The Cavaliers of Fortune; Or, British Heroes in Foreign Wars. James Grant
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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 Allée 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 Allée 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