Victory at Yorktown (32 page)

The allied pioneers—sappers and miners—were having the devil's own time in this general assault. Joseph Martin arrived at the trenches a little before sunset and knew they were in for a fight when he saw officers fixing bayonets to the end of long staves. Then he and his mates were handed axes and told to proceed in advance of the troops to cut a passage through the abatis, which were made of the tops of trees with the small branches cut on a slant, making them as sharp as spikes. Then the trees were laid at a short distance from the trench or ditch, pointing outward with the butt fastened to the ground so they couldn't be moved by those approaching them. As Martin said, “It is almost impossible to get through them,” but “Through these we were to cut a passage before we or the other assailants could enter.”

On both fronts it had come down to hand-to-hand fighting, with the pioneers ignoring enemy fire and slashing anyone who resisted them with axes in order to open holes in the defenses. In the French lines, where the Deux-Ponts and Gâtinais regiments were engaged, the latter were preparing to attack when General Rochambeau spoke to them. These men were from Auvergne and, having had their own regiment, were not happy about fighting under another name. The general addressed them, saying, “
Mes enfants
, I hope you have not forgotten that we have served together in that brave regiment of Auvergne
Sans tache,
*
an honorable name that it has deserved ever since its creation.” They answered that if he would restore their name to them, they would fight to the last man; as it turned out, “They kept their word, charged like lions, and lost one-third of their number.”
†
Evidently the reason the French had far more casualties than the Americans was that when the latter reached the abatis they removed sections of it with their own hands and then leaped over the rest, whereas the French waited, under intense fire, for their pioneers to clear away the obstruction.

In this firefight the French lost forty-six men killed and sixty-two wounded, including six officers. Among the latter was a captain named de Sireuil, whose leg was shot off and who died a year later. Two weeks earlier another French officer, the Chevalier de La Loge, a charming, witty, twenty-five-year-old poet, had had a leg shot off and died three days later. In those days all wounds tended to be serious, and the serious ones were almost always fatal since medical treatment was so primitive and the chance of infection so great.

*   *   *

ON THE MORNING
of October 16 a hundred French workmen were employed in repairing the batteries, and in the predawn light around 5
A.M
. some 350 British, led by Lieutenant Colonel Robert Abercrombie, made a sortie with the light infantry and guards, and massacred the picket of the Agénois regiment. After taking the captain prisoner, the British broke into a trench where some Soissonnais put up only token resistance before abandoning the post, and Abercrombie's men took possession of a trench where the allied line was weak. From here they ran on to an undefended battery, spiked the cannon with their bayonets, killed four or five men, and proceeded to the junction between the first and second parallels, where they discovered a battery commanded by Captain Savage of the Americans and halted. “What troops?” they called out, and when Savage replied, “French,” the British commander said, “Push on, my brave boys, and skin the buggers.”

The Comte de Noailles, who was nearby with a covering party, heard this and ordered his grenadiers to charge with the bayonet, which they did, shouting, “Vive le Roi!” Recounting this story, Colonel Richard Butler of the Pennsylvanians said, “to use the British phrase, [they] skivered eight of the Guards and Infantry and took twelve prisoners and drove them quite off.” The allied loss was trifling, he added, but he admired the way the British had executed the sortie with “secrecy and spirit.”

It was discovered later that Chastellux had been warned by a deserter the day before that the British were planning a sortie at daybreak and had even been told where the attack would come. But as Verger wrote, “the General had paid no attention to the warning and in consequence had made no dispositions.” Clermont-Crèvecoeur dismissed the whole episode: “it was of no significance, since [the British] could have done better. They were nearly all drunk,” he added, “and by the way they maneuvered they would have had great difficulty surprising a trench where the men were on the alert.” But he had to admit that a lot of damage could have resulted had they “done better”: “We must confess that we hardly dreamed of being attacked that night. The time was propitious, for the night was very dark.” And—what he did not add—the French were very lucky.

At the same time the Comte de Deux-Ponts's outfit was engaged, Colonel Alexander Hamilton was attacking Number 10, but with quicker success. The Americans, preceded by Martin and the other sappers and miners, led the way, and the infantrymen followed, advancing beyond the trenches and lying down on the ground to wait for the signal to attack. They did not have long to wait. Their watchword was “Rochambeau,” which, when pronounced quickly, sounded to the Americans like “Rush on, boys.” They were ready when the three shells lit up the sky, leaped to their feet, and moved immediately toward the redoubt. Although it was dark, Joseph Martin could make out that a lot of his buddies were falling to the ground and disappearing, and discovered as he neared the abatis that the area was pockmarked with huge holes—big enough to bury an ox in, he said. This was the place where many of their own large shells had landed, and the running men, their eyes fixed on what was ahead, were falling into them. “I thought the British were killing us off at a great rate,” he said, but “At length, one of the holes happening to pick me up, I found out the mystery of our huge slaughter.”

As quickly as the firing began, the men up ahead cried out, “The fort's our own! Rush on, boys!” and the pioneers immediately cleared a passage for the infantry, who swarmed over the abatis. The officers ordered the miners not to enter the fort, but there was no stopping them. Martin couldn't get through the entrance they had made, it was so crowded, but he found a place where cannon fire had blasted away some of the abatis, squeezed through, and as he was doing so a fellow at his side was hit in the head with a musket ball and fell under his feet, crying out piteously. The enemy was also throwing hand grenades; they were so thick, Martin said, that he thought they were burning cartridge paper, but he was soon “undeceived by their cracking.” As he mounted the breastwork he recognized an old friend in the light of the enemy's musket fire, it was so vivid. “The fort,” he said, “was taken and all quiet in a very short time.”

Later that night the skies clouded over and it began to rain, a steady downpour that turned the trenches into a morass of mud, making the digging miserable for the fatigue parties, whose job it was to connect the captured redoubts to the second parallel and bring up howitzers to within three hundred yards of the enemy's works. Henry Knox had a lot of faith in these weapons. At New Windsor this past summer he had his gunners practice ricocheting shells with them until one of his captains said they could drop them “just over the enemy's parapet, destroying them where they thought themselves most secure.”

*   *   *

EARLY THE NEXT
morning, Lord Cornwallis came out to observe the allies' work and returned to his quarters to write Clinton, from whom he had learned only a few days earlier about a rescue fleet that would be sent from New York. Sir Henry had sent Major Charles Cochrane, who arrived by whaleboat on October 10, with bad news for Cornwallis, the nub of which was that no rescue effort would be made in the immediate future.
*
(Admiral Graves—a reluctant fighting man if ever there was one—had led Clinton to believe that his fleet would be ready to leave New York by October 5. Now—incredibly—he told the general on October 17 that the “show of signals and topsails” that Clinton witnessed was nothing more than “spurs to push forward the lazy and supine. And I am sorry to find that difficulties go on increasing and … nothing can turn the current but being actually at sea.”) In other words, the commanders of the admiral's warships were too lazy to move and he was unable to persuade them to get under way, so there was no telling when the fleet would attempt to rescue Lord Cornwallis and his army.

Almost a week earlier, Cornwallis had written to New York reporting that Cochrane had arrived, adding that “nothing but a direct move to York River—which includes a successful naval action—
can save me.
” Suddenly, the bravado was gone. Enemy parallels were drawing closer all the time, the earl said; they had constructed batteries with great regularity and caution; and have been firing “without intermission with about forty pieces of cannon (mostly heavy) and sixteen mortars from eight to sixteen inches.” He had lost about seventy men in recent days, and his works were substantially damaged. In conclusion, he stated, “we cannot hope to make a long resistance.” And then he added a postscript: “Since the above was written we have lost thirty men.” On October 12 he penned another addendum: “We continue to lose men very fast.” Standing beneath the bluff leading down to the York River, he peered anxiously in the direction of Chesapeake Bay, hoping against hope that he would see the topsails of a British fleet, bringing the relief promised by Clinton.

On October 15, the morning after seeing the allies' progress toward his works, he wrote again to his chief, using a cipher: “My situation now becomes very critical. We dare not show a gun to their old batteries, and I expect that their new ones will open tomorrow morning. Experience has shown that our fresh earthen works do not resist their powerful artillery, so that we shall soon be exposed to an assault in ruined works, in a bad position, and with weakened numbers. The safety of the place is, therefore, so precarious that I cannot recommend that the fleet and army should run great risk in endeavoring to save us.”

The bombardment continued unabated, but despite the danger the allies stood around watching the results until Washington ordered the field cleared of spectators. Over in the captured redoubt Number 10 Alexander Hamilton was arguing with General Henry Knox, the army's chief of artillery. A general order had been issued that when a shell was seen, the troops might shout, “A shell!” but they were forbidden to cry out “A shot” when a shot was seen, the reason being that the explosion of a shell after it hit the ground could be avoided, while warning of a cannonball would serve little purpose. Hamilton considered it unsoldierlike to halloo “A shell!” while Knox disagreed, saying that the commander in chief had given the order so as to protect the lives of the men.

Suddenly, two shells landed in the redoubt—
spat! spat!
—and from all sides the shout went up, “a shell!” and both men dove for cover behind the blinds in the trench. To protect himself, Hamilton, who was the smaller of the two, got behind Knox, who was very large, but Knox shrugged him off, rolled over, and unintentionally threw Hamilton in the direction of the shells. The latter quickly jumped back to safety, the shells burst and scattered their deadly missiles in all directions, and Knox, brushing himself off, asked, “Now, Mr. Hamilton, what do you think about crying ‘shell'? But let me tell you not to make a breastwork of me again!”

*   *   *

ON THE NIGHT
of October 16 Cornwallis sent Lord Chewton to direct Tarleton to concentrate his troops at Gloucester, prepare the artillery to accompany the British troops in an attack against Brigadier Choisy before daybreak, and have horses and wagons ready to retreat north through the countryside. Behind this decision was the calamitous pounding of Yorktown by allied guns, which had shredded abatis, destroyed large sections of the British works, and dismounted many of their cannon, in addition to which they had almost exhausted their supply of shells.

Banastre Tarleton concurred. A retreat by way of Gloucester “was the only expedient that now presented itself to avert the mortification of a surrender.… Though this plan appeared less practicable than when first proposed, and was adopted at this crisis as a last resort, it yet afforded some hopes of success.” He sent a number of soldiers and sailors with boats to assist in the retreat, and before eleven o'clock the light infantry, most of the Guards brigade, and the 23rd Regiment, constituting the first wave of evacuees, shoved off for Gloucester. Most of the small craft had been damaged during the siege, but even so, Tarleton figured they could embark all the troops in three trips.

Cornwallis planned to accompany the second group himself, but before doing so he had to finish writing a letter to General Washington, “calculated to excite the humanity of that officer towards the sick, the wounded, and the detachment that would be left to capitulate.” The first division arrived in Gloucester before midnight, and part of the second had embarked when a rain squall came up. “At this critical moment,” the earl wrote, “the weather, from being moderate and calm, changed to a most violent storm of wind and rain and drove all the boats, some of which had troops on board, down the river. It was soon evident that the intended passage was impracticable.…” At least one American soldier feared there might be an evil omen in the sudden, unexpected chill at midnight, the fury of the wind and rain down the York; it was “almost as severe a storm as I ever remember to have seen,” he wrote.

Not until two in the morning did the storm begin to moderate, and orders then came to Gloucester for all the corps that had landed there to return to Yorktown. Since the boats were all on the Yorktown side, it took a long time to row them to Gloucester, and soon after daybreak they were under way to Cornwallis's headquarters, but now under fire of the allied batteries.