Who won the War?   (Page 2 of 3)

Soldiers, descendants of Loyalists and history buffs recreate a battle to demonstrate why the War of 1812 is still important today.

By Allen Abel with photography by David Trattles

Not all reenactors are hard core—some admit they sleep on air mattresses inside their tents. (Photo: David Trattles)

From the archives

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A play by play account of Crysler’s Farm, complete with maps and portraits. Originally published in the Canadian Geographical Journal in June 1961

The land where the make-believe combatants will be duelling was a fallow farm of ghosts. In 1958, the dredging and digging of the St. Lawrence Seaway required that certain parcels of land on the Canadian side of the river be levelled and flooded to aid the passage of ocean-going ships, lest they be speared by steeples. The storied battleground was inundated. For more than half a century, Canada’s Stalingrad has been as lost as Atlantis.

Lorraine Reoch remembers the morning that Crysler’s Farm slipped beneath the waves. She is sitting in the tent set up by the St. Lawrence Branch of the United Empire Loyalists, the proud descendants of American colonists who packed up and sailed north because they found America unappealing.

“My grandfather got me up at 4:30 in the morning to see it happen,” she says. “A lot of people expected a big wall of water when they blew the cofferdam at Iroquois, but it just slowly crept in and took three days. There was 60 feet of water where my grandfather’s cottage had been.

“If you can imagine land without trees, land without homes, that’s what it looked like that morning. As we came down the river that day,” Lorraine says, “they were burning the last of the shacks.”

Her husband Gord chimes in: “A lot of the older people couldn’t stand the move, and they died within a couple of years. These were heritage farms, you know. They went back hundreds of years.”

Most of the houses and stone-walled buildings from Ontario’s so-called Lost Villages were removed before the deluge. Many were transported on tractors to Morrisburg and reassembled into a touristy slice of yesteryear called Upper Canada Village. Markers from liquidated cemeteries were immured in red brick walls. Now the Kezars, the Mattices, the Davidsons, the Taits and their perpetual neighbours rest uneasily in their nouveau niches — stones without their sacred bones.

Also moved to higher ground was an obelisk erected by the Dominion of Canada in 1895 to honour the fallen of Crysler’s Farm.

“What if the Americans had won?” I ask Lorraine.

“I think we’d be American today,” she replies. “Our saving grace was right here.”

That point is a matter of dispute. The two sides still can’t agree on the significance of the battle or on what the War of 1812 (and 1813 and 1814) achieved, if anything.

“An unmitigated disgrace, the absolute nadir of the history of the American regular army,” lamented the late John R. Elting, a distinguished U.S. officer and scholar

“British victory in 1813, based on success at Crysler’s Farm and on a parallel triumph at Chateâuguay, preserved Canada’s independence from its aggressive neighbour,” writes Ontario historian Donald E. Graves in his authoritative narrative of the battle, Field of Glory.

“Two far less decisive battles occurred along another river in the fall of 1813,” sniffs Colorado writer Walter R. Borneman in 1812: The War That Forged a Nation, dismissing Crysler’s Farm and Chateâuguay entirely, compared with the Niagara and Thames campaigns. And, in his 482-page Union 1812: The Americans Who Fought the Second War of Independence, A. J. Langguth of the University of Southern California doesn’t mention the Battle of Crysler’s Farm at all.

For their part, the latter-day sutlers at the re-enactors’ encampment are happy to profit from both sides. They’re selling two different bumper stickers, one with the Stars and Stripes and the other with the Union Jack.

Both say: “War of 1812: Been There, Won That.”

Hundreds of spectators filter out of Upper Canada Village to visit the costumed combatants. But for some of the actors, going to war means more than a weekend of playing Mr. Dressup.

Jim Hough was a door gunner on American helicopters raining fire on the Viet Cong. It was 1969, the summer of Apollo 11 and Woodstock. Canadian rocker Bryan Adams would sing of that season as “the best days of my life,” but it was also the year Hough was airlifted to Japan with shrapnel in his face and then sent home.

It was Lieutenant General Henry Shrapnel, of course, whose diabolical exploding canister shell was the most devastating weapon in the British arsenal, circa 1812.

“It took a long time to get Jim here,” says Marsha Hough, stirring a pot of 19th-century stew under the Ontario oaks, to be served in hand-turned wooden bowls.

“I buried it for 30 years,” says Jim softly. “It took a long, long time to pick up a rifle again. Now, when I fire a musket, it’s just black powder. When I fire a cannon, it’s just smoke and noise. There’s no cartridge and no cannonball. I know what a cannonball can do.”

He shows me how to load and fire the handsome replica French rifle that Marsha bought for $700 as a “re-wedding” present.

“Pour in the powder, open the cartridge, ram it home. Half-cock. Pour powder in the flash pan. Close the flash pan. Fully cock, and wait for the order to fire.”

Wait, even as the men you love fall beside you. Steady, boys … steady … fire!

I ask Jim, “Do you feel a bond with the soldiers who fought and died in this battle?”

“Their courage was absolutely insane,” he says, “how they just stood there and reloaded while the other side shot at them. But it was the same in Vietnam. That’s what you train to do. You train with a group of guys, you live with a group of guys. If you ran, you shamed yourself in their eyes. Honour was a big, big thing.”

At Crysler’s Farm, many of the re-enactors on the American side are of the Vietnam generation; that, more than any river, separates them from their coeval Canucks. Charlie Abel tells me that his father had broken so many of his bones in childhood beatings, his draft board sent him home.

“Look around the world,” says Charlie. “A lot of the guys I grew up with didn’t come back from Vietnam. That’s one of the things about war — boys go over, but they don’t come back.”

Playing bang-bang in a ruffled shirt and sleeping in a tent is safer, except perhaps for the Morrisburg mosquitoes. “I love cannons,” says Charlie. “I’m a cannon person. I like the noise. I like cannons more than I like my wife.”

On his beefy arm is a tattoo that reads: “Abel’s Artillery.”

Marsha Hough says that she teaches middle-school history to emotionally disturbed boys.

“Like me,” says Charlie.

“War is horrible,” she says. “But when you do the handson stuff, the kids just love it.”