From Sea to Shining Sea (32 page)

They were all on their feet eventually, not cringing anymore, but standing and waiting for the attack, one and another now and then being decapitated by a ball or blinded by splinters or grapeshot, men dead and ruined who might have been all right yet, had it not been Lieutenant Johnny Clark’s duty as an officer to make them stand ready.

And Johnny stood and clenched his teeth and wept tears of disillusionment, because that imagined epic poetry of battle did not exist after all. Now it seemed not a glorious and knightly art, but simply a sickening science of shredding flesh and blasting bone to smithereens, all in the name of some abstract notion
Patrick Henry yelled about in Assembly and Thomas Paine wrote about in pamphlets.

One hundred yards up the line, Major Jonathan Clark was smoking his clay pipe, watching the bombardment, and thinking he should trot down the front to see how young Brother Johnny was doing with his first day of war, when word came down the line to all the company commanders that General Greene would cross the Brandywine at Chadd’s Ford and attack the British flank there. Light knapsacks and fixed bayonets. Orders for each regiment would be down momentarily.

Well, then. There’d be no time to visit Johnny. Jonathan dipped his head at the sound of a whistling shell, tapped the dottle out of his pipe while dirt and gravel rained on his hat, then moved down the line at a crouch getting his men ready to march. After Charles Town, he felt familiar with artillery; it had lost some of its terrors for him. Of course, one still had to respect it. A man would have to be a fool not to.

But there was a new and dreadful unknown right before him now; it was said to be the supreme test of any soldier’s mettle:

A bayonet charge.

As he went down the line he looked at bayonets and thought. He looked at the long, grooved spikes of steel and thought what they were for. None of his men had ever used a bayonet for its intended purpose, as it had not been that kind of a war so far. It had instead been a marching, waiting war and now and then a shooting and sniping war. Most of the men had used their bayonets only as spits on which to cook meat over campfires—on those rare occasions when there had been meat.

But the British, he was thinking now as he looked at these lethal steel spikes. They’re said to be the very masters of the bayonet. It was said that the British generals had such faith in cold steel that they often ordered their Redcoats to attack with unloaded muskets. Cold steel only. Generals who ordered such attacks were praised for their boldness of spirit—although the generals themselves did not do any charging with bayonets.

God have mercy on us all, Jonathan thought. Especially watch over dear Brother Johnny and my friend Bill.

I
T WAS MIDDAY NOW AND A WHOLE DIVISION OF
V
IRGINIANS
was running northward along a dusty road, gasping in the heat, stumbling. Johnny Clark was almost strangling in dust and his lungs were afire.

An hour before, they had been formed up on the east bank of the Brandywine, ready to cross at Chadd’s Ford and go against
the British with bayonets. But then a courier had arrived from General Washington, and the whole thing had changed.

A huge force of Redcoats and Hessians, under Lord Cornwallis’s banner, had suddenly appeared on the Continentals’ right flank, near the forks of the Brandywine four miles to the north; they had hit General Sullivan’s troops and were rolling them backward.

And so now Greene’s Virginians, instead of attacking across the river, were running up the zigzagging roads to reinforce Sullivan. And it was a run of four miles.

Gasping with exhaustion, sweat-soaked, they were at last led off the road and formed hastily into a long rank on a forested hilltop. Beyond the trees and below the hill, musketfire sputtered and cannon thundered. Off to the right, as the troops mopped their brows and regained their wind, Johnny could see General Greene holding a hasty council with the field officers. It all seemed so frantic, so desperate. Johnny felt a sense of doom.

G
ENERAL
M
UHLENBERG SALUTED
G
ENERAL
G
REENE AND
then spurred his horse down to a knot of officers near the flag of the 8th Virginia. He talked rapidly to them while pointing toward the roar of the invisible battle. Soon Jonathan came trotting along from company to company, stopping at each one and talking fast.

“Hey, old Johnny,” he cried, running up and grabbing him by the bicep, grinning through the dust that was caked on his sweaty face. “Here’s what. Sullivan’s troops likely will fall back right through here. We open and let ’em through. Then when the lobsterbacks come up the hill, we meet ’em with massed volleys and bayonets. Got that, brother mine?”

“Plain as day.”

“It’ll be a tangle,” Jonathan said in a tight voice with a hard squeeze on Johnny’s arm. “Don’t forget to pray for me, and I’ll do likewise for you.”

And then he was gone.

A
ND NOW
S
ULLIVAN
’
S RETREATING TROOPS WERE APPEARING
on the meadows below in a commotion of shouting and shooting and disorderly running. Officers were riding back and forth in haste and confusion, waving their swords and shouting unintelligible commands, which sounded more like pleas. Some of the retreating men were running pell-mell across the meadows, not even looking back; some were hesitating and looking for their leaders; some were stopping to kneel and fire their guns back
toward the woods before they came on. Some limped along, some were carrying wounded.

Johnny dressed his ranks and had his men look to their flintlocks. Many swigged from their canteens as they waited. “All right, then, all right!” Johnny shouted, too nervous to be still, “When those Redcoats get here, they’ll think they’ve stepped into hell by mistake, hey? Stand your ground!”

Now the retreating troops, straining for breath, came straggling into view over the brow of the hill, heads wobbling, and strange, poignant looks of surprise came onto the faces of some of them when they saw the long ranks of Virginians standing there waiting. They passed among the Virginians and went into the woods behind them. Down on the meadow now, tight, precise, rectangular companies of British infantry were coming, bayonets leveled, each company followed by its drummer; white leggings rose and fell in unison as they came over the bright grass, stepping over bodies, flowing around shattered gun wheels and dead horses, coming on inexorably.

Now a bugle sounded, and General Muhlenberg rode downward with his sword pointing toward the enemy. And the Virginians, still not recovered from their long run, moved forward in neat ranks over the brow of the hill and started down the slope. The first ranks of Redcoats now were a hundred yards downslope, climbing steadily.

The command came down the line to halt and deliver fire. “First rank,” Johnny shouted, “kneel and aim.” They knelt. “Fire!” Their muskets sputtered and crashed, and he saw several Redcoats stagger and fall. “Reload! Second rank, stand and fire!” Another crackling volley, and more Englishmen sagged and fell, and their comrades closed ranks around them and kept coming on. “Second rank, kneel and load, third rank stand and aim! Fire!” More Redcoats tumbled. But the companies came on, and the distance was closing, and there were too many of them to kill with volleys of bullets. Now a bugle played the charge, and Johnny bellowed, as if these would be his last words, his voice breaking: “Let’s go!” and led them at a run down the slope toward the advancing scarlet line. They ran with that untidy variety of noises running infantry make: bullet bags jouncing and rattling, breath wheezing, cloth swishing, muskets rattling, canteens clunking, shoes thumping, men grunting and farting. The air was hazy with powder smoke. Other companies were running ahead, to the right, the white Xs across their backs bobbing as they jogged downhill in the eye-blurring smoke. Men were straggling and stumbling, the lines in poor array; it was a sloppy
charge. And now there was nothing between Johnny’s company and the enemy; it was as if an icy hand had gripped his hot, pounding heart when he really began to see them, see their faces forty feet away. It was a veritable wall of grim-faced human beings, their glinting bayonets leveled at waist height, dense as fence pickets, their odd, erect black hats making them look tall as giants—but their faces were the faces of
people:
pugnacious, grim, half-scared, perhaps, but determined and angry.

Somehow it was not just a dreadful phalanx of marching mechanisms now, nor was it a league of granite Romans, but mortal
people
; and the Virginians, seeing vulnerable faces, began howling like wolves and Indians and hurled themselves the last few feet onto the enemy line.

The two fronts crashed together in a din of brutal noises: grunts, howls, and screams, steel clashing on steel, cloth ripping, metal crunching on bone and cartilage, metal whacking on wood. The Virginians were past the control of commands now; and that deep part of them that had always been Indian fighter, hunter, barnyard brawler and shivaree roughneck, took over their desperate souls. They bared their teeth, used their guns like spears and clubs and quarterstaffs, crouched and pounced, choked, gouged, and bit their way past the bayonets and into the red ranks. With a hum of tension in his throat, Johnny waded in, slashing and hacking with his saber at flesh, brass, wood, and steel. A bayonet punched through his clothes and scraped past his ribs; with his lower lip bitten between his teeth he hacked at the Englishman holding it until, bathing his hands and face in hot blood, the Englishman yielded and sank down and the bayonet fell out of Johnny’s clothes. Then came another bayonet, jabbing toward his eyes; he caught the steel in his left hand, twisting it aside and down with all his might. This Englishman was strong, with a ruddy, heavy-jowled workingman’s face and light blue, wide-open eyes, and he nearly lifted Johnny off the ground as he strained with both arms on the musket. Johnny stared into the light blue eyes, cocked his sword arm, and thrust the blade in under the Englishman’s ribs.

Now it was a deadly Donnybrook Fair here in this corner of the battlefield. The sweeping designs of generals were forgotten; each man was simply striving at each moment to murder another man before that man could murder him. A Virginian lay on the bloody grass with a bayonet through his groin, trying to throttle the Redcoat who leaned over him. Another Virginian, eyes nearly popping out of his head, stood wrestling with a British lieutenant, twisting his sword away with one hand while thumbgouging
his eye out with the other. Another Virginian had produced a non-regulation tomahawk from an underarm sheath, and was splitting British skulls with sickening wet
whacks.

Johnny was too busy fighting to give any orders, and there were no orders anyway that would have had any effect, unless he had screamed,
Kill
! And that order would have been unnecessary.

T
HERE WERE SEVERAL SUCH BRAWLS BEING FOUGHT ALONG
this sector now. Not all the American companies were fighting so fiercely. Some had been scattered and put to flight by the British charge; others had been simply overrun by it, stabbed and trampled to the last man.

One melee was going on under the flag of the 8th Virginia. Jonathan Clark chopped off the left hand of a British grenadier with a mighty swishing saber stroke, and the same stroke laid open the thigh of one of his own sergeants, who was fighting alongside him. The fighting quarters were too close. The ranks were coagulating into mobs: dense masses of contorted faces, straining limbs, jabbing steel, point-blank pistol shots, knife fights and fist fights. A six-foot British soldier jerked his bayonet out of the ribs of a Virginian, stepped over the body, and ran with his bloody spike aimed at the youth who carried the regimental banner. The boy saw him coming, lowered the pole, and impaled the Redcoat with the brass spear on its end. Blood spurted onto the pink silk as the Englishman fell, his weight snapping the slender pole. But while the young flag-bearer was trying to extricate the banner staff from the Englishman’s writhing body, he was clubbed to death by another Redcoat.

Y
ARD BY YARD NOW
,
THE
A
MERICANS WERE BEING FORCED
back up the hill by wave upon wave of English companies. Some of the enemy ranks now trotting forward out of the woods wore blue coats, red breeches, and red, high-pointed hats. It was a moment before Jonathan realized that he was seeing Hessians. Cornwallis had German mercenaries, and these were coming now, it seemed, by the thousands, from some inexhaustible Germanic reserve in the depth of the woods. Some of the Germans in the 8th Virginia now were hearing the German commands coming from the enemy’s side; their faces went strange, but they kept fighting as they had been. And the enemy kept materializing in the shadows of the trees, then emerging into the smoky, bright sunglow of the meadow battlefield, their drummers rattling away incessantly.

The Virginians, borne back and back, their clothes tattered, hands bloodied, were beginning to glance around in desperation for their officers now. Their murderous passions were growing exhausted, and they needed guidance now, some order that would recombine their individual desperations into a common will. Each had been alone in hell fighting those countless red demons for as long as he could stand it. Now they needed their comrades; they needed to feel their fellows shoulder to shoulder with them again, because there were too many red demons, too many bayonets poking at them like pitchforks.

Jonathan was shouting, trying to rally his companies. But always, just down the slope, was that oncoming wall of stolid, clean-shaven, well-fed British faces, that picket fence of bayonets, the massed crimson of uniforms.

B’God but they’re brave, he thought, and with a rush of admiration he thought, even in this desperate and murderous moment, he thought how fine a thing it was to have been born an Englishman.

T
HE
V
IRGINIANS THUS FOUGHT AND FELL BACK, FOUGHT
and fell back, delaying the British, allowing Sullivan’s wounded and shattered force to retreat. Cornwallis’s infantry kept coming, British and Hessians. The retreat was in the direction of the hamlet of Dilworth. Late in the afternoon the Virginians crossed through a draw near that village, regrouped still again, turned and set up another defensive line. Cannon came rolling up soon, pulled by lathered, wild-eyed horses nearly dead of overwork; the cannon were set up covering the defilade. Here, spewing grapeshot, they stalled the oncoming Redcoats for a bit, while General Greene conferred quickly with field officers in a farmhouse beside the Dilworth Road. Jonathan watched Greene limp to and fro on his bad knee. Greene was as good a Yankee as Jonathan had ever seen, a Rhode Island blacksmith’s son, a private risen to general on his merits.