One of the most satisfying things I ever ate in my life was a blueberry pie set to cool on a sill in Kamouraska. The woman who made it had fled a mile in the woods before the juice pooled in the collarbone of my grenadier and stained his teeth purple.

How you supply a scurvy-infested regiment with nourishment is that you confiscate the sheep, goats, eggs and cabbages of the enemy. It drives me wild that no matter which century I peruse, men look at my success with either praise or blame. They marvel at my genius or my brutality, asking where I got my knowledge. Whether they think me a depraved genius or a profitable servant of empire, their bafflement is constant and it disturbs me.

Not then, not now, and nowhere in the future, does anyone appear to read anything.

They haven’t read Xenophon’s advice on guerrilla warfare, so they think it novel when I train my infantry to retreat the instant after an attack, hiding behind any available thicket or dune instead of keeping to the silly English way of parading in formation, as easy to target as a street full of houses.

Nor does anyone seem to have heard of Sun Tsu.

It wasn’t yesterday he counselled warriors to plunder an enemy’s food. For centuries his advice has been in plain sight for anyone with eyes: one barrow of the enemy’s wheat and goat meat is worth twenty of your own because of the palaver, and the spoilage, and the cost of transport. Yet England marvels that I manage to find my soldiers cod, pork and eggs, as if the banks of the Saint Lawrence were populated only by owls. I’ve eaten an owl egg and I vouch instead for jam in a peasant’s larder.

How you get peasants to relinquish their precious winter supply of provender is that you nail a note to their wretched chapel door warning them that if they so much as whisper against our invasion their every lamb chop will sizzle on a Redcoat’s spit. There won’t be a shrew’s head or a barley grain left to nourish them through January. You point out that by March they have a choice of flesh remaining on their bones or cormorants spitting out those bones to turn pocked and green in the estuary. When they hesitate you don’t flinch. You send reeking Redcoats to torch every hovel on the riverbank until families stream like vermin from all hope of sustenance.

England did well to choose red for our uniforms: fish-gutting and sheep-butchering peasants are well acquainted with red. Unlike flashier generals, I wear the least fancy, plainest version of the red coat. I find that the hue on its own causes more fright than any buckle or adornment. Where is my uniform now? Oh yes, I remember—waiting for me—why have I not already put it on?

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