, I suspect, due to the fact that I don’t get out much. I am not is step with the latest thinking vis a vis bars and barmanship. And so, over those insular years, I have created my own version of the Manhattan, one where a jigger of bourbon and a jigger of vermouth are tossed into a tumbler packed with ice and, after a few shakes of bitters, leisurely sipped in between pulls at the ancestral pipe. The man behind the apron kept insisting that the darker red color I was looking for was due to—of all the hideous notions—grenadine (!) and freely offered to come back with a vat of the Shirley-Temple-makings and violate the sanctity of my personal happy hour with it. But I was firm and, I must say, Basil, you backed me up here staunchly. I don’t suppose you had the waiter in a headlock for more than, say, 45 seconds before he promised to put away the cherry juice, saving it for the next children’s party on the schedule. Rising from the floor and adjusting his apron, he said he would go and see how our mignonettes were coming along. Though victorious we too were gracious, suggesting to the maitre d’ that the man not be fired but merely horsewhipped behind the oldest dumpster in the alleyway.

As far as the liturgical dancer, Basil, I was in full accord with your proposed plan of action. Nothing would have pleased me more than to see the leotarded retard take a toss into the Jacuzzi-cum-font at the front of the edifice. May she choke on her beribboned baton and marry the youngest son of the guy with the fruity voice and the off-key guitar over by the choir bleachers. So far from thwarting your plans for her undoing, I was merely staggering beneath yet another example of liturgical lassitude: the lay Eucharistic ministers lounging at the back of the building swigging what was left of the Blood of Christ the same way they’d toss back a brewski after an afternoon on the riding mower. In my emotion I lurched backward, deflecting your well-aimed foot. When you kicked the walker out from under that retired nun in no habit and sensible shoes, no one could have been more surprised than myself. 

Surprised, but not apologetic.

.

One Recent Morning...

Poet's Coroner

Mr. Peperium

"Here, look at what FLG has written.", said Mrs. P after taking another refreshing sip from her morning mug.

Mr. P bent his brain to the computer screen, having upped the pica size a good 12 to 14 points so that his yet-another-year-older eyes could cope with the situation. There was a pause as he drank it all in.

Then, in the level, unemotional manner of one who is used to reading hysterically funny things but too proud to break down and admit that he wished he had written them he said, "That's hysterically funny."

"Why don't you tell it to FLG?" prodded Mrs. P. "It's exactly the kind of stuff PP needs."

"Why don't you tell him?" asked Mr P irritably. "You're the one they all want to hear from. I'm just the worker in the vineyard, a moiety of whose honest sweat is spent on the upkeep of the blog space."

"Come again?"

"Skip it. All I mean is that if Patum Peperium was a movie and they made a poster for it, my name would appear in exceptionally small type."

"But FLG thinks you're dead. It would be a nice surprise for him to suddenly hear from you."

"Does the guy have a weak heart?" queried Mr. P, with an eye to the legal ramifications.

"I don't think he could go through all those Federal interrogations if he did."

"Point taken. Oh, what the heck," concluded Mr. P, turning his face resolutely to the keyboard, for he had never learned the touch method. "Say he does keel over. It will make a whale of a story for the blog."

"You're so clever" cooed Mrs. P, entwining her arms around his neck and giving him a peck on his still full-ish head of hair.

Patum Peperium is pleased to announce, in its roundabout way, that FLG of Fear and Loathing in Georgetown has joined its staff.

Happy Bird-Day or, I Married a Teenage Audubon Guide

Poet's Coroner

Mr. Peperium

Yes, it's true. At the time of our betrothal, after my father the King of the Outer Isles had presented my future mother in law with a bejeweled snuffbox and a generous grant of land on one of the more remote islands of our realm, my father's Chancellor asked the traditional questions: Was the prince's intended bride proficient in equestrian sports? Yes, it seems that she had picked up a thing or two at a sort of stable in a place known as "Connecticut". After locating "Connecticut" on the large terrestrial globe that occupied one corner of the King's private library, the questions continued. Did the future Queen of the Outer Isles intend on providing the ruling house with an heir, or would she be one of those new Working Queens with a solid gold cell phone and a caffeine habit? No, an heir was definitely in the offing. Maybe even two. And after the royal births her future highness made it quite clear that she intended to stay home with the little prince- and princesslings. No drawbridge kids here.

So far, so good. Then the Chancellor asked the final question: Did her future majesty like animals? This was an important point, seeing as the Outer Isles are populated with more seagulls, sheep and ferrets than people. There had never been a call for free elections here for the simple reason that the call could not be made. Or so we thought.

Yes, said my bride-to-be, she did like animals. In fact, at one time back in Connecticut, she had been what was known as an "Audubon Guide". This interested my royal father, who stopped ogling the second assistant to the fifth lady in waiting long enough to ask my future wife what an Audubon Guide was. Her answer boded well for the flocks of seagulls that, as I said before, constituted our largest voting bloc.

But as so often happens on these occasions, encouraged no doubt by the warmth of her reception, my future Queen went a tad too far. She revealed that it had always been her dearest wish to someday own what she called a "Robo-Duck".

Once more tearing his attention away from the natural bustle on the second assistant, my father carefully set down his goblet of nectar and inquired what a "Robo-Duck" was. It seems that in another far-off island kingdom called England, my bride had heard tell of a man who had hollowed out a wooden duck decoy, installed a 1.5-horsepower engine with a toggle-switch remote and set about terrorizing the neighboring waterfowl. He would insinuate his remote-control Mallard into a flock or bevy of birds as they rocked gently at their moorings on a river. Then, without warning, he'd throw the throttle forward and apply all 1.5 horses. The decoy's nose would shoot skyward and a pure white rooster tail of foam shoot out to left and right. Pandemonium would, of course, ensue.

I suppose she was too busy wiping her eyes and composing herself after her fit of jolly, all-pals-together laughter to notice that it was a solo effort. There was a silence in the room you could have cut chunks out of and sold as doorstops. My father the King conferred briefly in whispers with his Chancellor. I could tell--even if my betrothed could not--that trouble loomed. I had seen that concerned look cloud my royal father's brow once before, on the evening the first assistant to the fifth lady in waiting said she had a headache.

Well, it was a near thing. But I assume that, her answers to all the other questions being satisfactory, my father and the Chancellor decided that this wish to terrorize the local waterfowl was a minor kink in an otherwise admirable character. The marriage was allowed to proceed and did so shortly thereafter, with full choral effects, at the Cathedral of Saint Sydney the Perplexed in our capital city.

No one gave any more thought to the Robo-Duck incident until the day reports came in that rafts of seagulls along the north coast of our main island were marching on the capital. Preliminary details were sketchy, but it appeared that a wooden duck was insinuating itself into their midst and, just as the stranger as being approached and asked for his card, would shoot off in a random direction trailing clouds of foam and exhaust from a small but serviceable engine.

Knowing exactly where to draw the line, the seagulls organized a political action committee. In every public park pigeons staged sit-down strikes on my father's statue. The eiders canvassed the canvasbacks. The result was a bill (pun intended) that expanded the franchise to all living creatures in the Outer Isles. Well, even my royal father could grasp the fact that, when every tse-tse fly and mollusk can cast a ballot, it wouldn't be long before our royal palace, hunting lodges and weekend retreats would be just so many addresses in the telephone directory of a brave new world. Especially those hunting lodges.

We abdicated three days later, took on the Peperium incognito, and have been living on a pretty snuggish budget ever since. But all is not lost. We do have the two heirs apparent--even if there's precious little to inherit. My father passed on several years ago, his last words being something incoherent about ducks, and left me his title and crown, which the kids now use for various indoor sports. And though she cost me my kingdom, I do love her Royal, Serene and Highly Exalted Majesty Queen What's-Her-Name the XVIII. Or, as we all know her now, Mrs. P.

Happy Birthday, J.

Well, If I've Gotta Go...

Poet's Coroner

Mr. Peperium

In former times, the legend goes,

Birds who drew the short straw chose

The ways and means of their demise.

This one picked two breasts, two thighs.

Happy Thanksgiving 

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