Nom De Guerre

We have discussed many times before the problems with the author's penultimate "Battle of Berthierville" but here I shall touch on very briefly, why the name itself doesn't actually make any sense.

For starters, think of any civil war battle (for that matter any battle) you know of. The name itself is very descriptive of the location it takes place at, or at the very least describes what and where it is. In the Civil War both sides had different naming conventions. The North usually named battles after the closest town, while the South named them after the local river or landmark. Hence you have the Battle of Antietam also known as the Battle of Sharpsburg, or Bull Run vs Manassas. They at least describe roughly where the battle took place.

The Battle of Berthierville though, seems to take place anywhere but Berthierville.


A brief examination of the position of the various actions which make up the battle should make this quite clear.

By the authors own map the fighting takes place well away from Berthierville (as far as 22 miles in fact) and as mentioned before, the amount of front the two armies occupy doesn't even resemble a civil war battlefield.

The author though states:

The village itself had been the bull’s-eye of three days of battle, from the initial fighting on the Chaloupe to the last skirmishes of the cavalry as the British withdrew north to Trois-Riveries and the Americans licked their wounds in camps from Lavaltrie to Saint-Barthelemy. There had been hard fights on the shores of the Chaloupe and the Bayonne, and in all the little towns from Lanoraie to Barthelemy, but Berthierville had been the focus.

However, other than maybe the focus of a little rearguard action, there doesn't seem to have been much fighting as the village changed hands. Quite the contrary that description of the battle shows that by and large it was merely the headquarters for one side or another as the fighting raged on.

More accurately, this battle ought to be called the "Berthierville Campaign" since it seems to comprise numerous lesser skirmishes and fights rather than the two armies actually meeting en masse. Instead you have lots of maneuvering and skirmishing, but never does it seem that the two sides actually come to grips with one another in full.

If the author desired to call it the "Battle of Berthierville" would it have not made more sense to treat it like a proper Civil War battle and have the two armies actually meet and engage at the village of Berthierville itself? However, that would not have fit into the author's plan of Grant getting one up on the British since it would probably require him to condense his army and launch an attack head on at a prepared British position.