I have taken comfort in the blessed peace of the choreography of war.

I see that choreography now, rising on this misty field under the waning moon.

All around me in the grass arise my lads. But it isn’t lads a general sees during the fight: what he sees is the beauty of tactical structure and geometric precision. The calming harmony of military strategy. The form and metre of soldiers taking their places as the general has ordered them to do.

I watch it rise out of the mist around me now—the aesthetic harmony of lines, columns, formations of infantry combatting not only the men of New France but also the adversaries of boreal swamp and bog that encroach on every attempt to carve a town or village out of this damned wilderness.

Around me materialize the sharp, beautiful red coats and guns and hats and bayonets against the rise of hill and hummock: this field breathes like a woman waiting for us to fall.

But we don’t fall, for we planned, mathematically and artfully, this scheme, the visual field, the planes of line and colour, just as my favourite painter, Jean-Antoine Watteau, planned his Festival of Love—a scene so similar to these undulating plains I feel I’ve entered it.

Was not my battle a festival of another sort of love?

Do people think a butcher hacks away at a cow without devotion? No! He follows a map of utmost precision, slicing rib from breastbone, unwinding intestine from curled bud, lifting brain from skull into brine with his slotted spoon, each tool fit for its task.

Or the war is music.

For, as Handel has his lines and spaces into which he must slot, finally, a set of musical notes—half notes, whole notes, quarter notes: an arsenal of fractions whose intervals and lengths can stretch into timeless space or become exquisitely small—so a general must compose his score, his symphony, his musical gift for the king.

My brigadiers gathering around me in the mist complain I am indecisive!

Would they dare interrupt Handel at his composition desk? Have they not noticed paper crumpled knee-high around the composer as he charts new variations, not out of vacillation but out of his quest for perfection?

The field peoples itself before me. I watch from my place under the moonlit crabapple, its strange little animal standing over me—silent and soft, as if he can somehow protect me.

Am I remembering my old battle, or are these new variations?

Notes sound at the composer’s command. Do my brigadiers and other detractors suppose me rigid or unreasonable? My orders have been few but necessary. I don’t deny I require obedience even while I change my mind. Do people suppose I am only a man speaking? How many times do I have to explain that a general is not merely a man?