Conceived in Liberty (25 page)

The British will leave Philadelphia. They won't attack us. Four or five thousand militiamen have already poured into Valley Forge. Our position is too strong.

We drill and drill and drill. We who have stayed through the winter, the battered Pennsylvania and New Jersey and Massachusetts brigades, are Steuben's pets. He makes soldiers of us. We were never soldiers before. We were a rabble of farmers, retreating all over the country before the British, defeated in every battle we fought. For the first time, we drill until we are like machines. Steuben is tireless; we must become men of iron; he is a fanatic about that.

He says: “Soon, soon, mine children. Ve strike dem vun blow—and den der var is over. Vun quvick blow. Soon—soon.”

It comes sooner than we expect. A rider on a lathered horse pounding up the Gulph Road. He rides through the sentries, screaming out something. The hoofbeats echo through the camp. He reins up wildly before headquarters.

Word of the rider goes through camp like fire. Nobody knows what word he brings, but it's taken that he comes from Philadelphia. We gather in groups, talking, guessing.

“The British march on camp …”

“They've burned Philadelphia—pulled for New York …”

“They've sailed down the Delaware …”

Night comes. We build our fires. For the first time, I wonder how these fires appear to the Quaker farmers down in the valleys. Strange men-beasts, who call themselves an army; they came out of the night, in the snow. They'll go back. The Quakers will live on, the way they've lived for a hundred years.

I wake in the night, and I grope for Bess. I mutter: “If we leave here—where will you come back to?” I think of three more years with no woman, three more years. I cry out for Bess, childishly, longingly. I am afraid to be alone.

The next day, the camp is curiously uneasy. In the morning, Steuben drills us. But he's a sullen Prussian for once, and he puts us through the drills mechanically. The sun is a hot red blister in the sky. Steuben marches us back and forth until we are wringing wet.

We lie about the dugouts, discuss rumours. It is certain by now that the British troops have left Philadelphia. For a winter they lay there at their ease, filling their bellies, twenty thousand of them. Twenty thousand men, while three thousand sick beggars starved in the hill country, eighteen miles away. Now the word comes that the remaining British troops, ten or twelve thousand, have left Philadelphia to march overland through the Jerseys to New York. The officers say nothing, and we try to piece things out for ourselves. Half the British forces have sailed away. If Washington attacks those who march through Jersey …

We look at each other. Only once have American troops defeated the English in battle—that was in Boston, in seventeen-seventy-five, at Bunker Hill, and then we could not hold our ground. Since then, we have been defeated continuously.

“We'll know soon,” Ely says. He is oddly calm, as if he had been waiting for this.

“We'll know,” Jacob agrees.

The next morning, the order comes for the brigades to march. The order comes to break camp—a place where we have lived for six months.

We are very quiet about it. Working in the dugout, putting our few belongings together, we try to understand that we have lived in this place for half a year. The calm is like a blanket over us. We are breaking camp—going into battle.

I stood in the dugout after Ely and Jacob had gone. I walked around, felt the beds, things we had built with our own hands. I leaned against the low, log walls. I kicked at the few ashes in the fireplace. It was very hot in the dugout then. The morning sun beat down on the roof.

It might have been years ago that we had built it—Clark Vandeer, Henry Lane, Edward Flagg, Kenton Brenner, Charley Green, strong men hewing the life out of trees.

Inside, it had been hell and inferno; inside, I had lain with Bess in my arms—loving a woman. How does a man love a woman and not know?

If I had carved inside, along the logs: Here a soldier of the army, Allen Hale, lay with a girl who was no fit and decent woman—a follower of the camp …

The musket rack is empty. One day we had brought the muskets to Wayne, eight muskets. Wayne looked at them. Ely said: “You'll need arms, sir. There's a fair lot of men in camp without arms.” Wayne answered, dully: “They belong with the men who used them—they belong—I'll take them. We need arms.”

Ely called to me now, and I went outside, I closed the door, threw the latch. It would stay closed; it was a place of the damned, and nobody would molest it. Maybe, after years, a pile of rotten timber covering a mudhole. Men of the revolution lived there—half a year. People would look at it curiously.

“Allen—come,” Ely says gently.

We join our brigade. It is a hot day, a burning hot day. The sun is a globe of yellow liquid in a sky of cold blue fire. Wayne walks his horse along our line, smiling, nodding—ragged, lean men, but men drawn fine with suffering. Men who will follow him into hell; men without a fear of hell. No fears left.

He calls out: “Brigades—forward!”

The drums pick up the tune. No other tune. A doggerel and a fit song for an army of beggars. A trumpet joins in, pricking shrill notes at the sky:

Yankee-Doodle went to London,

Riding on a pony …

The Pennsylvania brigades step out with the Prussian stiffness Steuben taught them. We march past the assembled Massachusetts and New Jersey lines. We walk past a mass of militia. Sitting on his horse, Steuben nods and nods; his face is twisted up; he can say nothing.

We take up our positions at the head of the army, directly behind Washington's life guard of Virginians. The tall Virginians look back at us and grin:

“Come on, farmers—there's ploughin' tu be done!”

We pick up our song.

Yankee-Doodle went to hell,

Claimed it was right chilly …

I look back, and the hills of the encampment are like a lush garden in the summer sun. A little cluster of Quaker farmers and their wives watch us from the parade.

Ely is on one side of me, Jacob on the other. I don't look back again.

XXII

A
CLOUDBURST
soaks us, and we march on through the pouring rain. The army is sprawled like a great snake over the hills, each end lost in a mist of rain. When the rain is over, the sun comes out again, stronger than ever. The mud on the road is turned to ripples of hard earth, which gradually powders into a fine dust under our feet. Many of us walk barefooted, and the crumpled dirt of the road feels good to our feet.

The rain soaks our clothes, plastering them to our backs. A film of dust forms all over them; it's unbearable. We drop our coats into the road, then our torn shirts. The musket straps bite into our backs. We strip to the waist, become a strange sight, an army of the naked.

We toil on, and at noon, throw ourselves down wearily. We can't eat much. We're strung too fine, nervous, waiting.

Talk is of the enemy. Where are they?—when will we meet them? We hear that the militia is uneasy with fear. We begin to understand why the Pennsylvania brigades march at the head of the army.

“I put no faith in militia,” Jacob says. “Whatever comes, we'll drive into it first. If we stand, the militia will stand. But I put no faith in militia to meet an attack.”

I feel a curious chill of fear. Life was never so precious or good—after the winter. I lived; all through that winter I lived.

“There'll be a battle, Jacob?”

“There'll be a battle. He cannot keep the militia with him for more than three months.”

“The last battle,” Ely says oddly.

We both look at him. Ely says, slowly: “I have no love for battle. There's been enough death. I'm sore tired, and wanting to rest. You and me, Jacob—we're no more young. Well be wanting a long, quiet rest.”

“Time for resting,” Jacob says. ‘There'll be time enough afterwards for rest.”

We march on—a forced march. The wagon train and the camp followers are left far in the rear. We're chasing something. We drag along, and the drum-beat seems lost in a fog of dust. Blood begins to speckle the road—from the naked feet. When a rest is called, we drop in our tracks, too weary to talk.

It rains again the next day, a solid wall of water, drawn out of the sodden heat. We cross the Delaware River, and come into a country of tall pines and barren sand dunes. The pine smell is heavy and sickening. The mosquitoes buzz in thick droning flocks, biting us until we are covered all over with welts. Sweat drips into our eyes, into our mouths. We are coated with dust.

Wayne laughs and says: “You'll scare the enemy. There'll be no need to fight.”

We're not pretty. We've become haunted by a spectre of battle. No rest until we come up with the enemy. We begin to long for the enemy, for anything that will relieve us.

We camp that night in the dunes, build our fires between the pines. We cook, and then sprawl away from the fires. It's cool nowhere. The sand itself is hot, and it doesn't lose any heat during the night. The heat is burnt into everything.

It's difficult for us to breathe. The heavy air, clouded with pine smell, is like a solid thing. It clings to our lungs.

One of the men, a dispatch rider for Wayne, comes over to where we are lying. He was stationed outside the tent where the staff officers were at council.

We ask him for news. Do we march, Do we ever leave this godforsaken Jersey land?

“They're fighting among themselves, the officers. They've been squabbling for hours. Lee wants no battle.”

“He's a fair wise soldier, Charles Lee.”

“He's no man for leading; he's a sickening man to look at.”

“Washington's nigh mad—sitting and muttering that he's alone—no man but Hamilton and Wayne and Steuben to follow him. He's like a man in a dream, Washington, sitting there and muttering, Why aren't you with me? Do I have to be alone? It's too much to be alone.”

“Where are the British?”

“Somewhere in the Jerseys. It's said there's a train of them fifteen miles long—half the people in Philadelphia with them, maybe two thousand Philadelphia wenches to lie with them each night.”

“Wayne wants battle——”

“It's Wayne's story that he'll go into battle with the Pennsylvania men. He says the whole army can go to hell and be damned—he'll go into battle with his Pennsylvania men.”

“He's no man to plan a battle—too hot.”

“He sits muttering, Fight—God damn you, fight. God-damn cowards, the lot of you. Lee says he'll take no words like that, and Wayne says he's a lying bastard if he'll swallow any words of his for Lee. Washington tries to soothe them, and Hamilton swears the lot of them are playing treason. Lee calls Hamilton a Jew—and Hamilton's fair ready to kill Lee. They fight like cats and dogs.”

“There's no man among them with his mind made up?”

“It's Washington's idea to fight.”

“He can't hold the army together for another battle. We're eight—nine thousand strong now. He'll fight now—or come a month there'll be no army.”

We march again the next day. Wayne dismounts and walks with us. He's a man burning with rage—tireless, pacing up and down the line, spurring us on. There's no sign of rain, no cloud in the sky, only a blue fire with a concentrated red fire in the centre of it. We trail between the pines, drag ourselves over sand dunes that give under our feet, curse the swarms of mosquitoes, fight blindly through the dust that rises the length of the army.

There's no rest. Hour after hour—forward. The men who started out barefooted have raw, bleeding feet now. The sand blisters our feet, burns them. Between the sun and the dirt, we are burnt black, our faces stubbled with beard again, our skin welted all over with mosquito bites.

Ely is taking it hard. Jacob, a thin wraith of a man, marches with the smouldering fire of a fanatic in his eyes. Jacob is the soul of the revolution, uncomplaining, tireless, fire that will burn steadily until it is blown out. But Ely's feet are cut to pieces again, swollen. They have never fully healed from the winter. They bleed steadily, in spite of our bandaging.

Once, when dropped to rest, Ely gasped: “This is the last march, Allen.”

“No—you've been through a lot worse than this, Ely. We rest soon.”

He said, not bitterly: “I'm tired. I've carried a load, Allen—a great deal of a load.”

Job Andrews, sitting near us, said: “It's hard, tired marching for an old man.”

“An old man,” Ely nodded, smiling a little.

“You're noways old.”

“Old enough, Allen. I'm thinking to give these poor feet of mine a rest soon. A long rest.”

We stumble on. Night, and we drop in our tracks. We have no strength to build fires. We fall asleep in brigade formation, toss on the hot sand, gasp for breath. With dawn, we're up and fighting our way north.

Men drop out of line. They clutch at their eyes, reel, stagger a few steps, and crumple to the sand. They lie in huddled bundles and the brigades crawl past them. We're caked with dirt—horrid black, sunburnt figures.

We come to a Hessian's body. A man dead with heat. What with their seventy pounds of uniform and equipment, the heat is more than they can stand. They die like flies. His bright green uniform is streaked with dirt and slime. He lies on his back, eyes open, face swollen shapeless by mosquito poison. He's a strange, lonely figure, a reminder of the enemy we haven't seen for six months. Some of the men pause to drag his boots off.

We go on, and now we know that they're fleeing from us. It's a fantastic, bizarre thing. For six months they could have wiped us out with a single blow. Now they're fleeing from filthy, naked beggars.

We see more and more Hessians dead of the heat. They sprawl directly on the road, or they lie crumpled to either side of it. Their green uniforms make splotches of colour on the sand. It's difficult to understand how they could have marched even a mile with those heavy uniforms. We tear off their boots. We laugh, and some of the naked Pennsylvania farmers wear the high Hessian hats. But not for long.