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Page 79
But the soldier still making a riot, and the commotion growing general,
a superior officer stepped up, who terminated the scene by remanding the
prisoner to his cell, dismissing the townspeople, with all strangers,
Israel among the rest, and closing the castle gates after them.
CHAPTER XXII.
SOMETHING FURTHER OF ETHAN ALLEN; WITH ISRAEL'S FLIGHT TOWARDS THE
WILDERNESS.
Among the episodes of the Revolutionary War, none is stranger than that
of Ethan Allen in England; the event and the man being equally uncommon.
Allen seems to have been a curious combination of a Hercules, a Joe
Miller, a Bayard, and a Tom Hyer; had a person like the Belgian giants;
mountain music in him like a Swiss; a heart plump as Coeur de Lion's.
Though born in New England, he exhibited no trace of her character. He
was frank, bluff, companionable as a Pagan, convivial, a Roman, hearty
as a harvest. His spirit was essentially Western; and herein is his
peculiar Americanism; for the Western spirit is, or will yet be (for no
other is, or can be), the true American one.
For the most part, Allen's manner while in England was scornful and
ferocious in the last degree; however, qualified by that wild, heroic
sort of levity, which in the hour of oppression or peril seems
inseparable from a nature like his; the mode whereby such a temper best
evinces its barbaric disdain of adversity, and how cheaply and
waggishly it holds the malice, even though triumphant, of its foes!
Aside from that inevitable egotism relatively pertaining to pine trees,
spires, and giants, there were, perhaps, two special incidental reasons
for the Titanic Vermonter's singular demeanor abroad. Taken captive
while heading a forlorn hope before Montreal, he was treated with
inexcusable cruelty and indignity; something as if he had fallen into
the hands of the Dyaks. Immediately upon his capture he would have been
deliberately suffered to have been butchered by the Indian allies in
cold blood on the spot, had he not, with desperate intrepidity, availed
himself of his enormous physical strength, by twitching a British
officer to him, and using him for a living target, whirling him round
and round against the murderous tomahawks of the savages. Shortly
afterwards, led into the town, fenced about by bayonets of the guard,
the commander of the enemy, one Colonel McCloud, flourished his cane
over the captive's head, with brutal insults promising him a rebel's
halter at Tyburn. During his passage to England in the same ship wherein
went passenger Colonel Guy Johnson, the implacable tory, he was kept
heavily ironed in the hold, and in all ways treated as a common
mutineer; or, it may be, rather as a lion of Asia; which, though caged,
was still too dreadful to behold without fear and trembling, and
consequent cruelty. And no wonder, at least for the fear; for on one
occasion, when chained hand and foot, he was insulted on shipboard by an
officer; with his teeth he twisted off the nail that went through the
mortise of his handcuffs, and so, having his arms at liberty, challenged
his insulter to combat. Often, as at Pendennis Castle, when no other
avengement was at hand, he would hurl on his foes such howling tempests
of anathema as fairly to shock them into retreat. Prompted by somewhat
similar motives, both on shipboard and in England, he would often make
the most vociferous allusions to Ticonderoga, and the part he played in
its capture, well knowing, that of all American names, Ticonderoga was,
at that period, by far the most famous and galling to Englishmen.
Parlor-men, dancing-masters, the graduates of the Albe Bellgarde, may
shrug their laced shoulders at the boisterousness of Allen in England.
True, he stood upon no punctilios with his jailers; for where modest
gentlemanhood is all on one side, it is a losing affair; as if my Lord
Chesterfield should take off his hat, and smile, and bow, to a mad bull,
in hopes of a reciprocation of politeness. When among wild beasts, if
they menace you, be a wild beast. Neither is it unlikely that this was
the view taken by Allen. For, besides the exasperating tendency to
self-assertion which such treatment as his must have bred on a man like
him, his experience must have taught him, that by assuming the part of a
jocular, reckless, and even braggart barbarian, he would better sustain
himself against bullying turnkeys than by submissive quietude. Nor
should it be forgotten, that besides the petty details of personal
malice, the enemy violated every international usage of right and
decency, in treating a distinguished prisoner of war as if he had been a
Botany-Bay convict. If, at the present day, in any similar case between
the same States, the repetition of such outrages would be more than
unlikely, it is only because it is among nations as among individuals:
imputed indigence provokes oppression and scorn; but that same indigence
being risen to opulence, receives a politic consideration even from its
former insulters.
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