From Sea to Shining Sea (41 page)

By the Eternal, he almost prayed now: Let me find the time and the strength, someday, when this war’s over with, to go up that Missouri and over, and go on down to the land’s end!

His scalp was prickling, as it had that long-ago night when he had dreamed this big scheme that he was on now. He was thinking that way again now, but farther on.

To the land’s end! he thought. By my God! May I live to go there!

M
AJOR
J
ONATHAN
C
LARK DREW HIS COAT SLEEVE ACROSS HIS
brow to try to stop the sweat off his forehead from pouring into his eyes and blurring his sight. He desperately sucked air with his mouth open, trying to get enough breath to take him a little farther up the slope. Never in his life had he been so hot, never had he endured such sultriness, not even at Charles Town.

He gasped for another chestful of the oven-hot air. Some of his slogging troops were wavering, staggering, eyes rolling, panting through open lips, their blazing feet often tripped by the soft, sandy soil.

It was the hottest day in anyone’s memory, and they had been marching all day in it toward Monmouth, pursuing General Clinton’s retreating army toward the New Jersey coast. They had marched, waited in the shadeless roads, marched more, waited more, all day long; already today, dozens of soldiers had collapsed
on the road; several had died; and now, now that their smart Steuben-style marching had been worn and baked down to a weaving trudge, now they were close upon the enemy and would have to try to fight a battle.

Led by General Greene, the Virginians had left the road a few minutes ago, passed through a sparse wood, through a swampy ravine, and now were trying to climb a rise of ground, an abandoned field overgrown with raspberry brambles. The men were so spent that the brambles that snagged their clothes nearly pulled them off balance. Beyond the top of the hill they were climbing, powder smoke and battle dust arose, a smudgy yellow that dimmed the descending sun. Artillery was so close now that the concussion of each report could be felt passing through the stifling air like ripples in water. Musket fire was sputtering continuously there, and shouts sometimes rose over the din. The regiment halted and waited while sappers tore down a rail fence. Jonathan plucked a red berry. It was not quite ripe, and its tang was more refreshing than the hot water in his canteen.

The smell of gunpowder was choking-sharp here. Jonathan watched the sappers work on the fence and wondered what the great sway of the battle was like now. One never really knew, it seemed, unless one happened to be the general, and maybe not even then. One saw only his own little approaches to the battlefield, then his own little immediate circle of mayhem and suffering for a few minutes or a few hours, but the whole context of it was always beyond, always a great, mysterious confusion. Only at Charles Town had he been able to see the great panorama of it. At Germantown he had seen nothing but fog and then a few yards of shooting, running, dying. He had not known for two days afterward that Brother Johnny’s unit had been captured. Probably not more than two or three hundred yards away from Jonathan himself that had happened, but in that battle it might as well have been on another continent.

And now there was this. The battle of Monmouth, New Jersey. All he knew about it was what he had heard from couriers coming back to report to General Greene. When Clinton had evacuated Philadelphia with his huge army on June 18, heading across New Jersey to the sea, General Washington had vacated Valley Forge to chase him. Clinton’s army, slowed by its enormous, twelve-mile-long baggage train, had moved barely five miles a day; the Continentals, being threadbare and lacking everything, had made nearly ten miles a day and now had overtaken Clinton’s army. General Charles Lee had been sent ahead with an advance force to attack Clinton’s rear while Washington
brought up the main army. But then the surprises had started happening. Lee, on being counterattacked, had ordered a retreat instead of holding till Washington’s arrival. Washington, astonished to see Lee’s force coming pell-mell toward the rear, had met Lee on the road, demanded an explanation, and, as a courier had said it, “cursed him till the leaves shook in the trees.” Washington then had taken after Lee’s retreating troops himself, riding like the great Virginia horseman he was, and almost singlehandedly had slowed the retreat, stopped it, and begun rallying Lee’s force to begin making a stand. The couriers, reporting all this, had been beside themselves with amazement. “Called General Lee a poltroon, he did! Lord, that’s Lee’s last battle, sure!” And another had reported, “His Excellency rode till his horse died, then hopped on another!”

And now Washington was busy forming a line of battle on the edge of a marsh. General Greene’s division, including the Virginians, was to form its right wing, and that was where they were going now as they clambered, faint with heat, up this rise to take their position.

That poor, sorry Lee, Jonathan thought. There had been rumors lately, in the officers’ circles, that Lee was trying to discredit General Washington, to betray him. The air was always full of such intrigue and speculation. Jonathan chose not to believe that Lee was a traitor. An overrated tactician, perhaps, but surely no traitor. At any rate, he had retreated, and had brought the battle to this state of affairs, and now the Virginians were climbing up one side of a rise, on the other side of which the battle seemed to be raging full force, and now they would be in battle in this inferno of a summer day, and Jonathan once again would be responsible for that one little corner of battle he could see and understand.

Now the fence was down and the ranks began moving forward again, still further thinned by heat-strokes. Jonathan looked down the line at his men. Most were so heat-flushed and gaping-mouthed that if they had fear, it could not show through their physical misery.

Close on the left now a tremendous artillery barrage was under way. Smoke and dust hung over the field like a choking fog.

“Fix bayonets!” was the first order to come down the line. And as Steuben had taught them to do, they all at once slipped the steel spikes out of their scabbards and locked them with twisting wrists onto their sunhot musket muzzles.

“Music!” The drums started rapping their ominous, blood-stirring cadences.

“Arms at port, march!” And with their weapons aslant across their chests the Virginians toiled obediently through the sand and heat into the drifting banks of smoke. Jonathan’s eyes watered and the membranes of his nostrils stung. Every breath was an assault on his lungs. In the pall of smoke he could see only the sere, sparse grass and the limp weeds before his feet; the shape of a dark bush or scrub tree would materialize in front of him, and he would expect it to be a Redcoat or a dragoon.

But the enemy did not appear yet in the choking yellow smoke, and soon Greene’s brigades were on line in control of this high ground. By now the sun was low in the west, glowing a sullen orange.

The heaviest action, judging by the noise of it, seemed to be down toward the left. Most of the smoke seemed to be drifting from there. Now and then through a rent in that curtain, Jonathan could see rows of scarlet uniforms, or winking yellow muzzleblasts. A staff officer galloped along the Virginians’ front, pointing down that way and exulting: “What luck! We’ve got the buggers enfiladed!” And he rode through the ranks back down the hill, shouting for artillery.

In a minute, caissons came rattling up the slope behind the Virginians, the horses surging to pull their loads up through the sandy ground. The pieces were unlimbered and chocked and aimed straight down along the enemy’s ranks. The British down there were not advancing; they had been fought to a standstill by the troops and cannon of the left wing. And now the artillery here on the hill opened up on the exposed flanks of those Redcoats, cutting them down in swatches. It was like a nightmare, all outlines blurred by a smoke as thick and sour as Hell’s brimstone. The cannon crashed repeatedly here on the high ground, while the artillery of the left wing thumped down there, and the British ranks at the bottom of the slope were trapped in the bombardment from two angles. The ground down there was strewn with fallen Englishmen, lying inert or crawling, while the ranks of them kept wavering, re-forming, trying to advance. Once again Jonathan was stirred by amazement at what those British Regulars could endure.

And now he saw that a wide front of the Redcoats—perhaps a battalion of them, though he could see only fragments of the picture through the haze—was wheeling left and coming toward this high ground, led by a saber-swinging officer. They were apparently coming this way to outflank the force in front of them, or were simply charging straight against this artillery that was devastating them. It was a brave mad move if they were coming
here; they had a long way to come, in the open, in the breathless furnace-heat of the slope, hidden by nothing but drifts of smoke. Jonathan turned to his captains. “Stand this ground!” he yelled. “Prepare to fire in volley! But don’t shoot till you can see the pimples on their chins!”

Some of the men grinned at the sound of this command. Jonathan had thought it up at Germantown: words chosen to make the oncoming juggernaut ranks of scarlet seem less formidable. At times like these it was hard to remember that Redcoats were vulnerable flesh and blood, as well as guts and steel.

A slight, hot breeze was stirring the smoke as the sun descended, and now much of the main front could be seen; it was more than a half-mile long, stretching away across the main road, in and out of copses of brushy growth, tall trees, morasses, orchards. A bridge across the low ground was packed with British infantry and light-horse. Now and then the smoke clouds would part and Jonathan could see a jutting structure among the trees that apparently was Monmouth Court House, more than a mile away. The masses of British units did not seem to be advancing anywhere, except the grenadiers tramping resolutely up the slope toward the Virginians. Coming up to meet the hail of lead, which now was poised to fall upon them.

But now a quicker motion down the slope, off to the right, caught Jonathan’s eye. It was a squadron of British light cavalry coming around the marching grenadiers to lead the charge up the hill. Jonathan’s heartbeat quickened. Cavalry was always a fearsome and stunning sight, sweeping across a field: the great horses, blacks and bays and sorrels and grays, racing forward under the spur, too dumb and disciplined to fear bullets, ridden stirrup-to-stirrup by reckless young men whose own courage was magnified by the speed and power they had at their command; Jonathan himself was enough of a rider and horse-racer and fox-hunter to know the precipitous kind of power they must feel. In battle he and his men had never yet faced a charge of horse, and it frightened him. They came so fast there was hardly time for firing and reloading. And every man, from childhood, had known to get out of the way of a running horse. Jonathan was afraid his men would flee before this; already they were looking confused and irresolute.

So he ran a few paces out past the front rank toward the oncoming cavalry, pointed his sword toward the plunging, thundering wall of horseflesh, bellowing:

“Ready and aim! And no man o’ mine dast miss anything so big as a horse!”

They came on. Jonathan’s heart was slamming. They were a hundred yards away; their hoof-falls were strangely soft in the deep sand, but now he could hear the snorts and their slumping breath and the jingle of metal as they came through the smoke. The riders were swishing sabers around their heads. At seventy yards their commander began a deep-throated war cry that was taken up in chorus by the rest:

“Yooooooooooo!”

Jonathan responded, unthinking, with the wild, high-pitched, half-Indian yodel of the frontiersman, and the Virginians all joined in with the blood-curdling ululation, heartened by it, purging their own fears by it:

“Eeeeyiyiyiyiyiyiyi!”

To his astonishment, the horses shied at the shrill sound; they flung their heads, wild-eyed; some reared, breaking the impetus of the rush. Those behind virtually ran up the backs of those in front; and at that moment, so thrilled by their own shrieking that they forgot to wait for the command to fire, the Virginians in the front ranks began discharging their muskets. They may have been resisting a cavalry charge, in tactical terms, but in their own quickened minds, they were simply stopping a runaway herd. The animals, first terrified by the hideous wail and now stung and punctured by musketballs, were stumbling, rearing, crumbling back on their cruppers, going every way but forward; their riders thus were transformed suddenly from bellowing demons into mere riders out of control of their mounts, helpless, frightened, and vulnerable. It was like mayhem at a horsefair now: lunging bodies, grunts, whinnying, spraying sand and roiling dust, flailing hooves, ears back, teeth bared, the thud of great bodies falling, legbones and ribs snapping, lost swords twirling through the air, brown beast-eyes wild with pain and terror.

“Second ranks, FIRE!” Jonathan thought to yell in the face of this appalling spectacle. They delivered a second volley, and more horses wheeled and fell. Cavalrymen in their short red coats groaned and sobbed and tried to disentangle themselves from the crush and surge of their tumbling beasts, or were shot down as they tried to rise from the ground and use their pistols. Some were dragged away, caught in their stirrups, others were galloping away, in or out of control of their mounts.

Lord God, Jonathan thought, eyes bugging with disbelief, we broke a cavalry charge!

That done, the rest was easy. Infantry seemed like a shooting practice now. The 8th Regiment fired volley after volley and reloaded with the Prussian precision Von Steuben had taught
them, even though every breath was a scorching torture and their vision was blurred with sweat and the tears of smarting eyes; and soon the slope in front of the Virginians was a carrion heap of wounded, twitching, uncomprehending horses, some struggling to rise on their forelegs, and of dying men lying supine on hot sand with their forearms flung over their shattered faces, leaking good English blood into the New Jersey sands.