The Proud and the Free (11 page)

Yet Wayne carried it through in the only way he knew, and he walked up to Billy Bowzar and faced him boldly and asked more quietly:

What do you intend to do?

We intend to march away to our own encampment.

Where is your encampment?

That is in our own orders, General Wayne, and not for the knowledge of you or any other officer.

Are you the leader of this mutiny?

This is no mutiny, and it doesn't profit you to call it that; but I am spokesman for the Committee of Sergeants.

And what does your Committee propose to do?

To reconstitute the army of the Revolution.

That is talk, said Wayne, and you know that as well as I do. Tell me what you want, and it may be that I spoke hastily before. But if you will state your demands and I can satisfy your demands, I am willing to forget that tonight ever happened and no measures will be taken against any man – including your Committee – and you can go back to the hutments and sleep out the night. Things will look better in the morning.

We can never forget that tonight happened, said Bowzar seriously and reflectively. If I did as you say, I would be hanging from a tree in the morning …

You have my word!

… But it is not the hanging that stops me. I am not so almighty fond of life that I can't look at a rope, even the way my good comrade Jimmy Coleman looked at a rope last year when you hanged him until he was dead; but tonight is something you can't blow away like a handful of snow. Look at them –

He turned and flung a hand at the Line.

When have you seen the men stand to parade that way – with the cold so bitter that it freezes the juice in the bones? They would not heed your command, and I have little doubt that they would less heed mine if I ordered them back to the hutments.

What are your demands? insisted Wayne stolidly, but biting his underlip until the blood smeared through, his fists clenched, his cheek twitching. I have given you my word as an officer and a gentleman. What are your demands?

We have no demands of you, General Wayne. There is nothing you can do for us. Our demands are to the people, and the Congress.

If I can right them –

And can you right them, my general? asked Billy Bowzar, grinning bitterly at the handsome young man before him, taking a fold of his cloak between his fingers. Will you cover all our rags with this? Will you feed us with the slop from your New Year's dinner? Will you pay us, who have not been paid these six months past? Will you bring back our children, who died of disease and hunger? Will you put shoes under our bleeding feet?

His voice raised; he still held the fold of Wayne's cloak, and Wayne stood rigid as steel while Bowzar spoke, ever more and more loudly and bitterly, with a passion I never knew the man to own.

Or will you scrape together our bloody tracks over five thousand miles of road for five years? Will you give us back our honor, we who have been beaten and lashed as foreign scum – or will you take one man out of the ranks, one man who talks the English a little less finely than you do, one man without property and wealth, and raise him up to be an officer over us? Will you honor us with even one of our own to lead us? Will you stop the ache of hunger in our bellies, so that while you fatten yourselves in the houses of the God-damned patroons and the cursed British gentlemen, we must watch our little drummer lads die for want of a shred of meat? Will you march us against the British enemy, instead of leaving us to rot in these cursed encampments – because you have not the guts to risk a fight that might bring a frown from that rotten, betraying Congress? Will you bring all the Lines together, so that they will stop plotting against each other and go against the enemy? Will you make the Declaration of Independence the law of this army? Will you give us equal bounty and equal pay? Will you hang every officer who kills one of us in his anger, who cheats us, who sells our food, who gambles away our pay, who speculates in the Philadelphia market with our clothing, who insults our women, who kicks our children? Will you do that, General Wayne? Will you declare that the Jersey and Pennsylvania farmers who hold their land in tenancy from the patroons and the lords now have it in freehold forever? Will you tell them that if they give us food, we will fight to the death for their freehold? Will you guarantee a hundred acres of land for every man in this army? You can do that, General Wayne – for there is land without end or limit in Pennsylvania, and no one owns it but the lords in London. Will you take it from them, and give it to us? Will you give us a stake in this? Will you now?… Come now?… The Line is standing to arms in the bitter cold, and you would not have them stand in the cold the whole night through! You would not have that – for then they would think that this is another evidence of the ways of the gentry and the disregard they have for what a simple man feels. So speak out, General Wayne!

In a fury, Billy Bowzar finished, and he flung away the general's cloak as if it were dirt. But Wayne didn't move, and there came a sigh out of the paraded men; and then Wayne said softly:

These are not demands I can satisfy, as well you know.

Then you can satisfy one other demand of ours, said Billy Bowzar. Get on your horse and ride out of our sight, and take your damned staff with you. The lot of you are like an abomination!

Now Wayne was rage incarnate, his face flour-white and every muscle along his cheeks trembling and quivering, and like a man made out of clockwork, tight springs and bent metal rods, he mounted his horse, hesitated just one moment, and then walked his horse toward us – with the other officers following him – spitting out words that were like molten spots of metal.

I command this Line! Do you hear me? All of you! This is an order: Break your ranks!

It was just before and during this that Angus MacGrath returned and whispered to me. For Christ's sake, Jamie, there is hell to pay in the old huts – and breaking into the Scottish – an' a deil gaed o'er Jock Webster, and the situation is dour, I tell ye, with the 5th and the 9th standing to arms, all cosh with the officers; and will ye tell the Committee to get us to hell out o' here before we shed our blood and die in this damned place?

Where are they? I asked him.

Parading over yonder, behind the Connecticut huts.

But then Wayne was riding his horse down on us, and his officers less confident, less brave, but with him at the moment, and as the Committee was pressed back, it was touch and go; so I did what I felt should be done; I addressed the citizen soldiers and told them to let a volley into the air. The muskets roared over the horses and a harsh shout went up from our men, and the horses broke and bolted, the riders not fighting them but letting them bolt across the parade and into the darkness in ten directions, riding with relief to be away from that long file of grim and bitter men. But the truth must be told that Wayne alone fought his horse as it reared and beat it back onto the ground, his face contorted, tears running down his cheeks; and then he ripped open coat and vest and shirt, ripping the clothes and buttons, tearing at his undershirt to bare his breast and revealing it with the red marks of his nails across it. And he screamed at us:

Then kill me! Here is a mark, if you want a mark, you dirty, mutinous bastards! Then kill me here and now, and have it over with! God curse your souls, kill me!

There was a trumpeter standing by, and Bowzar ran to him and had him play the advance. We left Wayne screaming and weeping, alone on his horse, while we ran down the Line to its head, where the drummer boys had picked up the beat, and Rosenbank was already marching and keeping time for the shrilling fifes. As we ran, I told Bowzar and Maloney of the news Angus had brought, and they questioned Angus as we ranged ourselves across the head of the Line. Somehow, we had failed with these two regiments: the officers had got there first, and now five hundred men were standing to arms and ready to bar our path – yet the way they had remained behind the Connecticut hutments, out of sight and sound and a good half mile away, it was plain that they would avoid a struggle and leave us to march out of camp if we wished to.

And they got six cannon, said Angus, by grace of Emil Horst who sold us, the dirty smaik …

“We will go up against them, nodded Billy Bowzar wearily, for this is either all of us or no part of us, and it's better to die here than to split the Line. If we split the Line, then it will be civil war and not war against the enemy, and I would rather hang now than have it that way.”

Then it's war now, muttered Danny Connell.

Is it? If our brothers will cut us down, we are damned wrong, and we should know it.

And Billy Bowzar waved his arm and swung to the left— and the whole long Line of the Pennsylvania regiments moved across the moonlit parade toward the Connecticut huts. We marched slowly, four abreast, a long, dark ribbon across the entire parade, and the shrill of our fifes and the beat of our drums woke the countryside for miles around.

It was a wonderful moment, that in which we crossed the snow-swept expanse of parade, for the beat of the drums was matched by the beat in our hearts; and when I ran down the Line and back, I saw in the faces of the men, cold and reddened and wrapped in rags, an indication of the fierce exultation of our strength – our power, inevitably – for nowhere on the whole Western continent was a force that could come up against us; we were the heart of the Revolution, and now we had suddenly translated the Revolution into ourselves and our hopes and our angers. Many, many times before, I had seen the Line go out, sometimes on parade, sometimes on one of those interminable marches up and down the Jersey pine barrens, sometimes against the enemy, sometimes in the lonely, broken way of retreat; but I never saw the Line as it was then, like a fierce old eagle whose clipped pinions had suddenly discovered once again the power of flight. The men could not keep still, and they picked up the march, so that their voices rang out with:

In freedom we're born, and like sons of the brave, will never surrender, but swear to defend her, and scorn to survive if unable to save.
…

One deep, rich voice picked up the verse – joined then voice by voice, while the fifes lifted it and shrilled like a wild and savage Highland fling. It was then that the two regiments came forth, marching in an opposite direction to ours, so that the two files crossed and faced each other, while a thousand throats roared their defiance in a song we had not sung these many months past – and were heard in every house and hamlet for miles around, and heard by the men of the two regiments as we chanted:

The tree which proud Haman for Mordecai reared,
Stands recorded that virtue endangered is spared;
The rogues, whom no bounds and no laws can restrain,
Must be stripped of their honors and humbled again!

The 5th and the 9th moved to cut us off, their officers riding behind them and shouting at them above the wild chant we maintained; but as we continued, the two regiments halted, and then a field gun was pressed through from behind, officers straining at the big, iron-bound wheels that men would not move, and Emil Horst holding a lighted match. Billy Bowzar and Jack Maloney and the Jew Levy ran toward them, Bowzar waving both his hands for silence, and Angus and I ran after them, and the lighted match waved back and forth like a torch. The singing died away, and the sudden silence was cut by a shrill voice screaming:

Fire on them! Fire on them!

We halted before their ranks, but MacGrath ran on, his musket clubbed, and as Horst dropped the match, he struck him on the side of the head and felled him like an ox.

Fire on them! Fire on them! The voice shrieked.

Now what in hell's name are you doing there, Bowzar cried at them, when the whole Line is marching?

This was heard, and a roar went up from our ranks, and our men called them out by name, and suddenly a thousand voices were calling:

The Line is marching! The Line is marching!

The two regiments broke; they went mad and wild, and when their officers cursed them, they pulled the officers from their saddles, beat them; and some they bayoneted; and the rest ran away, whipping their horses through the night. Two officers were slain there, and many more wounded, whereas in our own rising there had been no bloodshed at all. But it lasted only a few minutes; then it was over, and Bowzar's great voice was heard, crying:

Make room for the 5th! Make room for the 9th!

The Line parted to allow the regiments to form in their places, soldiers embracing soldiers, laughing, crying, shouting – and presently the drums picked up the march again.

I saw fleetingly Emil Horst staggering along, his hands bound, his face covered with blood. I saw Bowzar running toward the head of the Line, the tears streaming down his face as he ran. I saw Captain Oliver Husk lying face down in the snow, in a pool of blood.

And then I joined the Line, which was marching off to its own strange destiny.

PART FIVE

Being an account of our first march, and of the fate of Emil Horst.

W
E MARCHED only four or five miles that first night, to a place nearby where two Virginia brigades had encamped the winter before. What huts they had built were made slovenly, in the way of some Southern folk, and they were rotted and of no real use, but there was cleared space and a stream for drinking and plenty of firewood; and the only tactic we had worked out for that first night was to get away from the Morristown encampment. Once we did that, we felt that sleep was the first item on the agenda; although all in all it was little enough sleep that we of the Committee got ourselves, then or later.

In this march, there was only one incident of any importance, and that happened when we came to the first fork of the road; but already Billy Bowzar and the Jew Levy and Jack Maloney and Danny Connell had dropped out of sheer exhaustion, and they lay on a baggage cart, sleeping the sleep of the just, for all the rocking and lurching of the cart. A platoon of the 1st Regiment had intercepted a herd of cattle, a gift or a bribe or a sale from a wealthy patroon of Amboy to the officers; we left six beasts for the officers, and the rest, almost a hundred, we drove with us, and though they milled around the cart where Bowzar and the others slept, all their mooing disturbed them not at all. In the same way the women and children slept, but the little drummer lads stumbled along, keeping their rhythm going, and the men swung out their legs and sang as I had never known them to sing before.