The Fort Read Online Free PDF Page B

he was a doctor’s son, but everyone knew he was a friend of the young duke’s, and the duke was said to be richer than the next ten richest men in all Scotland, and a rich friend, as everyone also knew, was the next best thing to being wealthy oneself. The Duke of Hamilton was so rich that he had paid all the expenses of raising the 82nd Regiment of Foot, buying them uniforms, muskets, and bayonets, and rumor said his grace could probably afford to raise another ten such regiments without even noticing the expense. “Onwards,” Moore said, “onwards, ever onwards!”
    The six privates, all from the Lowlands of Scotland, did not move. They just gazed at Lieutenant Moore as though he were a strange species from some far-off heathen country.
    “Onwards!” Moore called again, striding fast once more through the trees. The fog muffled the harsh sound of the axes coming from where Brigadier McLean’s men were clearing the ridge so that their planned fort would have open fields of fire. The 82nd’s picquet, meanwhile, was climbing a gentle slope which leveled onto a wide plateau of thick undergrowth and dark firs. Moore trampled through the brush, then again stopped abruptly. “There,” he said, pointing, “ Thalassa, Thalassa .”
    “The lassie?” McClure asked.
    “You have not read Xenophon’s Anabasis , Sergeant?” Moore asked in mock horror.
    “Is that the one after Leviticus, sir?”
    Moore smiled. “ Thalassa , Sergeant, Thalassa ,” he said in mock reproof, “was the cry of the ten thousand when at last, after their long march, and after their dark ordeals, they came to the sea. That’s what it means! The sea! The sea! And they shouted for joy because they saw their safety in the gentle heaves of its bosom.”
    “Its bosom, sir,” McClure echoed, peering down a sudden steep bluff, thick with trees, to glimpse the cold sea through the foliage and beneath the drifting fog. “It’s not very bosomy, sir.”
    “And it is across that water, Sergeant, from their lair in the black lands of Boston, that the enemy will come. They will arrive in their hundreds and in their thousands, they will prowl like the dark hordes of Midian, they will descend upon us like the Assyrian!”
    “Not if this fog lasts, sir,” McClure said. “The buggers will get lost, sir.”
    Moore, for once, said nothing. He was gazing down the bluff. It was not quite a cliff, but no man could climb it easily. An attacker would need to drag himself up the two hundred feet by pulling on the straggly saplings, and a man using his hands to keep his footing could not use his musket. The beach, just visible, was brief and stony.
    “But are the buggers coming, sir?” McClure asked.
    “We cannot say,” Moore said distractedly.
    “But the brigadier thinks so, sir?” McClure asked anxiously. The privates listened, glancing nervously from the short sergeant to the tall officer.
    “We must assume, Sergeant,” Moore said airily, “that the wretched creatures will resent our presence. We make life difficult for them. By establishing ourselves in this land of soured milk and bitter honey we deny their privateers the harbors they require for their foul depredations. We are a thorn in their side, we are inconvenient, we are a challenge to their quietude.”
    McClure frowned and scratched his forehead. “So you’re saying the buggers will come, sir?”
    “I bloody hope so,” Moore said with sudden vehemence.
    “Not here, sir,” McClure said confidently. “Too steep.”
    “They’ll want to land somewhere in range of their ships’ cannons,” Moore said.
    “Cannons, sir?”
    “Big metal tubes which expel balls, Sergeant.”
    “Oh, thank you, sir. I was wondering, sir,” McClure said with a smile.
    Moore tried and failed to suppress a smile. “We shall be plied with shot, Sergeant, have no doubt of that. And I’ve no doubt ships could spatter this slope with cannon-fire, but how would men climb it into our musket-fire? Yet even so,