The Proud and the Free (14 page)

I must tell you of the weather, for unless you have lived in the Middle States, you will not know how it is that so often, early in January, winter turns into summer for a spell; the sun shines warm and sweet; the snow melts and the ground dries, and the foolish birds come out and sing as if there were no long and dreary months of cold ahead. The sky is bluer than even in the summertime, for there the cold, metallic sheen of winter persists, and when the sun sets, there is a riot of wild color, as if nature were upset and distraught at this topsy-turvy inversion of the seasons. This was the weather we had on Tuesday and Wednesday as we slowly marched through the Jerseys, with our fifes playing and our drums beating, but with more than that too.

We changed. It wasn't merely that we had new General Orders and no officers, for the change was as much inside of us. I felt it in my heart, in my stomach, in my limbs – and the others felt it too. For the first time in the five years since 1776, the regiments of Pennsylvania shaved themselves and cleaned themselves in the wintertime, and that was done on that Tuesday morning before we moved out of our bivouac. I remember well the camp that Tuesday morning, for it was different from any camp we made before that, or after that either. For one thing, it was alive – and in a manner of speaking we had been dead for a long, long time. The cold of winter was gone, not only from the air but from our hearts, and we exploded into life and noise and song and heady exuberance. And the women caught it, and the children too, running and laughing and shouting. There was such a time of cleaning and mending and patching, and rubbing the bayonets and muskets with lye and soap until they gleamed in the sun, and polishing the cannon and scraping the mud from the carts and carriers, and more mending – for we had a sudden lust and frenzy to look like an army and we carried this on until we were strangers to ourselves, and I remember how men stopped to look at each other and to grin or hoot or laugh until their sides shook.

And we had an audience. First, when the Jersey folk began to gather around our bivouac from all parts of the countryside, we were reserved and wary – for we were still the foreign brigades, and this was the land where winter after winter we had starved and sickened and died on all the endless miles of road we had marched, from Morristown to Newark to Trenton to Princeton to Basking Ridge to Chatham and Pluckemin, north and south and east and west, year after year, and here too we had fought and fought, on the Palisades and in the lonely reaches of the flats and at Monmouth in the pine barrens and along the rivers and on the coast; and always we were strangers and always we were hungry.

But not now. Let those who lie about us and malign us explain how, on Tuesday morning, the farmers came from all over the countryside with their gifts of food, with grain and pigs and sheep and sides of beef and chickens and bags of apples and potatoes. More and more of them came, until our commissary wagons were loaded full and piled high, and still the people came until a solid circle of them ringed our whole encampment. I doubt if there was one man or woman or child for ten miles around who was not of the gentry and not bedridden who did not come that morning to watch us and cheer us and bring us some gift.

They came out as if it were a holiday occasion. There were fat Dutch housewives holding little children, who shuffled uneasily in their wooden shoes, Dutch farmers with their clay pipes, Westphalians in their colorful costumes, the women with their high hats, the men with their blue vests and silken tassels, Saxon peasants who yawked open-mouthed at these terrible foreigners who had cast out their officer gentry, even the way it was whispered their own ancestors had done so long ago in their own revolt, which ran away in the distances of time in a river of blood. There were tall, rawboned Yankee tenants, Connecticut men from the paper works, wagon drivers, bearded, dirty leather-clad men who for years had driven their Jersey produce to the coast, where it was picked up by fishing smacks and sold at the wharves of British New York. And there were children of all ages and all kinds babbling away in all tongues, so that it occurred to me again, as it had so often before in Jersey, that we of the brigades were no more foreign than this strange assortment of folk who lived in the land. Little enough they had of Scotch and Irish, but sufficient of everything else – although today you would never know it to travel through the Jerseys as they are now. But it was different then, and the folk were simpler, and in their simplicity they saw much in us that we did not see in ourselves. Many of the women came with loaves of bread and baked herrings and potato pudding, and if we were wary of them, at first they were warier of us; for even their own hatred of the gentry could not entirely overcome the legend of our wildness and wickedness. But in a little while, all of these fears broke down. The drummer children were fed as they had never been fed before; the fat Westphalian women clucked and sighed over our skinnyness, and the wagon drivers handled our British muskets, which we had taken from the enemy in the course of the years, our long British bayonets and our shining bronze cannon. Children worshiped open-mouthed at our strutting pipers, who had such a wind as was never seen in America before, and tirelessly went on and on with their outlandish Highland music. Farm girls giggled as they helped our lads to patch their clothes into some sort of order, and reticent close-mouthed farmers became loquacious and snorted over the condition of our animals.

And for our own men, this was the strangest thing that had ever happened in all our years of warfare; for we were the foreign brigades without home or kin; we were soldiers without discharge; we had been whipped and beaten and herded like cattle; and for us there was no discharge – as there was among the New England and Southern troops. Where would one of us go if he deserted? Never before had we known such a sense of the people for whom we fought, and never before had the people known us – except as ragged, ugly strangers who marched endlessly up and down their roads, who stole their stock and broke their fences, and who did the will of our officer gentry. Long ago, in the first flush of revolt, they had welcomed us as we marched north to Boston, but already when we fled from New York, in 1776, their doors were closed against us; and never thereafter had either party done anything to endear him to the other.

With Abner Williams, I watched this that morning, after Emil Horst had been driven from the camp like a leper; and I was filled with emotion and sadness and joy all at once, as a cup is filled with water that laps over the edges – and I felt above all things a loneliness and wanting for the one maid whose lips had been sweet to me; and as I watched Abner Williams pick up a little child and pet it, I tried to make some order out of my thoughts. I pointed to the loose, eddying throng of our men, and I asked Williams:

What has happened?

I don't know, he answered, stroking the hair of the little girl as she laughed at him.

But you see that something has come over us.

I see it, but I don't know, and he put the child down, and it ran between his legs and then onward, twisting this way and that way.

Why did they hate us yesterday? Why do they love us today?

If I knew that, I would know much more, answered Abner Williams.

And what has happened to the men?

What has happened to you, then, Jamie Stuart?

What has happened to me? How should I know what has happened to me when I am sick a bittock and mighty a bittock, and I want to put my head to the side and cry, and I am filled with shame for every time I was drunk or wild or laid with a whore, and I feel pure and close to all these hard and godless men. But I am only Jamie Stuart who knows a little cobbling and a little bayoneting and you have had yerself education and college and learning of all kinds.

Of all kinds but the kind that would tell me what has been done here in our awful despair of yesterday.

And where do we go?

I don't know, Jamie, he said, and I said nothing to that, but stood in the warm sunshine, looking down at my broken boots, my torn, mud-stained leggings, my coarse overalls, so big and rough over my bony knees and legs – and I remembered back to the springtime after Valley Forge, when we came out of our stinking clothes and all of a sudden became thin-shanked lads frolicking in a brook. So we were young again now, and there was the strange and frightening discovery of youth in all we did.

A woman came to us and asked was there anything she could do?

Do me a favor of sewing, I said so softly, and took the rag from my arm.

They had come with needle and thread. Here were men who wanted mending, and this was a needle for the soul as well as the cloth; and it is never those who fight the wars who reap the glory. She was a woman of forty or so, buxom and round and yellow-haired, and Dutch I would say, from the manner of her speech, with little blue eyes like buttons; and just to look at her made the man in me rise up and beat against my stomach and chest. So she stood by me and sewed and asked me:

What is your name, son?

Jamie, I said. Jamie Stuart.

A foreigner?

I was born in Pennsylvania, but my folks were bound out from the old country.

As were mine, she sighed. And will you be going home?

I have no home, I answered, my voice all thick with emotion and longing. I have no kith and no kin.

You are an orphan boy?

That I am, I told her, but I am not so much of a boy as you think.

And I moved closer to her and touched her round, full breast, not boldly and wantonly, but so timorously that she smiled instead of being angry at me. But fires raced through me and all over me, and she saw in my eyes what I was thinking, and asked me:

How old are you, boy?

Twenty-two years, if you count the years. But if you measure the sorrows I have seen, I'm older than you are.

And all the while I stroked that fine, full womanly breast of hers, and she did not tell me nay, or make any other kind of play with me, but kept looking straight into my eyes.

I'm old enough to be your mother, she said.

That, you are not!

What do you want of me, boy? Marching in you come, and then you will go marching out, and you are hard as nails and strange as the moon, you men of the brigades.

Why am I strange to you, when you are nohow strange to me?

What do you want of me, boy? she asked.

And I knew what I wanted. I wanted to go where she was and, lie next to her and put my head on her bosom and soak up the fullness of her and the warmth of her and feel the comfort of a bed and a woman and an end to this marching into nowhere.

Marching in, marching out, she said.

Put your arms around me, I begged her.

With a thousand folk to see?

Let them see and be damned to them! Put your arms around me!

And that she did, holding me tight and tender. And then she let me go and began to sew with quick, nervous stitches at the dirty rag that was my badge of rank, saying to me:

It's a bitter thing to be a soldier.

Bitter indeed, I nodded.

But now we are sib, she smiled, using a Scottish word as the needle raced.

Sib, I nodded, sib, and the tears rolled down my cheeks. She finished the mending, and Williams returned and said harshly:

Blow the horns, Jamie, and get them to marching! What in hell are we doing here?

He was right. Without looking at her again, I left and found the trumpeters and had them blow; and Chester Rosenbank rounded up his drummer lads, their bellies so full they stuck out, and while the drums rolled and the fifes twittered, the men ran from all over the broad meadows, falling into ranks.

It was a heady thing, the way the men moved; it was full of pride and confidence and strength – and never did a sergeant or a corporal have to raise his voice. Regiment by regiment, they fell in, until the regiments and the artillery company were lined up across the meadow. It has been said often and too often that through all the time of the rising, we were drunk; but if we were it was not with rum but with this fine new freedom we had found for ourselves. Drunkenness was made a reason and excuse for every action we took, and it was said that the whole countryside sold us rum; but we were men without a bit of silver coin among us, and I do not remember any case of drunkenness in the first days of the rising – nor did we have rum to drink.

And drunken men never paraded and marched as we did. We set off down the road to Pluckemin with our drums beating and our flags flying, and we raised our voices to sing:

Captains, once more hoist your streamers,
Spread your sails and plow the wave,
Tell your masters they were dreamers
When they thought to cheat the brave.

The Committee marched in front; then the band; then the first six regiments of the Line; then the artillery; then the wagons with the women and children and sick and wounded; then the last regiments of the Line. We covered a good deal of road, and often the head of the column was out of sight of the rear, but we never broke pace or order; and all along the way, the road was lined with village and country folk who cheered to see us pass.

The hundred men of the Citizen-soldier Guard paced the files and skirmished the front and rear, and I ordered the head of the column with Angus at the end of it. The men were in fine spirits and as proud as peacocks, and at every halt they did things to give them a uniform appearance. Though some regiments of some states had uniforms, we of the Pennsylvania Line never had more than our yellow canvass overalls and our brown coats to mark us as soldiers; but all the uniforms in the world could not have made any other troops on the continent march as we did. How well I recall it, when I ran up and down the files, the shoulders backed, the lines of four rigid and holding, the muskets swinging in tempo and unison – and there a wild longing came on me that we could meet the enemy as we were, in this mood and this heart.

Yet my courage was threaded with fear and born out of the sick loneliness I had after leaving that woman. She stayed with me and inside of me, and my stomach was sick and tight until finally I had to go to the roadside and retch out the morning meal. Now where would we be going, if all the men were like me? I knew how I was. Home, I wanted, and that more than anything else, and my home was in the town of York with the lass I left so long ago. And what kept me here, I wondered. What kept any of us here?