Part 12

So also did Robert Nelson say that feudal nonsense was abolished forever, and the Church of not much more account. He and his brother Wolfred had their own interpretation of their relative’s saying that “England expects every man to do his duty.” Mrs. Wolfred Nelson’s grandfather, le Marquis de Fleurimont, was one of the French officers wounded in September, 1759; afterwards he took the oath of allegiance, and was again wounded in the repulse of Montgomery before Quebec. These Frenchified Englishmen seem to have been born for something better than treason, stratagem and spoils; they took none of the last and found the first two meant prison and expatriation. Wolfred Nelson was by far the best looking of the leaders, tall, with handsome features, and had moreover a brave and manly disposition. His proclamations were wonderfully worded, his Athanasian rendering declaring the Canadian Republic to be “one and indivisible.” Colonel Gore sought to take these prominent men, having heard that they were secreted at St. Hyacinthe. Accordingly a young officer and a picked party were told off, their sleighs without bells being timed to arrive after dark at the house where the leaders were supposed to be. The guide brought the sleighs there somewhere near midnight, and they found the usual comfortable French quarters, solid barns with yards and outbuildings. A chain of sentries was posted round the place and through the buildings; a knock brought madame, a most charming old lady, to the window; they were very welcome, and she showed them not only over the house, but she kept them seeking in many corners they would not have found for themselves, in cellars where stores of winter vegetables and fruit lay in rows, cupboards full of treasures, in cavernous depths beyond rafters which promised a reward for search, but only revealed much bacon and ham, flitches “the manifest product of a high-caste gramnivorous pig.” But Papineau, on the watch, had had time to get to a deep ditch which ran back into the fields, whence he made his way to a small bush near by. From there he escaped to the States; but Nelson was taken and lodged in Kingston gaol. Years afterwards, at an evening party, after his return from France, the charming, white-haired Papineau said to a gentleman who had been the soldier so prominent in the search, “I hear you are the officer who came to call on me at Madame ----’s, in ’37. You little know how nearly you took me.... You did your work admirably, for, though we were on the watch, I had only just time to run away down that wet ditch before your sentries met.” Among the effects then seized were many papers of value to the captors, one of them a letter from Papineau, finishing, “Continue to push it (the rebellion) as vigorously as you can,” and another, a schoolboy letter from Nelson’s son, a lad of fourteen, somewhat after the manner of Tom Sawyer: “I wish that it (the rebellion) will do well and without any noise, which I hate very much--except with the other side. I believe that the prediction of that man Bourgeoi will be accomplished, which is that the province will be all covered with blood and dead bodies.” A Montreal newspaper deplores “the fattening of Nelson for the gallows,” and considered that “death on the scaffold was the best example such a father could give to such a child.”

And yet Dr. O’Callaghan could write from over the border, “If you are to blame for the movement, blame then those who plotted and continued it, and who are to be held in history responsible for it. We, my friends, were the victims, not the conspirators; and were I on my deathbed I could declare before heaven that I had no more idea of a movement of resistance when I left Montreal and went to the Richelieu River with M. Papineau than I have now of being bishop of Quebec. And I also know that M. Papineau and I secreted ourselves for some time in a farmer’s house in the parish of St. Marc, lest our presence might alarm that country and be made a pretext for rashness.... I saw as clearly as I now see the country was not prepared.” Dr. O’Callaghan, the _fidus Achates_ of Papineau, the editor of the _Vindicator_, was not likely to have been as innocent as he afterwards remembered himself.

Another who managed to hide safely but nearer home, after the battle of St. Charles, was George Cartier. With his cousin Henri he passed the winter at the house of Antoine Larose, in his native village of St. Antoine, and the person destined to be his father-in-law was in hiding not far off. The future Sir George, to make sure of a quiet resting-place, wrote, and had published in a Montreal newspaper: “George E. Cartier, advocate, a young man of great ability and talent, was found frozen in the woods by his father. He might have served his Queen in the highest councils of his country had he not been brought up in a line of politics which led to his untimely end.” He read his self-description and epitaph, and handed it to his cousin, remarking, “At present, my dear Henri, we can sleep tranquil.” But he reckoned, not without his host, who was incorruptible, but without his host’s servant-maid. The maid had an admirer, and the admirer grew jealous of the two young men who enjoyed advantages superior to those granted him, made a scene with his fiancée, threatened to inform on them and to denounce M. Larose to the authorities for harbouring rebels. So the two young men, nephews many times removed of the celebrated Jacques, had to decamp to the less confined neighbourhood of les États Unis. In after years, when Mackenzie with questionable taste treated the episode of the rebellion as a comedy, he met M. Cartier, in parliamentary obstructive debate, and twitted him that they had both been “out” on the wrong side, and that the Government had shown its appreciation of the comparative values of their heads. He referred to the price of a thousand pounds set on his own, and only three hundred on that of the young man whose sudden demise from hunger and cold in the woods of Verchères had spoilt “une brilliante carrière.”

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Naturally, Montreal was now in a highly excited state, distracted at defeat and elated at victory; openly rejoicing or inwardly chafing, as the case might be. The specie in the Bank found its way for safe keeping to Quebec, ammunition, arms and soldiers began to arrive, volunteer battalions were formed; the gaol was crowded with prisoners; the outlets of the city were barricaded, and a general hum of expectation was in the air.

Detachments of the 1st Royals under Colonel Wetherall, of the 32nd and 83rd under Maitland and Dundas, the Volunteer Montreal Rifle Corps under Captain Leclerc, and a strong squadron of horse with six pieces of artillery, fully served, under command of Major Jackson, one sunny day defiled through the streets with colours waving and bands playing. The field battery, rocket troop and all the transports were on runners, for it was now the 15th of December and the snow was deep. The Commander-in-chief, the generally popular and much-feared hero of Waterloo and a hundred other fights, Sir John Colborne, with his richly caparisoned staff and escorted by two hundred Dragoons, brought up the rear of this imposing display.

They proceeded to the western extremity of the island, past the ruins of two old forts and the smaller remains of a larger one, all telling of former war times. At the expansion of the river, caused by its narrow outlets, was the Lake of the Two Mountains, where one of the hills, in summer clothed with richest verdure to the water’s edge, was called Calvary. Within its shadow lay St. Eustache, St. Benoit, and Ste. Scholastique; any of them might have been named Golgotha, so soon were they to become the place of skulls. “Le Grand Brûlé” was so named before “le vieux brûlot” was to rechristen it with fire and blood, for a forest fire had swept it at the end of the last or the beginning of this century; the “Petit Brûlé” was near Ste. Scholastique--names significant to the dwellers there of a fate worse than burning by forest fire.

St. Eustache, most picturesque of the early French settlements, was built on a tongue of land. At that day it consisted of a square of handsome stone houses, comfortable and well finished, in which the wealthy but discontented owners lived; hard by were the manor-house, the presbytère and convent, and in the centre stood the parish church, its two towers topped by spires as glittering as the “panoply of war” then in full sight ready for the attack. The people of this village, between five and six hundred, were enthusiastic Liberals, disaffected French--traitors, rebels or patriots, according to the point of view. Sir John Colborne saw them in strong colours, and was determined on their downfall, extermination if necessary. The defence was under Dr. Chénier and Girod. The latter, a misguided Swiss adventurer, had figured in several of the South American revolutionary wars, and later was a protégé of Perrault the philanthropist; his career was one of singular folly; he loved to appear in buccaneer style, affected the manner and language of a dictator, and accented his doings by usually riding a fine grey mare as his charger, which he had stolen from M. Dumont, a loyal Canadian. The parish priest, M. Paquin, assisted by his vicar, who read Colborne’s proclamation--a document not to be misunderstood and not of a cheerful tenor--succeeded in persuading the peasants to return to their homes in peace, that nothing but disaster awaited them if they persisted, and as a result of such persuasions but one solitary person was left to represent an insurgent garrison. But some fifteen hundred from about the Brûlé soon replaced them, some regularly armed, but most of them unarmed. M. Paquin now sent for Chénier, expostulated with him and showed how his undertaking was perilous and hopeless. Chénier was moved to tears, but he maintained that the news of Wetherall’s victory at St. Charles was false; he was resolved to die with arms in his hands. He and Girod turned the ecclesiastics out of their house, making it another point of defence and the church into a citadel. Many of the prudent were by now wending their way towards Montreal; some arrests followed; and those who remained and found themselves unarmed were assured by Chénier, “Be easy about that; there will be men killed. You can take their muskets.”

A habitant from l’Isle Jésu brought word of the approach of the troops, and soon Sir John Colborne’s two thousand men stood in the valley which looked made but for the place of peace. The whole force, field pieces, rocket mortar and train waggons, covered two miles of roadway. The advance guard would have reached there with the habitant had not the ice been unsafe, causing the men to make a detour to Ste. Rose, thereby increasing the march by six miles. The water had been open two days before, but to prove that it would bear, Colonel Gugy--“a tall, majestic-looking gentleman who expressed himself in a beautiful manner”--galloped from shore to shore. About noon all had arrived, and as they neared the village and took up position their numbers and character must have impressed the unhappy people with the hopelessness of the coming conflict. The usual desertions began, until Chénier, looking at one road full of his enemies and another full of his retreating countrymen, addressed the few who remained with him: “My brothers, behold advancing before you, to burn and destroy your beautiful homes, the servile mercenaries of the despotic Government which has enslaved your country.” And they in return cried the old cry, “Liberty or Death.”... “We will never desert our wives and little ones.” Officers in charge of divided squads put in a state of defence the manor house, the presbytère, the convent and one villager’s house, while Chénier, in person taking command of from sixty to eighty, many of whom were still without arms, went to the church, where the women and children had already fled. The last, for further safety, he placed in the vaults underneath. The doors were then barricaded, and the windows removed to convert the openings into loopholes. Thus did they await the coming annihilation, “nor,” said a British officer afterwards, “did they quail as our overwhelming force approached; they raised one loud and shrill terrific cheer, and then all was still as death till the cannonading and musketry began.” The field battery opened fire; but there was no reply. At first it was supposed that the place had been abandoned; but as another brigade came down the village street a rattling fire poured from the church. It was evident they meant to show fight. The howitzers tried to batter down the barricaded doors, but without effect. Colonel Jackson, of the artillery, asked for a surrender. The answer “was plucky but idiotic;” they pooh-poohed the offer, and among other preparations took a cannon to the top of the steeple. Then Jackson set his own gun, blew the steeple and all that was in it down, and those below who ran out of the doors were bayoneted. An officer who went into one of the empty houses close by upset a stove and placed on the coals all the combustibles he could find. In a moment the line of fire lengthened, and under cover of the smoke Colonel Wetherall and his men came at the double down the street; cavalry and still another regiment surrounded the village to prevent chance of escape, with a further precaution of a corps of volunteers spread out on the ice to pick off any unfortunate should he get through such a double line. The envelopment of fire was completed. The church and houses were now all ablaze. Driven by the flames the unhappy defenders abandoned one position for another, only to find the second worse. At the back of the church a small door leading into the sacristy had been forced, and the soldiers, groping their way through smoke and darkness, led by Colonel Gugy, were shot at by the few who remained. Gugy was one of those wounded. The staircase was gone, and another officer lighted a fire beneath the altar, got his men out, and the cessation of shots within told the success of his work. The simultaneous fire pouring on the French from all sides was liking boiling water on an anthill. Men half-roasted, with bullets already lodged in their miserable bodies, women creeping from the crypt, found that what flame and bullet had spared the bayonet could finish. Chénier and the few remaining, mad with despair, leaped from the windows into the graveyard, and fought there anew with all the desperation of a forlorn hope. A ball brought the leader down; but rallying his sinking strength he rose, to be again shot, until, with the fourth bullet, he rose no more--the blackened semblance of a man. He died “comme un héros digne de la Grèce antique.” In the mêlée a few managed to escape, but for a moment only; those who made for the ice were picked off there, and those who fell on their knees and begged for quarter heard “Jock Weir, remember Jock Weir.” By half-past four the work was finished. Cannon and musketry had ceased, but the houses still burned; the churchyard and the convent were heaped with dead, and the wounded, burning alive, received now and then a merciful shot or a stab from a bayonet. The village swine added yet another horror. “Pshaw,” said a Scotch volunteer to a squeamish comrade, “it’s nothing but French hog eating French hog.” Pathos was added to horrors, when it appeared that the pockets of some of the youngest of the insurgents were full of marbles--toys turned to missiles.

The air was insufferable, but in spite of it loot and pillage went on. At Montreal, in the clear atmosphere of a Canadian December night, the bright belt of illuminated sky told as plainly as telegraph that the expedition had been a success. “Such a scene,” wrote a correspondent to the press, “was never witnessed. It must prove an awful example. The artillery opened fire at half-past one. Everything was over, except the shooting of a few fugitives, by half-past three.”

Quite a different view of the case is found in official despatches. Sir John Colborne writes to Lord Glenelg, 30th March, ’38: “On the evening in which the troops took possession of St. Eustache, the loyal inhabitants of that village and neighbourhood, anxious to return to their homes and to protect the remainder of their property, followed the troops; and I believe it is not denied that the houses which were burnt, except those that were necessarily destroyed in driving the rebels from the fortified church, were set on fire by the Loyalists of St. Eustache and Rivière du Chêne, who had been driven from the country in October and November.” And in a despatch from Glenelg to Lord Durham, June 2nd, ’38, we find: “Having laid that despatch before the Queen, Her Majesty has commanded me to desire Your Lordship to signify to Sir J. Colborne, that while she deeply laments that any needless severities should have been exercised by one class of Her Majesty’s subjects against another, Her Majesty is gratified to learn, as she fully anticipated, that her troops are in no degree responsible for any of the excesses which unhappily attended the defeat of the insurgents at St. Benoit and St. Charles, but that in the harassing service in which they were engaged they maintained unimpaired their high character for discipline and training.”

Certainly some of her officers did their best to make up for “needless severity.” Colonel Gugy and Colonel Griffin afterwards were unwearied, and in a measure successful, in their mediations between exasperated nationalities. The former persuaded many at the time to return to their houses, and priest and layman alike commended him in his rôle of pacificator. Colborne appointed Colonel Griffin military magistrate, with civil powers, in the County of Two Mountains, and in that office he protected the weak, raised the fallen, and did much to assuage the necessary horrors of civil war.

When the curé Paquin had begged the people to give in, Chénier’s wife added her entreaties, saying there was no disgrace in surrendering to such a superior force. But her husband had only fondly kissed her, repeating that well-worn sentence, “La garde meurt mais ne se rend pas,” bade her good-bye and sent her to a place of safety. One tradition has it that a greater ordeal than farewell and death awaited her. The usual terrors of the law were expended upon her scorched remnant of a husband; the mutilated quarters lay tossed about in the house of one Anderson, near the battlefield, and she was not allowed to bury them. After a burial of some fashion she had the hardihood to seek the remains, disinter and secrete them, and when opportunity came, in the refuge of a friend’s garret, sew the parts together and have them buried properly. The edge of romance is dulled when we read that there was more of the hot head and mulish foot about Chénier than the hero; but to the present day there is a local phrase, “Brave comme Chénier.” The day after the battle Colborne’s chief officers declared that they were obliged to despatch Chénier. A patriot dame standing by said none but an English soldier was capable of killing a wounded man. The Abbé Paquin declares that the mutilation of the body and the removal of the heart were incidents in the _post mortem_, held by the desire of the surgeons, to ascertain the precise wound of which he died, and the historian De Bellefeuille corroborates his assertion. This scarcely accounts for parading the heart about on the point of a bayonet, and it is also pertinently asked, “Depuis quand ouvre-t-on les corps des soldats tués sur un champ de bataille pour savoir de quoi ils sont morts!”

* * * * *

Terrified at the fate of St. Eustache, the inhabitants of St. Benoit turned out to meet Sir John, a white flag displayed from every window. At Ste. Scholastique they carried their emblems of submission in their hands, white flags and lighted tapers, sinking on their knees in the roadway as they presented them. At Carillon they did the same. Like the three hundred men of Liége, “all in their white shirts and prostrate on their knees praying for grace,” the crowd through which Colborne passed presented the appearance of two distinct assortment of souls, “... of the elect and of the damned.” There were but few of the elect in this case. Arrests were made and the torch was applied, although Christie says “He dealt with much humanity, dismissing most of them.” Of Colborne it might be said, “Where he makes a desert, calls it peace.” The Glengarry Highlanders met the troops at St. Benoit, and in the succeeding burnings, according to Gore’s own words, “were in every case, I believe, the instruments of infliction;” such irregular troops were not to be controlled. “Many of those who served as volunteers,” says Christie, “were persons who had been exceedingly ill-treated by the patriots while in the ascendant.”

The ironical Bishop Lartigue now found it well to write another pastoral. After all the carnage was over the voices of the clergy generally were uplifted, this time thanking God that peace was restored. “How now about the fine promises made by the seditious of the wonderful things they would do for you?” asks this terrible bishop. “Was it the controlling spirit of a numerical majority of the people of this country, who, according to the insurgents, ought to have sway in all things, that directed their military operations? Did you find yourselves in a condition of greater freedom than before, while exposed to all sorts of vexations, threatened with fire-raisings, loss of goods, deprivation of life itself, if you did not submit to the frightful despotisms of these insurgents, who by violent, not persuasive means, caused more than a moiety of all the dupes they had to take up arms against the victorious armies of our sovereign?”

No sooner had rebellion come to a head and French blood flowed than France remembered where Canada was, and quickly learned much about her. People were asking in wonderment what all the trouble could be. The Gallican remembered his cousin-several-times-removed, and set about helping him. One journal advised volunteers and auxiliaries, and another made the oft-repeated comparison between Canada and Ireland. Engraved copies of Papineau’s portrait adorned windows, and biographical sketches of him appeared in the newspapers. _Le Journal des Débats_ did not confine itself to printed sympathy, but suggested that arms and ammunition should be smuggled into Canada and volunteers enlisted to go there to help.

This sympathy spread far afield in Europe. At the Russian Emperor’s birthday fête at New Archangel the Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Naval Forces gave a splendid banquet, at the close of which “a collection was made for the unfortunate patriots of Canada.” Without exception, every one present contributed, with a result of 22,800 francs; and what is more, this sum was forwarded to its destination by the Admiral himself. We hope he had more definite geographical ideas than had the nearer French. Given a letter to post to Quebec, before rebellion had brought it and its people prominently forward, a post-office clerk in Paris gravely asked if it should go _via_ Panama or Cape Horn.

And then France remembered that those who had returned at the time of the Conquest said “it was very cold over there.”

Gallows Hill.

“_Up then, brave Canadians! Get your rifles and make short work of it._”

“_Canadians, rally round your Head, Nor to these base insurgents yield._”

“_Sir Francis Bond Head’s entire government of Upper Canada was one long, earnest, undeviating opposition to the instructions of H. M. colonial ministers._”--BLAKE.