The Victory with No Name: The Native American Defeat of the First American Army by Colin G. Calloway

Author:Colin G. Calloway [Calloway, Colin G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780199388004
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2014-08-15T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

The Battle with No Name

A COUPLE OF MONTHS AFTER HIS VICTORY over Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington wrote, famously, “The history of a battle is not unlike the history of a ball. Some individuals may recollect all the little events of which the great result is the battle won or lost, but no individual can recollect the order in which, or the exact moment at which, they occurred, which makes all the difference as to their value or importance.” 1 St. Clair’s defeat was no Waterloo, where some 140,000 soldiers clashed in a sea of carnage, and it was certainly no ball, yet Wellington’s comment applies well to the struggle that occurred on the banks of the Wabash on November 4, 1791. Even so, the action that day was so congested that most of the survivors’ accounts are in substantial agreement, and their individual, piecemeal experiences provide a composite picture of how the battle unfolded.

“The violence of combat,” Karl Marlantes recalls from Vietnam in his book What It Is Like to Go to War, “assaults psyches, confuses ethics, and tests souls.” 2 For the ordinary soldier, John Keegan writes, battle “takes place in a wildly unstable physical and emotional environment.” Battles involve leadership, courage, duty, and trying to maintain order in a context of extreme violence, but they also always involve fear and disintegration, “for it is towards the disintegration of human groups that battle is directed.” How a soldier behaves in the heat of battle depends on a contest between his discipline, courage, and sense of duty or loyalty and his natural instinct for self-preservation. Military training tries to ensure that the former keep the latter in check. When order breaks down and soldiers seek safety in flight, they often, ironically, expose themselves to the greatest immediate danger until they put distance between themselves and their enemies. Panic spreads, other soldiers are swept up in the scramble for safety, and in their flight they act more like a crowd than a military unit. Men with little or no military training are more likely to run than are regulars, but—as at Waterloo, where the battle-hardened veterans of Napoleon’s elite Imperial Guard faltered in the teeth of devastating British musket fire and then fled in disarray—none is immune to the possibility. 3 In the end, observes the historian James Wright, “combat is about simply staying alive.” 4

Poorly trained, badly provisioned and equipped, dispirited by a month of frustrating delays, tedious marches, cold wet weather, desertions, and dissension, St. Clair’s troops confronted an enemy Ebenezer Denny described as “brought up from infancy to war, and perhaps superior to an equal number of the best men that could be taken against them.” 5 Discounting the militia, officers’ servants, and guards who immediately dispersed, Winthrop Sargent reckoned that once the battle got under way the effective American fighting force was reduced to 1,080 “raw and undisciplined troops, ignorant totally of the Indian and indeed all other mode of fighting.

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