I search here under the sacred shade of ash and maple for that spot on the plains where I bade my men do the thing that won our battle. I bade them obey me, yes. I bade them each take a mouthful of smashed snails for their dysentery. I bade them carry gear by the hundredweight over the Foulon: muskets and cannon, more poundage than a man can carry unless he’s possessed. I bade them move silent as phantoms. Did I threaten deserters with scalping by my own hand? Yes to all of it. Did I forbid them to pray in my presence, invoking instead a supra-divine cunning? I did. But none of these things gave us our edge that slew the French.

No one knew we were here.

We were so exhausted we hardly knew it ourselves.

I timed our ascent so that in dawn’s glimmer no Englishman would err and shoot the red coat of his brother. But dawn was not my secret.

When we attained the Foulon cliff—after we deceived the sparse sentries with our very good French, after we sweated under our loads and tricked the owls of New France into not shrieking our presence—we got to the edge of the plains, a mile and a half from where the battle would explode. Then I drew my secret sword.

I have said inferior commanders do not read Xenophon or other philosophers of war, but had they done so, such studies would have failed to tell them what I know from my blessed country of poetry, realm of genius, divine part of man I have found nowhere near a church.

I commanded my men to lie down on the plains and go to sleep…

…the innocent sleep,

Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care,

The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath,

Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,

Chief nourisher in life’s feast…

I locate that blessed hollow now! Under a family of new willows I lie. Just as I bade my men lie down in 1759, before our enemy woke.

I sensed then, and I feel it even now, that these new trees on the plains are far lighter in spirit than the oak and wych elm that surrounded our Scots camps at Culloden. Culloden’s assault on my reason began with tortured roots and waterlogged bark.

Owls screamed as they gathered loot. I was eighteen. I hid from men so as to recover from the horror of Culloden’s slaughter but I hadn’t bargained that a kestrel would sail toward me, murderous. Pewter light etched the creature’s beak, its all-knowing eyes, its wing-parts and talons. I discerned how mechanical a falcon is, how fiercely it zeroes in on its bloody intent, its flight never joyful as men imagine flight.