Part 8
The 92nd were ordered to line a ditch in front of the Namur road, on the left flank of the farm-house; Wellington took his station near, and a hot cannonade swept over them. The proud and fiery Cameron, still pursuing his feud with the duke, never deigned to take the slightest notice of him, but allowed him to pass and repass his post without according either salute or recognising. At four in the afternoon the Black Brunswick which failed in a charge in front of this position, and their brave prince fell by a mortal wound. Inspired with new ardour, a body of French cavalry, which had taken the colours of the 69th, or South Lincolnshire Regiment, swept forward, and then the 92nd, the moment the Brunswickers were past, poured an oblique but deadly volley upon the foe, piling men and horses breast high before the roadway. Attended by one soldier, his servant, M. Bourgoyne, an officer of these horse chasseurs, clad in light green uniform, tried to escape round the flank of the 92nd. His brass helmet had fallen off, and displayed his curly black hair; he was a handsome young man, and waved his sabre, repeatedly shouting "_Vive l'Empereur_." Cameron evinced no disposition to molest this gallant Frenchman, but Wellington exclaimed, "92nd, d----n it, do not let that fellow escape." Fifty or sixty men then fired at him; but, such was the speed of his horse, the smoke, confusion, and inutility of firing with fixed bayonets, that he escaped all their shots, and caracoled his horse along the whole line of the 92nd. Then private Harold Chisholm, and a corporal of the 42nd Highlanders (who had lost his regiment and joined Cameron), unfixed their bayonets, knelt down, fired, and the chasseur fell to the earth, while his charger limped away on three legs. M. Bourgoyne had been shot through both ankles. Several Hanoverians now rushed forward to bayonet him, but he was rescued by Lieutenants Chisholm and Ewen Ross, who had him borne to the rear. Lieutenant Hector Innes encountered his servant, who was run through from behind by a Belgian lancer and slain. M. Bourgoyne was afterwards sent to Brussels; and his family in Paris expressed to Lieutenant Winchester, and other Highland officers, their deep gratitude for his preservation.
Again the chasseurs charged, and again they were repulsed; while a fire of cannon and musket-shot was thinning fast the ranks of Cameron. Forming under cover of these attacks, the French infantry, flanked by artillery, possessed themselves of a two-storied house, and in heavy column advanced beyond it with great spirit. At that moment,
"92nd!" exclaimed the Duke of Wellington, waving his cocked hat, "prepare to charge."
Fassifern raised his bonnet, set spurs to his horse, the whole regiment sprang over the ditch which bounded the road, and with bayonets charged, dashed through the smoke upon the enemy, and routed them. Officers and men fell fast on every side; but on went the 92nd until the gable of the two-storied house at the corner of the Charleroi road broke the centre of their line. Then they formed up in two wings, rank entire, with the house in the centre; and Cameron sent forward his cousin Ewen Ross, with the light company, into a wood of olives to skirmish, where he received a severe wound in the groin. At that time the grape-shot of the French artillery was sweeping the corn-field between the wood and the farm-house, and shredding away the ripe ears like flakes of snow in the wind. A body of French, who occupied the upper story, were firing briskly from the windows; and others who lined a thick thorn hedge, defended the avenues to the building.
Here it was that the brave Cameron, of Fassifern, fell; but the accounts of his death, as related by Siborne and others, are not strictly correct in detail. He had led his Highlanders close to the hedge, when a shot from the house passed through his belly, entering on the left side, and passing out on the right, tearing the intestines, and inflicting a mortal wound. At the same moment his horse sank under him, pierced by four musket balls.
The regiment gave a wild cheer, burst in the gates of the garden, and fearfully was he avenged by the charged bayonet and clubbed musket; but ere this Captain William Grant, Lieutenants Chisholm, Becher, and M'Pherson were killed, and soon after were barbarously stripped by the French. Nineteen officers of the 92nd were wounded, and 280 rank and file killed and wounded. The aged mother of Chisholm received a widow's pension from the Government, and Campbell, the adjutant, brought his claymore and watch home to her in Strathglass, as mementos of that dark day at Les Quatre Bras.
"The warlike and lamented Colonel Cameron," says his cousin Lieutenant Ewen Ross (92nd), who was wounded on that day by his side, and whose letter is now before me, "Cameron, than whom there was not a braver or better officer in the best or bravest of armies, was left to the chance care of his orderly sergeant, William Grant, who with a private of the 4th company led him carefully and slowly to a square of office houses at Quatre Bras. His horse being perforated by four musket balls, could carry him no further, and was then shot. The colonel was then carried in a blanket to Gemappe by Sergeant Grant, Colin Mackenzie the drum-major, two drummers named MacLean, and three MacRaes belonging to the band."
Ewen M'Millan and another Highlander carried Cameron into what the soldiers not inaptly named the _bloody hospital_ at Gemappe, where his wound was at once pronounced to be mortal. On the position being abandoned, in his hereditary hatred and horror of the French, he expressed great dread of being left to die in their hands; and by nine in the evening his faithful and sorrowing foster-brother procured a common cart, the only vehicle to be had, and placed him in it with Ensign Angus M'Donald, who was also severely wounded, and conveyed them towards Brussels. On the way Cameron asked if the enemy had been defeated? M'Millan answered "yes," though such was not the case, but the poor fellow's heart was ready to burst.
"Defeated--then I die happy!" said Cameron; "but, oh! I hope my dear native country will believe that I have served her faithfully."
After this the power of language failed him; but Angus M'Donald (who afterwards died from the effect of his own wound) related that he heard him praying fervently in Gaelic, and in whispers. He was sinking fast. As the cart passed near where his cousin Ross lay wounded, the latter sent his servant, Angus Sutherland, to inquire how he was; but Cameron's speech was gone--he could only shake his head mournfully, without replying; and just as the cart entered the village of Waterloo, he laid his head on the breast of the brave and good M'Millan, on whose arm he had reclined, and expired without a sigh.
His faithful follower conveyed the body in by the Namur gate, through which Cameron had that morning ridden forth at the head of his Highlanders, and took it straight to the billet they had occupied in Brussels. As he was obliged to rejoin the regiment without delay for the coming conflict at Waterloo, he made a rough deal coffin, and in this placed the body of his master, brother, and friend--for Cameron had been all these three to the poor Highland private; and thus he interred him, still in his full uniform, by the side of the King's Avenue, on the Ghent road, the Allee Verte. This was on the evening of Saturday, the 17th of June. The body was conveyed to its hastily-made tomb, in a common cart, for poor Ewen could afford nothing better; and the only persons who accompanied him were the landlord of the billet, an honest Belgian, and three wounded Highlanders, who, with their open scars, had tottered out of Brussels to pay the last tribute to him they loved so well, and had followed so long.
"Your lordships will see in the enclosed lists," says Wellington, in a dispatch to the Treasury, dated Orville, 25th June, "the names of some most valuable officers lost to His Majesty's service. Among them, I cannot avoid to mention Colonel Cameron, of the 92nd Regiment, and Colonel Sir H. Ellis of the 23rd, to whose conduct I have frequently called your lordships' attention, and who at last fell, distinguishing themselves at the head of the brave troops which they commanded. Notwithstanding the glory of the occasion, it is impossible not to lament such men, both on account of the public and as friends."
Such was the eulogium of Wellington!
When Cameron was lying dead in the hospital of Gemappe, there was found in the pocket of his Highland regimentals a touching memento, illustrative of his character, and more honourable even than the trophies of battle which he bore on his breast; viz., a pocket-book, containing the names of all the Highland soldiers who had come with him from his father's lands and from Lochaber; marking those whom he had promoted, and those who were dead; for he counted many of them as his clansmen and kindred, and had ever looked after the interests and welfare of them all as if they had been the children of his own hearth, and he had carried this list with him in all his battles, for it was dated at Alexandria, in Egypt, 24th September, 1801.
A captain of an English regiment was buried near him; and there in that lonely place the graves lay undisturbed until the month of April, 1816. In that year the colonel's brother, Captain Peter Cameron, of the Balcarris, came to Brussels, accompanied by Ewen M'Millan, who led him to the well-remembered place, where the graves lay, near three trees at a corner of the Allee Verte. The colonel's remains were exhumed, placed within another coffin, and brought to Leith; from whence a king's ship conveyed them to his native Lochaber, where a grand Highland funeral was prepared.
From Fassifern the remains of the colonel were borne for five miles, on the shoulders of his friends and clansmen, to the old kirkyard of Kilmalie, where, in presence of 3000 Highlanders, his aged father, then verging on his eightieth year, laid his head in the grave a second time, while the pipes played a lament; and now he sleeps in his native earth by the tomb of the MacLauchlans, the _Leine Chrios_ of Locheil. Donald Cameron, his chief, was in attendance, with Barra, Barcaldine, and Glencoe, and seventy gentlemen of the clans dined in honour of the occasion, at the Inn of Maryburgh.
Old Highlanders yet tell how sadly and how solemnly on that day the march of _Gille Chriosd_ rang in the great glen of Caledonia, and yet remember the dirge composed on that occasion by _Ailean Dall_, or "Blind Allan," the bard of the chieftain of Glengarry--perhaps the last of the family bards in the Scottish Highlands.
In consideration of his son's brilliant services, the venerable Ewen of Fassifern received a baronetcy, and in Kilmalie a monument has been raised above the grave of the hero of Arriverette. Its epitaph is from the pen of Sir Walter Scott, and is remarkable for the elegance of its expression:--
"Sacred to the memory of Colonel John Cameron, eldest son of Ewen Cameron of Fassifern, Bart., whose mortal remains, transported from the field of glory where he died, rest here with those of his forefathers. During twenty years of active military service, with a spirit which knew no fear, and shunned no danger, he accompanied or led, in marches, sieges, and battles, the 92nd Regiment of Scottish Highlanders, always to honour and always to victory; and at length, in the 42nd year of his age, upon the memorable 16th June, 1815, was slain in command of that corps, while actively contributing to achieve the decisive victory of Waterloo, which gave peace to Europe. Thus closing his military career with the long and eventful struggle, in which his services had been so often distinguished; he _died_, lamented by that unrivalled general, to whose long train of success he had so often contributed; by his country, from which he had repeatedly received marks of the highest consideration, and by his sovereign, who graced his surviving family with those marks of honour which could not follow, to this place, him whom they were designed to commemorate. _Reader, call not his fate untimely, who, thus honoured and lamented, closed a life of fame by a death of glory!_"
Few of Camerons old comrades now survive. I know of only three officers and four privates living of the regiment which, between the 27th August, 1799, and the 18th June, 1815, had lost, in killed and wounded, 117 officers and 1634 men. After being discharged, Ewen M'Millan (who could never learn one word of English) died, in 1840, at Callart, the seat of Cameron's brother, and he now sleeps by his old master's side at Kilmalie. He it is whose memory Scott has embalmed in his "_Dance of Death_," and--
"Who for many a day Had followed stout and stern, Where through battles, rout, and reel, Storm of shot and hedge of steel, Led the grandson of Lochiel, Valiant Fassifern!
Though steel and shot he leads no more, Low laid 'mid friends' and foemen's gore But long his native lake's wild shore, And Suinart rough, and high Ardgower, And Morven long and tell;
And proud Bennevis hear with awe, How, upon Bloody Quatre Bras, Brave Cameron heard the wild hurrah Of conquest, as he fell!"
Riddled with wounds, Colonel Donald M'Donald of Inch, Knight of St. Vladimir, died in 1830, and is interred at Edinburgh; Lieutenant Winchester died there in 1846. Captain Campbell died, by leaping over a window, with a pistol in each hand, to chastise a person who had insulted him; some have died as emigrants among the wilds of the far West; many more are lying near Uppark, in Jamaica, where the close-ranked headstones show where 1300 of the Gordon Highlanders are sleeping far from their native hills; and now Paymaster Gordon, and Lieutenants Ewen Ross, John Grant, and Alexander Gordon alone survive to wear the _war decoration_.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 3: As an example of the number of _officers_ belonging to the clans, who served during the war and escaped its slaughter, we may state that there were on full and half-pay commissions, in 1816, 22 Buchanans; 67 Camerons; 22 Drummonds; 26 Fergusons; 41 Forbeses; 49 Grahames; 90 Frazers; 96 Grants; 144 M'Leans and M'Kenzies; 248 Campbells; and other names in the same proportion.]
[Footnote 4: MS. Records, 92nd Highlanders.]
[Footnote 5: Lieutenant Hope, 92nd.]
[Footnote 6: "Record:" Lyon Court, Edinburgh.]
[Footnote 7: Note of his services furnished to author from Horse Guards.]
SIR SAMUEL GREIG.
Sir Samuel Greig, Governor of Cronstadt, Admiral of all the Russias, and commonly called _the Father of the Russian Navy_, was a Scotsman of humble but respectable parentage, and was born at the ancient seaport town of Inverkeithing, in Fifeshire, on the 30th of November, 1735.[8] He was educated by the parochial schoolmaster, who lived long to boast of his pupil, for the Domini would seem to have been still alive when the old statistical account of Scotland was published in 1794.
When very young, Samuel Greig entered the British navy, and at an early age obtained the rank of lieutenant. In 1759 he served with the fleet of Admiral Sir Edward Hawke, C.B. (afterwards Lord Hawke), when blockading the harbour of Brest, where a fine French fleet lay, under the pennant of the Marquis de Conflans. At that time a double invasion of Britain (one by the way of Scotland, the other on the coast of England) was threatened; but Commodore Boys blocked up Dunkirk, and Rodney bombarded Havre-de-Grace, while the French transports and flat-bottomed boats lay inactive in Brest, with the fleet of M. de Conflans; till a violent storm in autumn, having driven the ships of Sir Edward Hawke into Torbay, the marquis put to sea with twenty-one sail of the line and four frigates, and threw all England into consternation.
With twenty sail of the line, Hawke left Torbay, and came up with the French fleet between Belleisle and Cape Quiberon, close in on the coast of France, and in the desperate conflict which ensued, "young Greig," though a subaltern, is said to "have eminently distinguished himself." The battle began at two o'clock, P.M., on the 20th of November.
Sir Edward, in the _Royal George_, 110, lay alongside De Conflans in the _Soleil Royale_, 80, which was soon driven on shore and burned. He then lay alongside the _Thesee_, and sent her to the bottom by one broadside. _La Superbe_ shared the same fate; the _Juste_ was sunk off the mouth of the Loire; the _Hero_ was burned; and thus M. de Conflans was totally defeated. Nothing saved the rest of his fleet from irretrievable ruin but the shadow of a tempestuous night, in which two British ships of the line were lost. Lieutenant Greig served with the fleet in all its operations, during the long cruise off the coast of Bretagne, and the blockade of the river Vilaine, to prevent seven French ships which lay there from joining Conflans, whose battered squadron had reached Rochefort; but so dangerous were the storms, and so incessantly tempestuous the weather, that the fear of invasion passed away. Sir Edward Hawke was at length recalled, and the thanks of Parliament and a pension were awarded to him. In this war the British destroyed, or took twenty-seven French ships of the line and thirty-one frigates. Six of their vessels perished. Thus, in all they lost sixty-four sail, while Britain, by every casualty, lost only seven line-of-battle ships and five frigates.
The next scene of Greig's service was at the capture of several of the West India Islands.
War having been declared against the Spaniards, an attack on their settlements in the West Indies was arranged, and Martinico, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, and Grenada were taken. Then Cuba was assailed. Greig was with the fleet, consisting of nineteen sail of the line, eighteen frigates, and 150 transports, which had 10,000 soldiers on board, and sailed for Cuba under Admiral Sir George Pocoke, K.B., whose commodore was the Hon. Augustus Keppel, raised to the peerage in 1782.
The energy and exertions of Lieutenant Greig, during that tremendous cannonading which preceded the siege and capture of the Moro Castle, elicited the praise of his commander; but no promotion followed, for the time was unfavourable for either Scotsmen or Irishmen rising in the British service. After incredible exertions, difficulties, danger, and slaughter, Havannah was captured, with 180 miles of coast; the Puntal Castle, the ships in the harbour, three millions sterling of booty, and an immense quantity of arms, artillery, and stores were surrendered to the British. Greig's share of this enormous prize-money was very small, being somewhere about 80_l._
Lieutenant Greig served in many other engagements during that successful war; and his bravery, activity, and skill as a seaman had so frequently elicited particular attention, that after the treaty of peace which was signed at Paris in February, 1763, under Lord Bute's administration, when the Court of St. Petersburg requested that a few British officers of distinguished ability might be sent to improve the Russian fleet, Greig was one of the _five_ who were first selected, and his rank as lieutenant in the navy of Russia was confirmed by the Empress Catherine II., in 1764. The only stipulation he and the others made was, that they were to have the power of returning to the British service whenever they chose.
Russia, since the beginning of the seventeenth century, has ever been an excellent field for Scottish talent and valour. Thus Greig, by his superior skill in naval affairs, his intelligence and diligent discharge of the duties entrusted to him, soon attracted the special notice of the Imperial Government, and the Empress appointed him a captain in her fleet. He drew many other Scotsmen around him, and, with these, he was at incredible pains to teach the half-barbarous and wholly unlettered Russians the science of seamanship and the art of gunnery, in all of which they were very deficient, "and he rapidly raised the Russian naval service to a degree of respectability and importance which it never before had attained."
In 1769, when he was in his thirty-fourth year, a war broke out between Russia and Turkey, consequent on the civil strife which religious intolerance had kindled in Poland. The Czarina marched in her troops; and while pretending that her sole object was to rescue one body of Polish citizens from the tyranny of the other, she secretly sought to enslave them all, and render their country a province of the Russian empire.
The growing greatness of the latter had alarmed its old hereditary enemy, the Grand Seignior, who required Catherine immediately to withdraw her troops from the Polish republic. Evasions were given, and conflicts began between the Russian and Turkish outposts, on the borders of the Ottoman empire, until the sack of Balta, in Lesser Tartary, and a general massacre of its inhabitants, by the soldiers of the Czarina, procured the committal of her ambassador to the Castle of the Seven Towers, in October, 1769; and hostilities, which were only suspended by the rigour of the season, began early in the spring of the ensuing year.
Captain Greig was appointed commodore of the fleet which was to sail for the Mediterranean, under Alexis Count Orloff; and in that ample arena of service he had an opportunity of displaying his zeal and intrepidity in such a manner as led to his immediate promotion to the rank of flag-officer.
A partial breaking up of the ice in the Baltic enabled some of the fleet to sail; and so early as the 14th of January, 1770, one part of the armament, under the Scottish admiral Elphinstone, consisting of one 70-gun ship, two of sixty guns each, and five others, arrived at Spithead, _en route_ for the Archipelago.
The other division, of twenty-two sail of the line, reached Port Mahon, in Minorca, so early as the 4th of January; and by the 6th of March appeared off Cephalonia, the largest of the Ionian Isles, and, with a fair wind, bore away directly for the Morea. At Minorca they left some vessels to wait for Elphinstone, who left Spithead on the 14th of April, passed Gibraltar on the 4th of May, and before the end of July had twice defeated the Turkish fleet--on one occasion encountering three times his force, and destroying eight ships; on the second occasion, with nineteen ships, encountering Giafar Bey, with twenty-three. Giafar's largest ships were destroyed, and his fleet dispersed.
In the great battle of the 6th of July, Greig, Mackenzie, and other officers in the Russian fleet, had an opportunity of eminently rendering good and gallant service; and by their energy and skill the world now saw a naval force, which, as Cormick says, had issued from the foot of the Baltic, able "to shake the remotest parts of the Mediterranean, to intercept the trade of the Levant, to excite and support the insurrection of the Greek Christians, and to leave nothing of the vast empire of their enemies free from alarm and confusion."