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REBECCA WEAVER˜HIGHTOWER
Frontier
Fictions
SETTLER SAGAS AND POSTCOLONIAL GUILT
Frontier Fictions
Rebecca Weaver-Hightower
Frontier Fictions
Settler Sagas and Postcolonial Guilt
Rebecca Weaver-Hightower
North Dakota State University
Fargo, ND, USA
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
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For Marcus
Acknowledgements
They say it takes a village to raise a child; it has taken more than a village
to write this book. To all of you who have helped my research and writ-
ing or provided inspiration and influence, please know that I am grateful.
You are too many to thank in this space. But I would like to call out the
following for special thanks:
vii
viii Acknowledgements
Index 235
ix
List of Figures
Fig. 1.1 The walls surrounding the historic Lower Fort Garry site
in Manitoba (Picture by the author) 3
Fig. 1.2 The empty tepee visitors pass to visit the Lower Fort Garry
site in Manitoba (Picture by the author) 4
Fig. 1.3 The frontispiece to Conquering the Wilderness… by Colonel
Frank Triplett presents its own settler fantasy 6
Fig. 2.1 Settler and Aboriginal Family Round a Fire, South Australia by
Edward Russell (Reproduced courtesy of the National Library
of Australia, collection number an5880827) 57
Fig. 2.2 A Native Family of New South Wales Sitting Down on an
English Settlers Farm, by Augustus Earle (Reproduced
courtesy of the National Library of Australia, collection
number an2818442-v) 58
Fig. 3.1 Still from the American “Crying Indian” Keep American
Beautiful public service announcement of 1971 82
Fig. 4.1 Peaceable Kingdom (1834), the version housed in the National
Gallery of Art in Washington, DC (US) and a detail from the
background of the same painting, showing the painting’s
animal analogy 123
Fig. 4.2 Peaceable Kingdom (1834), the version housed in the National
Gallery of Art in Washington, DC (US) and a detail from
the background of the same painting, showing the painting’s
human analogy 124
Fig. 5.1 An 1871 illustrated edition from Kingsley’s The Lost Child 173
xi
xii List of Figures
Fig. 5.2 The Little Wanderers, William Strutt’s painting of the living
Duff children resembling a postmortem drawing
(Reproduced courtesy of the National Library of Australia,
collection number 3240607) 174
Fig. 5.3 A photograph by Jose Maria Mora of an unknown deceased
girl, posed as if asleep out in nature 175
Fig. A.1 Still from the YouTube video “Inside Voortrekker
Monument, Day of the Vow” that shows the cenotaph, the
shaft of sunlight, and the crowd of onlookers 200
Introduction: “Sorry Books”
and the Guilt That Never Goes Away
xiii
xiv INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY
the first settlers’ hardship. Yet Need’s very next sentence complicates this
justification by acknowledging the prior existence of indigenous peo-
ple. The rest of his surveying party, he explains, was roasting “a haunch
of venison, bought of an Indian, as usual” (54). These “Indians” from
whom his men “as usual” buy meat were already present on the land
Need claims for his own.2 This prior existence, even if Need does not
acknowledge it, would have meant inhabitance, if not ownership.3 These
two juxtaposed sentences—one justifying Need’s ownership and the next
undermining it—show the competing demands settlers like Need had
to manage: while writing their own ownership into existence, they had
to account for the prior presence of indigenous people on the land they
want to claim, but in such a way that their settler ownership would not
be endangered.
Need presents an even clearer example of this cognitive dissonance a
year later:
experience guilt. Instead Frontier Fictions argues that texts like Need’s
would not have worked so hard to depict the heroic settler as undis-
puted landowner if doubt were not already circulating. Examining guilt
requires some nuance, though. Unlike Need’s account, protagonists of
most settler texts do not ponder being intruders. Instead, as this book
will illustrate, most reveal guilty thoughts and feelings through echoes,
efforts to bury or disguise them, and translucent fantasies that only par-
tially cloak the ghostly contours underneath.
As I have shared bits of this research in the decade it took to write
this book, I often encountered two responses. Some listeners patiently
explained that of course settlers felt guilt and wrote about it (as if this book
and its examination were unnecessary). These scholars reminded that guilt
over colonization and settlement is clearly visible in the work of writers
like Thomas Pringle, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and others, as well as in the
work of benevolence and missionary societies. These texts not only indi-
cate an awareness that wrongs have been committed against indigenous
peoples, but also often express some level of culpability for those wrongs.
On the other hand, other listeners patiently explained that of course set-
tlers did not feel guilty (as if this book and its examination were anachro-
nistic). Guilt and feelings of responsibility for the treatment of indigenous
peoples, they said, are twentieth/twenty-first-century responses that I am
imposing on nineteenth-century people, who did not see indigenous peo-
ple as human or understand colonization as a form of invasion.
Frontier Fictions walks a line in the middle of these two reactions. It
recognizes authors on both poles, those who much discussed guilt and
those who completely ignored it, paying the greatest attention, as I will
explain, to texts that fall in between. Frontier Fictions examines how
ordinary settlers, perhaps not fully conscious of guilty feelings, expressed
ambivalence in subtle, indirect ways—misgivings flashing onto the pages
of otherwise typical settlement narratives. Thus this book conceptual-
izes guilt not just as the reaction of a few progressives with greater than
average sensitivity and insight, but as an understandable—even predict-
able—reaction to an emotionally difficult circumstance. Historians like
Henry Reynolds have likewise archived examples of ordinary people
expressing reservations about the morality of settlement, such as when
a Port Philip settler wrote in the 1840s “this right to Australia is a sore
subject with many of the British settlers… and they strive to satisfy their
consciences in various ways” (Frontier: Reports from the Edge of White
Settlement 162). Such direct discussions of guilty consciences are few and
xvi INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY
far between. But one can only speculate how many more people expe-
rienced pangs of conscience than those with the literacy skills and time
to record them. Writing is all the evidence contemporary scholars have
to uncover complicated historical responses to colonization, so we must
unearth underlying guilt by analyzing stories that recur in text after text
about settlers and settlement, stories that betray all the hallmarks of what
psychologists and psychoanalysts call “defense mechanisms.”
Frontier Fictions, in focusing on narrative defense mechanisms, is a
book about psychological guilt and all the ways literature can provide
means to defend against that guilt. As I have indicated above, nine-
teenth-century European settlers and their descendants were and are
wrestling with complicated and often un(der)expressed guilt inherent in
the colonizing process, which throughout this book I refer to as “set-
tler guilt,” a state of mind that can be historically situated but that is
ongoing. The fields of settler colonial studies and postcolonial studies
would benefit from paying greater attention to settler guilt, especially to
how literature expresses and interacts with it.4 A greater understanding
of settler guilt will result in a more nuanced awareness of settlement as a
transnational, historic and contemporary phenomenon and appreciation
of literature as part of that culture. By reading texts like Catherine Parr
Traill’s Backwoods of Canada or Marcus Clarke’s For the Terms of His
Natural Life in terms of their expressions of or denials of psychological
guilt, we gain insight into the historic and contemporary transnational
situation that we call “settlement.”
Frontier Fictions investigates how the narrative tropes this book exam-
ines—the heroic settler, the “doomed” native, the coveted landscape, the
allegorical animal, and the lost child—together function to justify settle-
ment and so appear in texts across settler cultures. By exploring com-
monalities among settler cultures, this book recognizes that the settler
experience includes wrestling with guilt, even if denying it. These com-
monalities lead to studying settlement and its fantasy of legitimacy hori-
zontally across time and space instead of vertically as a phase in a nation’s
development, or as Patrick Wolfe recommends in “Settler Colonialism
and the Elimination of the Native,” as a structure, not an event—a
phrase that has become a touchstone of settler colonial studies and one
that grounds this study. And as a structure and not an accomplished
event, settlement as it continues must be reasserted, defended, and legit-
imized, even hundreds of years after its initial acts, since those of us liv-
ing in the nations that evolved from settler colonies are still existing in
INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY xvii
this structure and are thus still settlers. Recognizing that settlement must
still be asserted, however, positions it as a structure that can be inter-
rupted or dismantled in the service of indigenous survivance, not as an
inevitability.5
By signing our name to this book we are recording our regret for the
injustice suffered by Indigenous Australians as a result of European settle-
ment; In particular the effect of government policy on the human dignity
and spirit of Indigenous Australians. We are recording our desire for rec-
onciliation and for a better future for all our peoples. By signing this book
we are demonstrating a commitment to a united Australia, which values
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritage, and provides justice and
equity for all.
Over one year, half a million Australians signed the over five hundred
Sorry Books and wrote further statements.6
Most of the statements added to the Sorry Books express regret and
communal guilt, like:
To be Australian is not to deny our history, which has shaped our Nation.
To be Australian is to accept what has happened in the past and to learn
from past events, in an effort to grow and develop our nation. I am
extremely ashamed and sorry for the mistreatment of Aboriginal people
and I would not only like to express my shame but also my hope that such
events will never again occur.
Indeed, much of the novel involves Thornhill dealing with the psy-
chological conundrum and the resulting guilt from settling already
inhabited land. When Thornhill sees evidence of indigenous crops, for
instance, he convinces himself that the plants grow wild. Then, when he
sees that “some other man had set foot here, worked it with his pick,” he
denies that fact, telling his son that animals had dug the dirt (140). But
indigenous ownership of the land Thornhill covets keeps being asserted.
He discovers rock paintings of a fish and his boat, evidence of contin-
ued indigenous habitation, since the paintings portray his own recent
arrival. Thornhill has an epiphany: “It came to him that this might look
an empty place, but … this place was no more empty than a parlour in
London, from which the master of the house had just stepped into the
bedroom. He might not be seen, but he was there” (206). Yet Thornhill
continues to pretend to himself and others that the indigenous claim
does not exist. And, when he cannot deny it any longer, he participates
in a communal massacre of the indigenous people, in an attempt to erase
them from “his” site—and psyche. The book’s ending shows, however,
that Thornhill’s guilt over these actions haunts him the rest of his life.
By imagining the thoughts of settlers, Grenville resurrects a nineteenth-
century settler guilt that has remained largely unrecorded. Similar efforts
have been made in the work of historians like Henry Reynolds, who have
labored to include the erased and denied violence of colonization in
Australia’s historic record.9 Grenville’s work to understand how “taking
land” became recast as “taking up land” parallels the work of this “sorry
book,” the one you are now reading; for Frontier Fictions takes as its aim
the recovery of the (often) unexpressed settler guilt of settlers and the
unpacking of the stories they and their descendants tell to sanitize colonial
violence. My argument is that we need not rely on contemporary novelists
like Grenville to imagine nineteenth-century settler guilt; instead we can
read the nineteenth-century literature itself for evidence, through the nar-
ratives that emerge as tropes across the settler corpus.
My third reason for interest in The Secret River concerns how it func-
tioned within early twenty-first century Australia’s wrestling with its own
continued settlement. The Secret River sparked the public’s imagination,
becoming a critically acclaimed best seller, adapted into a successful play
and film. The novel provided a cultural touchstone for a nation that
needed to have a conversation post-Mabo and work through its settler
guilt. Marguerite Nolan and Robert Clarke, in fact, show in “Reading
The Secret River” how it encouraged public debate about postcolonial
xxii INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY
reconciliation. The Secret River is not alone in this work. The American
Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Canadian Thomas
King’s Green Grass, Running Water, and South African JM Coetzee’s
Disgrace all examine contemporary culpability and reoccurring narratives
of legitimacy.10 In some cases, as with the DVD of the Australian film
Rabbit Proof Fence (from Doris Pilkington’s book), which includes mate-
rials for discussion groups, the spurring of public debate about reconcil-
iation seems deliberate. Frontier Fictions argues that these texts, through
these conversations, aided the management of settler guilt not only of
writers but also of readers, who—through the novels—confronted,
explored, and sometimes denied their own settler guilt.
These recent texts present an apt analogy for the work of settler stories
in the nineteenth century, which also aided the confrontation, explora-
tion, and denial of guilt. However, evidence of the cultural and psycho-
logical work being performed by the nineteenth-century novels is not
always as clear with contemporary texts like The Secret River. Some texts
this book examines, like Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, were widely
read in their own time, but many were not. So the evidence is subtle and
elusive, as I attempt to recover reader responses without book reviews
of the day, historical studies of readership, or evidence that settlers were
reading each other’s work.11 Thus my focus on nineteenth-century texts
is often on what these stories of settler contact tell us about authors
struggling with feelings about settlement instead of on readers who I
can only suppose existed. My exploration, then, relies, as I will explain,
on the texts themselves and the repeated tropes they contain—stories
of heroic settlers, “doomed” natives, coveted land, allegorical animals,
and lost children—which repeat across four settler cultures, over two
centuries and beyond, because of the emotional release they provided and
continue to provide.
Spaces of Settlement
My explication of common tropes in nineteenth and twentieth/
twenty-first-century settler tales in order to better understand the
Anglophone settler experience demands that I cut a broad swath in
my analysis. Like James Belich in Replenishing the Earth: The Settler
Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo World, 1783–1939, I am fasci-
nated by the explosion of Anglo-settler colonies across the globe. And
like other texts of settler colonial studies, this project is comparative.12
INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY xxiii
cultures and chronologies but also across various forms of media, includ-
ing print media but also paintings, book illustrations, television shows,
films, advertisements, monuments, museum exhibits, and tourist sites.
Such crossover is warranted, for, as Tanya Dalziell aptly explains in Settler
Romances and the Australian Girl, “the role popular texts played in the
production of settlers’ consent to colonial projects cannot be underesti-
mated” (6).
Frontier Fictions furthers the discussion of the settler experience by
looking at similarities in expression across time and space in order to
better understand the ambivalences of the settler psyche horizontally
as a continued experience of colonization, not vertically as a teleologi-
cal completed phase in a nation’s development. As such, the line of this
book’s argument tends to be more triangular than linear, as I compare
what a particular literary text says, what its author wrote and said else-
where, and the historical and cultural context in which the text was pro-
duced. Only by looking at a text as part of an interconnected triangle can
one see what it leaves out, alludes to, represses, denies, or deflects.
that the harmful act one committed was not justified” (“Collective Guilt”
2–3); but, in contrast, collective guilt, Branscombe and Doosje explain in a
related publication, “stems from the distress that group members experience
when they accept that their ingroup is responsible for immoral actions that
harmed another group” (Collective Guilt: International Perspectives 3). That
is, collective guilt need not involve participation in harm-doing; one only
needs to feel allegiance to or membership in the group responsible for the
harm-doing. As already introduced, Frontier Fictions further expands the
idea of collective guilt to “persistent collective guilt,” as a state of ontologi-
cal and moral guilt for an ancestor’s actions.
To better discuss this range of individual emotional responses to collec-
tive guilt, I propose a typology of four categories: Sensitivity, Ambivalence,
Disavowal, and Blindness, which can be seen in the expressions in the
Sorry Books already referenced as well as in the texts Frontier Fictions
will analyze. The first category, Sensitivity, is evident in articulation of
emotional guilt (and shame about oneself and culture in response to that
guilt). History is full of examples of Sensitivity and of texts written with
political aims or as part of benevolence movements, by intellectuals, activ-
ists, and abolitionists of slavery and colonization, including well-stud-
ied writers like Thomas Pringle and Harriet Beecher Stowe. The second
category, Ambivalence, can be characterized as the experience of emo-
tional guilt without full awareness and articulation of it. Guilt emerges
in Ambivalent writing as authors struggle with feelings they cannot quite
understand or admit, some denying these feelings, and others expressing
them in indirect ways. Many ordinary settlers, like Thomas Need, with
whom I began this introduction, display Ambivalence. My third category,
Disavowal, comes from the recognition that guilt exists with others but
the denial of it in oneself. Narratives of Disavowal are often bombastically
nationalistic, evoking indigenous people who are either absent or simplis-
tically evil. And the fourth category, Blindness, comes from the absence of
awareness of guilt in oneself or others and thus a lack of contemplation or
writing about it (though I might argue that we find hints of guilt in the
conspicuous absence of some topics). Distinction between being Blind or
Disavowing in relationship to guilt comes through a person’s response to
the issue of guilt. The Blind person would be confused (Why would they
feel guilty?) while a Disavowing person would be overly assertive of a lack
of guilt, indicating strong defensive feelings behind the denial.
These categories are not necessarily discrete or fixed. People can shift
relationship to guilt within their lifetime and even within the same nar-
rative. Though all are important, this book focuses on Ambivalence and
xxx INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY
Disavowal, where the writing provides the most insight into the com-
plicated settler position. Frontier Fictions does not focus on Sensitive
texts that obviously express guilt and have been the focus of much liter-
ary criticism already or Blind texts that omit discussion or even recogni-
tion of guilt. Ambivalent and Disavowing texts are both more revealing
and representative of the larger society as it debates and weighs its
conscience.
Unpacking expressions of guilt in settlement narratives and under-
standing how they function for individuals and the larger culture requires
the psychoanalytic concepts of defense mechanisms. Psychologists and
psychoanalysts explain that people respond to feelings of guilt by tell-
ing themselves stories that defend against or release psychological and
emotional discomfort. The repeated, cross-cultural narratives threaded
throughout settler literatures function as defense mechanisms, allow-
ing an individual and a culture to recast the violence of settlement into
something else.
As one might expect, this book draws upon the work of Sigmund
Freud and other psychoanalyts, but my use here, is, as Anne McClintock
explains in Imperial Leather, a “situated psychoanalysis.” That is, Freud
was able, better than anyone, to recognize and theorize the complexities
of the modern condition because he was both an analyst and product
of his time (nineteenth-century colonial-era Europe). I, like other critics,
find his work useful for describing the tangled thoughts and emotions
that grow out of the complicated self/other dynamic that was exacer-
bated by the empire.22 Certainly, as this book argues, inherent in impe-
rial expansion is underlying ontological and emotional guilt; and Freud’s
theories of responses to guilt, though he doesn’t make this connection
himself, make sense as a product of deeply ambivalent colonialism as well
as descriptor of it.
It was Sigmund Freud’s daughter, Anna Freud, however, who fully
theorized defense mechanisms in The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense
(but again not connecting the behavior she witnessed to the impe-
rial world in which they lived), arguing that defense mechanisms must
operate on the subconscious level to be effective in reducing anxiety.
Psychologists since then have identified scores of defense mechanisms;
but the mechanisms that most show up in the literature Frontier Fictions
examines nevermind repression (trying to keep an unpleasant occurrence
from conscious thought), denial (manipulating perceptions to exclude
something unpleasant), identification (attributing to oneself the desired
INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY xxxi
The accounts Frontier Fictions analyzes allow authors and readers to play
out one drama through another in order to manage painful feelings of
guilt resulting from conflict with indigenous people. Like the Rat Man rit-
ualistically repeating his narrative in real life and in analytic sessions, tales
of settler heroes, doomed natives, welcoming animals, tamed landscapes,
and lost children are told (with slight variation) over and over in novels
and accounts of settlement. These stories mark a compulsion to manage
colonization’s many anxieties, but because the defense mechanisms are
never entirely successful at warding off the stressors—difficult work for
any single book, poem, story, diary, or account—and because the messy
work of settlement continues, the mechanisms must be repeated in tale
after tale, in futile attempt for the stress of settlement to fade away.
The Chapters
Frontier Fictions is organized into five chapters and a conclusion, with
each chapter focusing on reading one of what Robert Shohat and Ella
Stam in Unthinking Eurocentrism have called “tropes of empire,” across
the four settler colonies and the nineteenth century, with twentieth and
twenty-first-century examples brought in where relevant. This thematic
organization emphasizes the commonalities of the settler experience and
the similar archetypal stories repeated in each place as part of managing a
common settler guilt. One of the chief values of this study is in the con-
nections it draws: among these four settled spaces, among the many texts
it reads (some never before juxtaposed or discussed), among what seem
to be disparate forms (nonfiction, fiction, television, film, poetry, art, dia-
ries, monuments, etc.), and among interrelated but not typically linked
narrative genres.
The book’s first two chapters juxtapose contact settlers’ stories of their
own lives with stories of the lives of their Others, the people indigenous
to the space being settled. Chapter 1, “The Settler Saga” explores rep-
resentations of contact settler life, like Catherine Parr Traill’s Canadian
tale, Backwoods of Canada (1836); James Fenimore Cooper’s story of
the American frontier in The Deerslayer (1841); John Robinson’s South
African narrative, George Linton or the First Years of an English Colony
(1876); and Marcus Clarke’s account of Australian convicts, For the Term
of His Natural Life (which was published serially from 1870–1872 but
as a novel in 1874). I argue that these novels present a version of the
settler experience as a heroic saga, downplaying or erasing conflict with
xxxiv INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY
indigenous peoples to focus on the settler’s journey from the old home
to the new one and struggle to conquer the land. In this way, these
stories participate in cultural denial, facilitating the disavowal of vio-
lence inherent in imperial conquest and the indigenous victims of that
violence. As well, Settler Sagas provide a means of identifying with the
victim, since instead of being perpetrator of colonial violence, the set-
tler becomes victim of it, most often at the hands of the English colonial
establishment. In this way, too, the settler becomes depicted as the Good
Settler and someone else as the Bad Settler, another important defense
mechanism.
The book’s second chapter, “The Doomed Native,” analyzes stories
of the contact settler’s interaction with the indigene in various spaces—
the settler’s land, the native’s land, or disputed territory. Tales like
American Emerson Bennett’s Forest and Prairie or Life on the Frontier
(1860), Thomas M’Combie’s The Colonist in Australia or the Adventures
of Godfrey Arabin (1850), Alexander Davis’s South African narrative
Umbandine: A Romance of Swaziland (1898), and John Cunningham
Geikie’s Adventures in Canada, or, Life in the Woods (1864) often depict
indigenes as already tragically doomed to eradication from forces out-
side of the settler’s control, therefore releasing the contact settler from
guilt and responsibility for genocide. Other stories portray the indige-
nous person as violent and unscrupulous, as being unfit for involvement
in “civilization.” These narratives function both as vehicles of denial and
projection (allowing the subject to project negative feelings onto some-
one else; “I hate him” becomes “He hates me,” or “I wish he would
die” becomes “he wants me to die”). This chapter also includes analysis
of captivity narratives, which though typically discussed as an American
genre, exist in all four nations.
The book’s final three chapters include stories about the landscape,
animals, and children, all as symbolic Others, sometimes representing
an indigenous person, always allowing the settler to assert the legiti-
macy of his ownership of the land. Chapter 3, “Guiltscapes and Coveted
Land,” examines the settler’s interaction with the landscape in texts
like Catherine Parr Traill’s The Backwoods of Canada (1836), Henry
Kingsley’s Australian novel of settlement, The Recollections of Geoffrey
Hamlyn (1859), John Robinson’s South African tale George Linton or
the First Years of an English Colony (1876), and William Gilmore Simms’
American story The Yemassee: A Romance of Carolina (1835). Instead
of being focused on representations of the landscape per se, this chapter
INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY xxxv
Notes
1. I have discovered other accounts of settlers who wrote about problems
with their settlement. For instance, Kate Grenville explains in Searching
for the Secret River that “among the stories of brutality were others of
honourable, even courageous behavior by settlers. At great cost to him-
self, the ex-convict David Carly in Western Australia in the late nine-
teenth century protested to the authorities about the mistreatment of
Aboriginal people: ‘Again I write to you … from this land of murder and
INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY xxxvii
slavery and fraud … I have defended these murdered Slaves to the best of
my ability for 13 years and to my Complete Ruin so I will defend them
to the last as I have long since given up all hope of aid from any quarter’”
(125). Grenville creates her character Blackwood as a settler who is aware
of the multiple problems his settlement causes and who feels sympathy
for the indigenous people.
2. This study uses the misnomer “Indian” to refer to Native Americans (not
inhabitants of the country of India) where appropriate for the textual dis-
cussion. Most often, though, I refer to original inhabitants of the four
settler spaces I study using the term “indigenous” instead of Aboriginal
or First Nations or other cognates. I also do not use the more specific
designations of different language groups within the four countries under
analysis. The term “indigenous” distinguishes politically and culturally
between the inhabitants of spaces when the European settlers arrived,
who often did not distinguish among different language groups in their
own representations. I use the term “settler” throughout this book to
refer to Europeans of the fifteenth to twentieth centuries who traveled
to spaces with the intention of remaining there. I realize that some of the
indigenous people I discuss were at one time settlers themselves.
3. As I will explore in Chapter 3, a powerful justification for taking land
involved creating what Patricia Seed in her book Ceremonies of Possession
in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 calls “ceremonies of
possession.” For British settlers like Need, farming or gardening the land
was what was necessary to indicate ownership and erase the inhabitance
and ownership of indigenous hunter gatherers.
4. In the decade I have been writing this book, settler colonial studies has
become a recognized subdiscipline with its own journal and (contested)
canonical authors and texts. New books in settler colonial studies are
published monthly, with some of the most important of late including
not just the work of Patrick Wolfe, Lorenzo Veracini, and Mark Rifkin
discussed elsewhere in this chapter, but also including Fiona Bateman
and Lionel Pilkington’s Studies in Settler Colonialism, Lorenzo Veracini
and Edward Cavanagh’s Routledge Handbook of the History of Settler
Colonialism, and Sarah Maddison, Tom Clark, and Ravi de Costa’s The
Limits of Settler Colonial Reconciliation. This book aims to contribute to
this field’s understanding of the settler state of mind, to, as Macoun and
Strakosch suggest “provid[e] non-Indigenous people in settler states with
a better account of ourselves—rather than as an account of the entire set-
tler–Indigenous relationship” (438).
5. In this way, this project responds to emerging criticism that the field
of settler colonial studies is contributing to the enshrining of settler
colonialism as a stable, inevitable structure instead of opening cracks
xxxviii INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY
One cannot deal successfully with the present or the future without under-
standing the past. True understanding comes from experiencing—Black
Creek presents experiences. From the first step onto the wooden boardwalk,
time changes. The smell of cooking, the sound of the blacksmith hammer-
ing on his anvil, the feel of soft fleece, the taste of fresh whole wheat bread
and the sight of crinolined skirts swaying along the pathways, all help to
erase the modern world for awhile. The visitor no longer merely views but
participates—history has become an experience involving all the senses. (11)
Lorraine O’Byrne, foreword to Black Creek Pioneer Village:
Toronto’s Living History Village
Fig. 1.1 The walls surrounding the historic Lower Fort Garry site in Manitoba
(Picture by the author)
4 R. WEAVER-HIGHTOWER
Fig. 1.2 The empty tepee visitors pass to visit the Lower Fort Garry site in
Manitoba (Picture by the author)
This chapter examines stories about the ideal settler, heroic and him-
self indigenous and then stories of the victim settler, abused and deceived,
ending with analysis of the “Good Settler,” successful and benevolent,
a foil to the “Bad Settler.” As I will note at various places throughout
this chapter, prior critics have analyzed some of the texts I examine
(Catherine Parr Traill’s Backwoods of Canada; James Fenimore Cooper’s
The Deerslayer; John Robinson’s George Linton or the First Years of an
English Colony; and Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life),
while other texts (such as Frank Triplett’s Conquering the Wilderness and
Joseph Hilts’s Among the Forest Trees) have nearly been forgotten.
so that, after a time, the subject cannot distinguish the preferred version
from reality. As Cramer explains, “The perceptual system may continue
to function, but it takes second place to the much preferred personal-
ized fantasy” (38). Individuals engaging in this form of denial may insist
that others engage in it, as well. It is not enough that they believe the
fantasy; they need to spread it to others. Though told by settlers writing
in different times on different continents in different settler situations,
the “personal” fantasies in these different books are remarkably similar
because all were in a similar situation of colonial contact. Overall, contact
settler literatures contain a fantasy of a heroic and self-sacrificing settler
that downplays the negative aspects of settlement (fear, doubt, aggres-
sion toward indigenous people). I call this fictional settler a “fantasy set-
tler” and the story in which he exists a “settler fantasy.”
The reality these stories mask was typically far less pleasant.5 In the
United States, for instance, the 1862 Homestead Act encouraged move-
ment into the Western territory by offering 160 acres to those able to
construct a dwelling and farm for five years. Yet conditions were harsh
enough that only half remained the five years, with the rest giving up to
try again or return home to a situation unpleasant enough to cause them
to immigrate in the first place. With little government help and nonexist-
ent social services, life expectancy was short. Even mail was unavailable
to early settlers. Yet, in the settler fantasy, this life of labor turned settlers
into martyrs, and only the worthiest remained to populate the country.
Despite (or because of) these harsh realities, the settler fantasy
endured. By the nineteenth century in the United States and Canada,
a first generation of settlers had been made into celebrities whose sto-
ries created a fantasy embraced by later generations spreading west-
ward across the continent. Much can be said about this influence just
by repeating the lengthy title of one late nineteenth-century American
text by Colonel Frank Triplett, who also authored The Life, Times
and Treacherous Death of Jesse James (1882).6 His text was entitled:
Conquering the Wilderness; or New Pictorial History, Life and Times of the
Pioneer Heroes and Heroines of America, A Full Account of the Romantic
Deeds, Lofty Achievements and Marvelous Adventures of Boone, Kenton,
Clarke, Logan, Harrod, the Wetzel Brothers, the Bradys, Poe, and Thirty
Other Celebrated Frontiersmen and Indian Fighters; Crocket, Houston,
Kit Carson, Buffalo Bill, Wild Bill, and the Famous Plainsmen, Graham
Sutter, Marshall Freemont, Kearsey, and Other Historic Names of the
Pacific Coast with Picturesque Sketches of Border Life, Past and Present,
6 R. WEAVER-HIGHTOWER
river in the distance can be seen a tiny herd of bison and group of tepees.
The wagon train will bypass the Indians, which do not or cannot p resent
significant obstacles in this “march” predestined to succeed (which I
explicate in Chapter 3).
Into this larger frontispiece scene are inserted two smaller circular
vignettes, one labeled “Kentucky” with a man in buckskin on a ledge
above a river pointing off into the distance, as if indicating to his com-
panion the direction he is planning to travel. The other vignette labe-
led “California” shows two men wading in a stream panning for gold
beside a tent, with the ocean and a ship in the background, likely carry-
ing other immigrants to shore to try their luck. Significantly, none of the
images of “the march of destiny” include cities, towns, or even recog-
nizable figures. The frontispiece gives three different approximations of
people in the midst of settling, not yet success stories. Instead the image
encapsulates the settler fantasy of a nation of people “destined” to be
successful, but in the midst of doing the hard work of settling. To return
to Cramer’s language, this image encapsulates Tripplett’s personal fan-
tasy, which, through the publication of the book, he endeavors to make
a national fantasy.8 I will return to this idea of the personal fantasy
expressed in narrative throughout this chapter, as I examine writers cre-
ating stories of settlement in their novels that directly counter the reali-
ties they would have witnessed around them, thus marking the stories as
defense mechanisms.
Settler Self-Sacrifice
Also part of the fantasy is that the noble and self-sacrificing settler is
doing the hard work of colonizing for the benefit of future generations.
As I will show, this depiction of the settler as a victim for his own future
progeny is a defense mechanism of identification (taking on desired
characteristics of an Other). By presenting himself as a victim, the set-
tler defends himself from blame for harm committed toward indigenous
Others, who are, one might argue, the real victims of the settlement
project.
This notion of the self-sacrificing settler is introduced in the preface
to Joseph Henry Hilts’ 1888 Canadian Settler Saga Among the Forest
Trees: Or How the Bushman Family Got Their Homes. In his other pub-
lished text, Experiences of a Backwoods Preacher or Facts and Incidents
Culled from Thirty Years of a Ministerial Life (1892), Hilts explains that
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Feeney disdained to answer. Presently Major Inuki appeared again
and announced guilelessly:
“Gentlema’—my dear fren’s, our gen’ral express himself prepare to
greet your illustrious peersonages—one and every one—in his
quarters at once. Would you be deigned to follow my poor
leadership?”
“Holy Father!—where’s my dress-suit?” Feeney asked with a start.
“Such an honor does not increase our chances for watching the next
battle at close-range,” observed Finacune.
Nookie-san led them through the dust past innumerable battalions,
until on a rising trail the sentries became as thick as fire-flies. After a
twenty-minute walk they reached the summit of a commanding hill.
At the entrance of a large tent paper-lanterns were hung, and below
in the light Kuroki’s staff was gathered. Felicitations endured for
several moments; then an inspired hush dominated all. The flap of
the tent was drawn aside, and a small, gray-haired man of stars
emerged stiffly. His eyes were bent toward the turf and thus he stood
motionless beneath the lanterns for several seconds.
“General Kuroki,” spoke Inuki in a low voice.
The general raised his eyes for just an instant—great, tired, burning,
black eyes with heavy rolled lids—bowed slightly, then backed into
the tent.
“Now, there’s a man with no carnal lust in him,” Feeney commented
to his companion. “He has commanded his wife and family not to
write him from Japan, lest their letters distract attention from his work
at hand.”
“And he drowned a thousand men crossing the Yalu,” remarked
Finacune.
Bingley passed them with the remark, “I wonder if God has the
dignity of Kuroki?”
Long afterward, when silence and stars lay upon the hills, there was
still a low whispering in the tent of Feeney and Finacune.
“I wonder where the great frieze coat is this night?” came with a
yawn from the old man.
“God knows,” Finacune replied. “Alone in the dark somewhere—
unearthing great tales to be printed under a strange name. If any one
finds them, it will be Dartmore, and his roots will wither because they
are not in the Review. Or——” The little man halted suddenly. He
had been about to add that a woman was apt to find them. Instead
he said, “Alone in the dark somewhere, hiding from the wrath of the
world—unless somebody’s hunted him down to tell him that he’s
clean and desirable again.”
“I’d like to see the great frieze coat this night,” said Feeney in a
listless tone, as if he had not listened to the other.
“I’d like to have been the one—to find him for her.”
“There never was a nobler thing done for a woman—than Routledge
did,” the old man went on, after a pause.
“There never was a nobler woman,” breathed the florid one.
SEVENTEENTH CHAPTER
FEENEY AND FINACUNE ARE PRIVILEGED TO
“READ THE FIERY GOSPEL WRIT IN BURNISHED
ROWS OF STEEL”
As a matter of fact, Kuroki was only waiting for Oku and Nodzu to
join him in the great concentration upon Liaoyang under Oyama.
This battle was planned to finish the Russians in the field, as Togo
was to do at sea, and Nogi in the Fortress. Roughly, the Japanese
now stretched across the peninsula from the mouth of the Liao to the
mouth of the Yalu—a quarter of a million men with eyes on Liaoyang
—Kuroki on the right, Nodzu in the centre, Oku on the left. Oyama
polished his boots and spurs in Tokyo, preparing to take his rice and
tea in the field as soon as it was heated to the proper temperature.
Late in June, Kuroki awoke and began to spread like a gentle flow of
lava, filling the hither defiles of the great Shanalin range, making
ready to take the stiff and dreadful passes which the Russians had
fortified as the outer protection of Liaoyang. Right here it must be
interpolated that Bingley had cut Kuroki for Nodzu’s fourth army a
few days before, when the two forces had touched wings for a day.
The “Horse-killer” was scarcely gone before Kuroki encountered one
of the toughest and pluckiest foes of his stupendous campaign,
General Kellar, who gave him terrific fights at Fenshui and Motien
passes, and tried to take them back after they were lost. Again at
Yansu, a month later, the doughty Kellar disputed the last mountain-
trail to the city, and Kuroki had to kill him to get through.... The army
was growing accustomed to the civilians, and these were days of
service for the correspondents. It was given them now to see the
great fighting-machine of Kuroki—that huge bulk of flying power—
lose its pomp and gloss and adjust itself to the field. It faded into the
brown of the mountains, took on a vulpine leanness and a nerveless,
soulless complacence, like nothing else in the world. Food was king;
fighting was the big-game sport; toil was toil, and death was not the
least of benefits. It was now August, and Kuroki’s part in the
Liaoyang preliminaries finished. A month later the battle was on.... In
the gray morning light of the twenty-ninth of August, the sound of
distant batteries boomed over the Shanalin peaks to the ears of the
correspondents. Finacune leaped up with a cry:
“Liaoyang is on! And what are we doing away off here?”
“Smokin’ our pipes in the mountings,” Feeney answered huskily,
reaching for a match, “‘an’ breathin’ the mornin’ cool.’”
“We’re lost,” Finacune declared bitterly. “I can hear the London
experts howling, ‘Where’s Kuroki and his lost army?’”
“Lost, is it? Hush! Come near me, young man. We’re lost, but
destined to appear in good time,” Feeney whispered. “I’ll bet you an
oyster-stew to a dill-pickle that we are the flankers. We’re relegated
off here to cross the river when the moon’s right, and to bore in at
the railroad behind the city, while Oyama and Kuropatkin are locking
horns in front.”
Old Feeney, wise in war, had hit upon the strategy before the others;
although any expert familiar with the terrain would thus have planned
the taking of the city. That night Kuroki camped on the south side of
the Taitse; and on the morning of the second day following was
across with seventy thousand men. This by the grace of a corps of
insignificant-looking engineers, busy little brown chaps who worked a
miracle of pontooning—conquered a deep and rushing river without
wetting a foot in Kuroki’s command. There had been rains, too, and
between the showers, far salvos of cannon rode in from the west on
the damp, jerky winds.
There is no place so good as here to drop a conventional figure of
the Liaoyang field. The strategy of the battle is simple as a play in
straight foot-ball. Japanese and Russian linesmen are engaged in a
furious struggle south and southeast of the city. Imagine Kuroki, the
Japanese half-back, breaking loose with the ball and dashing around
the right end (crossing the Taitse River) and boring in behind toward
the Russian goal—the railroad. This threatens the Russian
communications. If the Russian full-back, Orloff, cannot defend the
goal, the whole Russian line will be jerked up and out of the city to
prevent being cut off from St. Petersburg. This leaves the field and
the city to the Japanese. Here is the simplest possible straight line
sketch of the city, river, railroad, and the position of the fighters when
the battle began; also, shown by the arrow, the sweep of Kuroki’s
now-famous end-run. [See drawing on next page.]
The midnight which ended August found the intrepid flanker
launched straight at the Russian railroad at the point called the
Yentai Collieries, nine miles behind the city.
“We’re locked tight in the Russian holdings this minute,” Finacune
whispered, as he rode beside the grim veteran.
“Where did you think we were—on some church steps?” Feeney
asked.
It looked a dark and dangerous game to the dapper little man. The
lure of action, so strong at Home, often turns cold at the point of
realization. Finacune had the nerves which are the curse of
civilization, and he felt the chill white hand of fear creeping along
these sensitive ganglia just now in the dark.
“I haven’t a thing against Kuropatkin—only I hope he is a fool for a
night,” he observed presently. “Somehow, I don’t feel cheerful about
the fool part. He must hear us tramping on his back door-steps this
way. Why can’t he spare enough men from the city to come out here
and sort of outflank the flanker?”
“That’s just his idea,” Feeney replied, “but don’t forget that Oyama
will keep him so dam’ busy below that it will be hard for him to match
us man for man and still hold on. However, remember he’s got the
position, and he won’t need to match the Japanese—quite.”
As a matter of fact, Kuropatkin’s far-flung antennæ had followed
Kuroki well. The Russian chief, knowing the strength of his front
position on the city, had determined to slip back and crush Kuroki
with an overwhelming force, leaving only two corps of Siberians,
under Zurubaieff, to hold off Nodzu and Oku from the inner defenses
of Liaoyang. General Orloff, who was in command at the Yentai
Collieries, where Kuroki’s flanking point was aimed, was under
orders to attack the Japanese in flank at the moment Kuropatkin’s
main force appeared to hit the Japanese in full. There was the
constant roar of big guns in Orloff’s ears in that dawning of
September first—a rainy dawn. Also his own troops were moving
along the railroad. Another thing, there had been a vodka-train
broken into the night before by his own men.
Orloff thought he saw Kuropatkin coming, and set out prematurely.
Kuroki was concealed in the fields of ripe millet, and turned to the
work of slaughter with much enthusiasm, wondering at the weakness
of the enemy. This slaughter of Orloff, which lost the battle for the
Russians, Feeney and Finacune saw.
“There’s eighteen burnt matches in your coat pocket, my young
friend,” said Feeney, “and your pipe would light better if you put
some smokin’ in it—in the bowl, y’know. For what do you save the
burnt matches?”
Finacune grinned shyly. “Wait till the fire starts—I’ll be warmer. I’m
always like this at first—like the little boy who tried to cure bees with
rheumatism.”
“Something’s wrong with the Russians,” Feeney declared in low
excitement. “We should all be dead by this time—if they are going to
whip Kuroki. Oh, war—war is a devil of a thing!” he added flippantly.
“We’re crushing the farmers’ grain.”
“Shut up, you fire-eater. Haven’t you any reverence? I’m preparing
myself for death.”
That instant they heard a low command from an unseen Japanese
officer, and a long drawn trumpet-cry. The Japanese leaped up from
the grain. All was a tangle. Feeney, grabbing Finacune’s arm, seized
the moment to break from Major Inuki and the others, and rushed
forward to the open with the infantry.
“Come on,” he said excitedly. “We’re foot-loose! Come on, my little
angel brother, and play tag with these children!... ‘Onward, Christian
Soldiers!’”
Never a wild rose of boyhood smelled half so sweet to Finacune as
the ancient soil of Asia that moment, but he was whipped forward by
certain emotions, to say nothing of Feeney and the avalanche of
Japanese. They reached the edge of the grain and met the first gust
of Orloff’s rifle steel. Down they went for the volleys, and that
moment perceived a most amazing trick of a shell. A little knot of ten
Japanese were running forward just before them when there was a
sudden whistling shriek. The ten were lost for a second in a chariot
of fire. When it cleared only one Japanese remained standing.
“That Russian gunner bowled a pretty spare,” grimly observed
Feeney. “Come, get up, lad. The volleys are over.”
“Not this Finacune. I’m not short-sighted. I’m going to hold fast to this
sweet piece of mainland just now. Besides——”
The little man burst into a nervous laugh and glanced at his foot.
Then he stiffened into a sitting posture. Feeney looked him over. His
hat was gone, scalp bleeding, his shirt-sleeve burst open as if it had
been wet brown paper, and the sole of his left shoe torn away clean.
“Queer about that shrapnel,” he mumbled. “I’m interested in shrapnel
anyway. I haven’t got any more toe-nails on that foot than a bee.”
Meanwhile, Kuroki was crushing the Orloff member with a force
destined to wreck the whole Russian nervous-system. Out of the
grain he poured torrents of infantry which smote the Russian column
in a score of places at once.
“Did you ever put your ear to the ground during a battle, Feeney?”
the other asked wistfully. “It sounds aw’fly funny—funnier than sea-
shells. Let’s try.”
Feeney did not answer. He was watching the disorder which swept
over the Russian lines. It had changed into a deluge tossing back
toward the Collieries. There was a fury even in the clouds of powder
smoke that seemingly had nothing to do with the winds. They darted,
stretched, and tore apart from the whipped-line with some devilish
volition of their own.
“There’ll be excitement presently,” the veteran remarked.
The other had risen and was clutching his arm, his bare foot lifted
from the ground. He was properly stimulated by the action, but kept
up a more or less incessant chattering, his brain working as if driven
by cocaine.
“Ex—excitement! This is a sedative, I believe. Let’s lie down, you
bald-headed fatalist——”
“Don’t dare to. Look at your foot. Dangerous below. Ricochets hug
the turf.... Livin’ God! they’re going to throw out cavalry upon us!
They’re going to heave cavalry against Kuroki’s point! Bloom up, little
man. Here’s where the most nerveless of the white races smite the
most nervous of the yellow—and on horses!”
“I’m bloomin’ on one foot,” said Finacune.
Kuropatkin, apprised of Orloff’s error, was thundering his divisions up
the railroad at double-time toward the Collieries, but, despairing to
reach the blundering Orloff in time, had ordered his cavalry railway-
guards to charge the enemy.... They came on now with mediæval
grandeur, a dream of chivalry, breaking through gaps of Orloff’s
disordered infantry—to turn the point of the Japanese flanker.
Splendid squadrons!... A curse dropped from Feeney’s gray lips.
“They’re going to murder the cavalry to put red blood into that rotten
foot-outfit,” he said.
Finacune’s face was colorless. He did not answer. The sound of
bullets in the air was like the winging of a plague of locusts. Often
the two huddled together, allowing a gasping battalion to leap past
them toward the front. Kuroki was breaking his command into
fragments and rolling them forward like swells of the sea. His front-
rankers dropped to their knees to fire; then dashed forward a little
way to repeat—all with inhuman precision. Feeney’s field-glass
brought out their work. In a mile-long dust-cloud, the Russian cavalry
thundered forward like a tornado.
The Cossacks swept into Kuroki’s zone of fire. Feeney heard his
companion breathe fast, and turned his head. The Word man was
staring into the heart of the Cossack charge, his fears forgotten,
fascinated unto madness. The earth roared with hoofs, and the air
was rent with guns. On came the cavalry until it reached Kuroki’s
point and halted it; but upon the Cossacks now from the countless
Japanese skirmish-lines were hurled waves of flying metal—waves
that dashed over the Russian horsemen as the sundered seas
rushed together upon Pharaoh’s hosts.
“It’s like a biograph,” came from Finacune.
Kuroki was checked; his van ridden down. The Russian horse,
cumbered with its dead, and taking an enfilading fire from half the
Japanese command, was now ordered to retire. Only the skeletons
of the glorious squadrons obeyed. Kuroki was stopped indeed—
stopped to thrust an impediment aside. He rose from his knees,
fastened a new point to his plow, and bored in toward the railway
upon the strewn and trampled grain-fields. Already the hospital corps
was gathering in the endless sheaves of wounded.
“One can tell the dead by the way they lie,” Finacune said vaguely.
“They lie crosswise and spoil the symmetry.”
Orloff was steadied a trifle by the cavalry sacrifice, and turned an
erratic but deadly fire upon the Japanese.... At this instant Major
Inuki pounced upon the two correspondents and carried them back
toward headquarters. He made very many monkey-sounds; was
quite unintelligible from excitement; in fact, at the thought of these
two being suffered to see so much alone. If their heads had been
cameras, straightway would they have been smashed....
Practically they had seen it all. Kuroki’s work for that September day
was done. Shortly after the retirement of the cavalry, he received a
dispatch from Oyama saying that Kuropatkin had ordered a general
retreat. Kuroki’s end-run had won the battle for Oyama; Orloff had
lost it for Kuropatkin. The latter, perceiving the havoc at the Collieries
when he came up with his big force, decided not to attack the
victorious flanker. Instead, he set out for Mukden, and commanded
Zurubaieff, the rear-guard, to pull up out of the city, cross the Taitse,
and burn his bridges behind him.
While Feeney and Finacune were flanking with Kuroki, the “Horse-
killer” was with Nodzu, whose business it was to charge the Russian
centre before Liaoyang. Bingley had not shifted commands without a
good reason. He had made up his mind to get to an uncensored
cable after the battle was over, and Nodzu was nearer the outlet of
the war-zone. Moreover, it was said that the civilian contingent with
Nodzu was not subjected to the smothering system, quite to the
same extent as that with the flanker, Kuroki.
Nodzu, himself, did not appeal to Bingley. He seemed like a nice,
polite little person of the sort the “Horse-killer” had observed serving
behind curio-counters in Tokyo. His voice was light, and his beard
wasn’t iron-gray. Bingley remarked that a marooned painter would
have a hard time gathering a pastelle-brush from Nodzu’s beard, and
he noted with contempt that the general spoke drawing-room
Japanese to his staff. The generals whom Bingley respected, roared.
They not only split infinitives, but they forked them with flame.
All three officers under Field-Marshal Oyama—Kuroki flanking on the
right, Nodzu bearing in on the Russian centre, and Oku pushing up
the railroad on the left—had to fight their way to the positions from
which the three finally took the city. Many lesser towns and some
very difficult passes were picked up on the way. For instance, Oku,
the left blade of the crescent, who was being watched by the chief
male figure in this narrative (as Bingley was watching Nodzu),
changed the flags at Kaiping, Tashekao, and Newchwang on the
way, Chinese towns of filth and fatness; and shoved before him in an
indignant turkey-trot Generals Stackelberg and Zurubaieff.
Baking hot weather, and Liaoyang ahead! Nogi was thundering
behind at the fortress of Port Arthur; Togo was a red demon in smoky
crashing seas; blood of the Bear already smeared the Sun flag, and
the blood-flower was in bloom in Manchuria.
Bingley felt the floods of hate stir and heat within him on the morning
of August twenty-fourth, when over the hills from the right, which was
eastward, sounded the Beginning—Kuroki in cannonade. Feeney
and Finacune had had the luck to beat him to real action. The next
day Oku took up the bombardment on the left. It was not until the
following morn that Nodzu leaped to his guns, and the hot winds
brought to the nostrils of the “Horse-killer” the pungent breath of
powder.
The correspondents were held back in the smoke as usual. Five
months in the field, and they had not yet caught up with the war.
Again, on the second day of Nodzu’s action, the correspondents
were left behind under a guard who was extremely courteous. This
was more than white flesh could bear. The civilians implored,
demanded. It was remarkable that Bingley did not mix strongly in this
rebellion. He was planning carefully, desperately, to be in at the end,
and showed the courage to wait. He realized that the battle was far
from ended yet; even though Kuroki was mixing hand-to-hand in the
east, Oku in the west closing in over barriers of blood, and Nodzu in
the centre engaged daily with a ten-mile front of duelists—a bare-
handed, hot-throated fiend, chucking his dead behind him for elbow-
room.
Bingley studied maps and strategy—not from Nodzu’s standpoint
alone, but from the whole. What would he do if he were Field-
Marshal Oyama?
The theatre of war was dark on the morning of August twenty-ninth,
but in mid-afternoon Nodzu began firing—firing at nothing! He stood
still and belched thunder, as if it were something to be rid of; ripping
open the very kernels of sound, and making the summer afternoon
no fit place for butterflies. Bingley’s eyes were very bright. This
tallied with one of his hypotheses. It was a demonstration, under the
cover of which his old friend Kuroki was to start a flanking
movement.
That night the smileless young giant worked long in his tent.
Stretched full-length upon his blankets, a lantern by his side, he
wrote hard in his note-books and drew maps of the flying flanker,
whom Feeney and Finacune were now following. He showed these
maps, all dated to the hour, in London afterward, with the remark that
he had divined the strategy of Liaoyang before the battle.
He glanced at his watch, at last, and at his field outfit, which was all
packed and in order. Then he slept until dawn. No one slept after
that, since Nodzu was up with the first light, like a boy with a new
cannon on the morning of the Fourth. Bingley was missed at
breakfast. His Korean coolies knew nothing, except that they had
been ordered to take care of the Bingley property and wait for
orders. The “Horse-killer” had made a clean departure with a good
mount and nothing but his saddle-bags. Still, no one fathomed his
audacity. Confidently, it was expected that he would be returned in
short order by some of the Japanese commanders who happened to
read the civilian insignia flaring upon his sleeve. As a matter of fact,
Bingley quickly would have been overhauled had he not brooded so
long and so well upon the time. The middle Japanese army was too
busy that morning to think of one daring civilian.
Bingley’s plan was this: To watch what he could of the battle,
unfettered, making his way gradually westward behind Oku until the
end, or until such time as he mastered the color and saw the end;
then to ride alone down the railroad, nearly to Fengmarong; there to
leave his horse, cross the Liao River, and travel on foot down to
Wangcheng. He planned to catch the Chinese Eastern at
Wangcheng and make the day’s journey to Shanhaikwan beyond the
Wall, where the Japanese could not censor his message. In a word,
Bingley’s plan was to stake all on reaching a free cable before any
other man, and to put on that cable the first and greatest story of the
greatest battle of the war.
That was a day in which Bingley truly lived. A mile behind Nodzu’s
reserve, he spurred his horse down into a tight darkened ravine, and
tethered the beast long to crop the pale grass blades thinly scattered
throughout the sunless crevasse. Marking well the topography of the
place, so that he could find it again in anything but darkness, Bingley
moved back toward the valleys of action. Nodzu was hammering the
impregnable Russian position before the city from the hills, and
charging down at intervals great masses of infantry to hold the main
Russian force in their intrenchments before the city, and thus to
prevent the Russian general from sending back a large enough
portion of his army to crush or outflank the Japanese flanker.
Noon found Bingley still at large and across a big valley, now almost
empty of troops. He was forced to cross one more ridge to command
the battle-picture. This required a further hour, and he sat down to
rest upon the shoulder of a lofty, thickly timbered hill which
overlooked the city for which the nations met—a huge, sprawled
Chinese town, lost for moments at a time in the smoke-fog. The river
behind was obscured entirely; still, the placing of the whole battle
array was cleared to him in a moment. All his mapping and brooding
had helped him marvelously to this quick grasp of the field. He
wished that he could cable the picture of the city, the river, the
railroad, the hills, just as he saw them now—so that London might
also see through Bingley eyes. As for the rest—Nodzu’s great
thundering guns and his phantom armies moving below in the white
powder-reek—he could write that....
“But I’ve got to get a strip of real action—I’ve got to see the little
beasts go,” he muttered at length. “It’s a long chance, but I’ve got to
get a touch of the blood-end—to do it right. It is as necessary as the
lay of the land.”
And down he went, forgetting fear and passing time, even during
certain moments, forgetting the outer world that would cry, “Bingley!
Bingley!” when he was through.... Deeper and deeper he sank into
the white mist of smoke which five minutes before had been torn by
flame and riven with rifle crashes.
It was a moment of lull between Nodzu’s infantry charges. A land
current of air cleared the low distance. The southern line of
intrenched Russian infantry looked less than a mile away. Behind
them, the land was pitted and upheaved with defenses to the very
wall of the city, having the look, as Bingley observed, as the wind
swiftly cleared away the smoke, of the skin of a small-pox
convalescent. There was no sign of life in the Russian works, but his
quick eye marked that shrapnel was emplaced on the higher
mounds.... Had he lived a thousand years for the single purpose of
viewing a battle—hundreds of acres of embattled thousands
straining in unbridled devilment; a valley soaked and strewn with life
essences, yet swarming with more raw material for murder—he
could not have judged his advent better. It was the thirtieth of August
—the day that Nodzu and Oku began their un-Christly sacrifices to
hold Kuropatkin in the city and in front, while Kuroki flanked.
Suddenly—it was like a tornado, prairie fire, and stampede rolled into
one—Nodzu of the pastelle-brush beard called up his swarm from
thicket, hummock, gulley, ditch, from the very earth, and launched it
forward against the first blank ridge of the Russians. This brown
cyclone tore over Bingley of the Thames and across the ruffled
valley. The “Horse-killer” sat in awe. There was not yet a shot. The
Russian trenches had the look of desertion.
“Hell!” he snapped viciously. “Those trenches are abandoned.
Kuropatkin might as well be cooling his toes in Lake Baikal for all
Nodzu will find there, and he’s rushing as if——”
At this instant the Russian works were rubbed out of vision in a burst
of white smoke, and the sound of Russian bullets was like the
swooping of ten thousand night-hawks.... A terrific crash, a blast of
dust, burnt powder, filings, sickening gases—and that which a
moment ago was a dashing young captain with upraised sword was
now wet rags and dripping fragments of pulp.
“Shrapnel,” said Bingley. “He’s happy now. He was playing to a
gallery of Samurai saints—that little officer.... Nervy devils all—never
doubt it.... But we’re walloped—walloped sure as hell. We can never
take those works.”
The position of the enemy was now obscured by trembling terraces
of white smoke, out of which poured countless streams of death,
literally spraying Nodzu’s command, as firemen play their torrents
upon a burning building. A rat couldn’t have lived out a full minute in
the base of that valley. The Japanese left a terrible tribute, but the
few sped on and upward to the first line of Russian entrenchments. A
peculiar memory recurred to Bingley. Once in London he had seen a
runaway team of huge grays attached to a loaded coal-cart. The
tailboard of the cart jarred loose, and the contents streamed out
behind as the horses ran. So the hard-hit streamed out from the
Japanese charge as it passed over the base of the valley.
Even as the maddest of the Japanese survivors were about to flood
over the first embankment, it was fringed with bayonets as a wall
with broken glass; and along the length of the next higher trenches
shot a ragged ring of smoke—clots of white strung like pearls.... As a
train boring into a mountain is stopped, so was Nodzu’s brown
swarm halted, lifted, and hurled back.
“The little brown dogs!” observed Bingley with joyful amazement.
“Why, they’d keep the British army busy!... And they smile, dam’ ’em
—they smile!”
This last referred to the dead and wounded which the hospital corps
was now bringing back.... From out of the welter, a new charge
formed and failed. Again—even Bingley was shaken by the slaughter
and his organs stuck together—Nodzu hurled a third torrent of the
Samurai up that unconquerable roll of earth. It curled like a feather in
a flame, diminished, and faltered back....
The day was ending—Bingley’s gorgeous, memorable day. He had
travelled twenty-five miles on foot; he had caught up with the
Japanese army after five months in the field; he had seen Nodzu
charge and Zurubaieff hold; he had seen the wounded who would
not cry, and the dead who would not frown.
The whole was a veritable disease in his veins. The day had burned,
devoured him. He was tired enough to sleep in a tree, chilled from
spent energy; so hungry that he could have eaten horn or hoof; but
over all he was mastered by the thought of Bingley and his work—
the free cable, the story, the Thames, the battle, Bingley, the first and
greatest story, acclaim of the world, the world by the horns! So his
brain ran, and far back in his brain the films of carnage were sorted,
filed, and labelled—living, wounded, dead; the voices of the
Japanese as they ran, Russian-pits from which death spread,
shrapnel emplacements which exploded hell; barbed entanglements
spitting the Japanese for leisure-slaying, as the butcher-bird hangs
up its living meat to keep it fresh for the hunger-time; the long, quick-
moving, burnished guns that caught the sun, when the smoke
cleared, and reflected it like a burning-glass—such were the details
of the hideous panorama in Bingley’s brain.
The chief of his troubles was that Liaoyang still held. He had always
laughed at the Russians, and looked forward to the time when he
should watch the British beat them back forever from India. The valor
of the stolid, ox-like holding angered him now. Suppose Liaoyang
should not be taken! It would spoil his story and hold him in the field
longer than he cared to stay. He had but scant provisions for two
days. He planned to be off for the free cable to-morrow night.
“It’s going to rain,” he gasped, as he let himself down at nightfall into
his ravine. He heard the nicker of the horse below. It did not come to
him with any spirit of welcome, for Bingley was sufficient unto
himself, but with the thought that he must keep the beast alive for the
race to the cable after the battle.
“Yes, it’s going to rain,” he repeated. “You can count on rain after
artillery like to-day.... Living God! I thought I knew war before, but it
was all sparrow-squabbling until to-day!”
He found his saddle-bags safely in the cache where he had left them
—this with a gulp of joy, for the little food he had was in them.
Crackers, sardines, a drink of brandy that set his empty organism to
drumming like a partridge. It also whetted his appetite to a paring
edge, but he spared his ration and smoked his hunger away. Then in
the last drab of day, and in the rain, he cut grasses and branches,
piling them within the reach of his horse. A stream of water began to
trickle presently down the rocks when the shower broke. Bingley
drank deeply, and caught many ponchos full afterward for his mount.
Later he fell asleep, shivering, and dreamed that the devil was
lashing the world’s people—a nation at a time—into pits of
incandescence. The savagery of the dream aroused him, and he
became conscious of a strangeness in his ears. It was the silence,
and it pained like rarefied air. Wet, stiffened, deathly cold, he fell
asleep again.
The next day, the thirty-first, and the worst of the battle, Bingley
curved about Oku’s rear to the railroad which marked for him a short
cut to the outer world. Another, that day, watched Oku closely as he
forced the Russian right wing to face the Japanese, but Bingley,
even from a distance, was charged and maddened by the dynamics
of the action....
Late in the afternoon, a little to the west of the railway, he stopped to
finish his food and gather forage for his horse, when over the crest of
a low hill appeared a tall human figure. The Japanese put no such
giants in the field, and Bingley was startled by a certain familiarity of
movement.
The man approached, a white man. Chill, weakness, and hatred
welled suddenly in Bingley’s veins. He was not alone on the road to
a free cable. The man he feared most in the world was entered in the
race with him—the man he had seen last at the Army and Navy
reception, and roughed and insulted, nearly three years before.
Routledge smiled, but spoke no word. Bingley regarded the strong,
strange profile, haggard, darkened as a storm arena. He saddled
savagely and rode after the other. It was fifty-five miles to
Wangcheng, where he meant to catch the Chinese Eastern for
Shanhaikwan to-morrow morning—fifty-five miles in the dark, over
rain-softened roads.
“Hell! he can’t make it on foot,” Bingley muttered. “I’ll beat him to the
train.”
And yet he was angered and irritated with the reflection that the man
ahead had never yet been beaten.
NINETEENTH CHAPTER
NOREEN CARDINEGH, ENTERING A JAPANESE
HOUSE AT EVENTIDE, IS CONFRONTED BY THE
VISIBLE THOUGHT-FORM OF HER LOVER