Chalmette Plantation, Louisiana, United States of America
January 8th, 1815
General Andrew Jackson glared at the battlefield before him. If you could call it that. New Orleans and the mouth of the Mississippi was dreadful territory for a conventional battle. That was half his strategy. The British regulars he faced might have swept Napoleon’s forces aside in Spain and France, but they couldn’t compare to his fighting Americans on their own turf. (He conveniently ignored the fact that Louisiana had only been Americans ‘own turf’ for twelve years and most of his men had never been here before). “I will smash them, so help me God!” he cried to his men. “By the Eternal, they shall not sleep on our soil!”
Jackson had made those sentences his battle cry for most of the day, and by now they were delivered in a histrionic shriek that under other circumstances might have been comical. But his men understood. Many, such as the Kentuckian militiamen backing up his regulars, were from the same southern tradition as Jackson, having acquired a taste for such high-pitched battle cries from their Indian foes. For that matter, some of those Indians were fighting on Jackson’s side today: he could see a small number of Cherokee braves even now engaging fire with British skirmishers. They were from the faction that had opposed the Red Sticks group that Jackson had smashed. They were his allies...for now.
King George’s army was indeed having many of the problems Jackson had foreseen. They had underestimated the flow of the Mississippi and their boats had been swept along, landing far from their intended site. Their artillery struggled to cope with the conditions, so different from the battlefields of Europe or India they knew. But nonetheless the regulars came. They approached the ‘Jackson Line’ of makeshift defences, answering Jackson’s challenge with their old battle cry of ‘HUZZAH!’
That cry sent Jackson back in time. For a moment he was a young teenager again, serving as a courier in the Revolutionary War. Many of his men, in short trousers when George Washington died, regarded that whole generation as world-bestriding titans belonging to a vanished legendary age. Jackson’s own small service to that age elevated him above other generals in their estimation. He did all he could to encourage the attitude.
His eyes hardened. The British had been beaten then, and they would be again. He dared to climb the Jackson Line where his men could see him, sweeping his sword forward dramatically as he yelled for them to fire, to kill the bastards. His eye picked out details of the red-coated men approaching: they wore tartan, albeit in the form of trousers rather than kilts. Highlanders. Jackson himself was of Scottish ancestry, via the plantations in Ulster, but that wouldn’t stop him fighting these long-lost brethren. Or killing them as easily as he had the Red Sticks. “I will smash them—”
Jackson never saw the man who killed him. The Highlander hadn’t been aiming for him, after all; he had only just appeared atop the fortifications. The Scotchman had been aiming his musket for the line of American regulars, but he stumbled on a stone at just the wrong time and his shot flew off wildly at far too elevated an angle.
Too elevated to hit the regulars, that is, but not their general.
As Jackson lay dying in a tent a half-hour later, John Coffee came to him to tell him that the British had been defeated and were in retreat. Jackson smiled to himself, at least knowing that his name would live forever in the pages of history. And after all, despite some ambitions for higher office, he knew in his heart of hearts that he was a warrior first: his impact on history would always have been in the battlefield, not the ballot box...
*
Waterloo, United Kingdom of the Netherlands
June 18th, 1815
The day—the longest of days—was over. Boney had cast his die for the last time, and at long last, after the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life, he had lost. Blücher had arrived. The British and their allies had held. The losses were grievous, terribly grievous. But they had held. And now L’Émpereur was in full flight. Still from the French lines the astonished cry echoed: “La Garde recule. Sauve qui peut!” The Guard is retreating! Save yourself! Napoleon had tried so hard for many years to preserve the myth of his Guard’s invincibility, only committing them when he was sure of victory. Now he had been forced to turn to them at long last and they had been found wanting. French morale was destroyed.
There lay the farmhouses of Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte, so hotly fought over during the day, now swiftly abandoned. But—no. Some of the Guard at least had honour. La Haye Sainte was held against the British in one brave but futile last stand. “La Garde meurt, elle ne se rend pas!” cried one Frenchman, his name known only to God. The Guard does not surrender! The Guard dies!
Once again the Duke of Wellington urged Copenhagen forward. The horse snorted as he ate up the yards of the battlefield. Wellington’s men, so worn and battered by the hours of hammering from the French, cheered and followed. As the Waterloo sunset bathed the battlefield in a golden glow, the ground so covered in wadding that it looked almost like snow, Wellington joined Henry Paget, his cavalry commander. Well, the Earl of Uxbridge now. Wellington had not entirely agreed with Uxbridge’s actions that day, including him foolishly leading a charge in person—and what am I doing right now? Wellington thought wryly. “They’re done!” he cried. “Boney’s done!”
Uxbridge’s mouth split into a smile. “It’s all over at long last,” he said in wonder. “What has it been – twenty-five years since the Bastille was stormed, something like that? What will we do with peace?”
Wellington laughed shortly at the thought. “There is always something for men like us to do. Perhaps we are destined for high office.” He wasn’t sure if he welcomed the thought; his brief experiences with political intrigue, both at home and abroad, had left him rather distasteful of that other battlefield, the one where words could wound no less surely than musket balls.
Uxbridge was about to reply when it happened. One of the last cannons crewed by one of the last French artillerymen fired one of the last shots of the day. Red mist blinded Wellington for a moment, Copenhagen bucking beneath him. For one heartstopping moment he thought the horse had been hit. He looked down to examine his beast’s flanks. There was blood there, all right, but... “By God, sir, I’ve lost my leg!” he cried.
Uxbridge stared over at him. “By God, sir, you have!”
Such things could be survivable, with amputation and surgery, if the wound was in the right place. It was not. Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington and a host of other titles, bled out and died that hot June evening on the greatest battlefield Europe had ever seen. Back home, the churchbells would fall silent as men remembered the time ten years ago when Nelson, England’s other great hero, had too been cut down at the moment of his greatest triumph. There would be a second martyr, a second state funeral, a second place in St Paul's.
And the world was at peace.
*
The War Office, Pall Mall, London, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland
April 8th, 1818
Full of bombast as usual, Henry John Temple, Viscount Palmerston, raced for the stairs up to the War Office and leapt them in a single bound. His lunch break had been highly successful, the Madeira port wine circulating pleasantly through his veins, and he was ready to tackle the afternoon’s work. His business in tackling the planned reductions of the Army and its administrative bureaucracy were bound to ruffle a few feathers to say the least, especially given his controversial appointment of his friend Laurence Sulivan to an office in the ministry. So be it! Let it never be said that ‘Pam’ was one to shirk a good fight. If the bureaucrats in the War Office thought they knew how to conduct a war, then he would teach them a thing or two, with practical experience.
Palmerston was so wrapped up in his own thoughts that he barely perceived the man stepping out of the shadows near the stairs. His own momentum from his leap almost saved him, but the man corrected his aim just enough and the bullet caught him in the back. Palmerston fell to the ground with a groan. He caught sight of a messenger emerging from the doorway to grapple with the gunman and seize his weapon. The man glared intensely at the messenger—William Owen, Palmerston belatedly recognised him—as he was apprehended: “You know me, and you know my wrongs; I have killed him.”
It was that deranged Lieutenant, David Davies, the one whose case Palmerston had heard about and tried to intervene in. Palmerston had heard he had hacked off his own manhood in hospital; killing a peer of the realm was small potatoes after that, he supposed. He managed to open his mouth with a croak. “No you haven’t, young man,” he managed. “The world will have to do a lot more than that to get rid of...of...”
Strange how dark it was for midday.
