The Proud and the Free (16 page)

Because we don't know, Jamie. We will sit down with the Committee tonight and talk about it.

And talk and talk and talk.

That's right, Jamie.

We talked for five years, but in one night of action those of us who know a little about doing and less of gabble turned the world over.

Not the whole world, Jamie, said Billy Bowzar gently, taking my arm as I strode along beside him. Not the whole world, but just the Pennsylvania Line. And meanwhile we are marching to Princeton, where we will rest awhile and patch our boots —

And you'll have use for a cobbler, since I have no brains in my head to match yourself and the Jew Levy!

Easy, Jamie, and cork your bung a little. We got a great appreciation for what you did. I am no general that I can pin a medal onto you, Jamie, but I also have no crystal ball to peer into and find the answers. Maybe if we had waited a month or six months before we rose up, we would have known. But if we waited, we would have lost our guts, for we are still like men in a dream, and it was only last night, Jamie, that we did what we did.

Then Danny Connell drew me aside into the drain of the road, so that we stood against the hump of hedge and rut while the columns marched past. The men came swinging by, grinning at us, and one and another said:

Ho, Jamie! Ho, Danny!

What bird pecks in you? asked Danny Connell, his pinched, drawn face anxious and warm, an old man in a lad's body, like so many of us.

No bird.

But the answer was fear, I knew; and I was asking myself,
Why, Jamie Stuart, why?
even as the 10th marched past, singing
Erin's sons are weeping sadly, they will see her sward no more
… I wanted to know
Why? why?

They got an affection for us, said Danny Connell, and me damned heart is glad for that. We lead them, and they got an affection for us, Jamie. There is the whole world turned upside down.

And again, we stood and watched. Across the road, on a shoulder of a hill, was a wooden stake fence, and a family of nine or ten children were there, German or Dutch from the look of them, all of them like peas from the same pod with corn-thatch hair and blue eyes, a dog next to them – all of them staring open-mouthed and silent at this endless line of men, marching four abreast, playing drums and fifes and pipes and singing outlandish songs.

Then the wagons came, and on one of them was Connell's Mathilda, and when she saw him, she dropped off and he caught her up in his arms, laughing as he rocked her back and forth.

To hell with that! I cried at him. We are on the march, and you are of the Committee, and this is a hell of a thing to do!

What pecks in him? asked the Irishman.

But I ran off to catch the head of the column again.

We bivouacked that Tuesday night in the old encampment at Middlebrook, where we had hutted for a time two years before. That was the way it was then in the Jerseys – for you will remember that for five years we had fought and marched over this ground. There was almost no stream of clear water where we had not bivouacked at one time or another, if not the Line, then one or another regiment of the Line, and there was no lane or bypath with which we were not familiar. And all over the country were our huts, or the huts of the Jersey men or the Connecticut men or the Massachusetts men, the abandoned parades, the forests we had clipped for our warmth, all of it brief, a quick erection that began to rot almost as the sound of our drums vanished; and I know of nothing more melancholy than an old encampment, filled with the ghosts of dead comrades and dead dreams – and in the same way have our deeds and sufferings vanished in the rush of years, to be replaced by a pleasant fairy tale for little children and old women, with no little memory of what the flesh and blood men were and what they wanted and what they died for.

So we came back to Middlebrook as the sun was setting on that mild, uncommon winter afternoon, and we encamped ourselves on the parade. We had no desire to put the hutments to use, for they were filled with all the old wickedness and suffering of the past – and dirt and refuse and the foul smell of long disuse. The weather was mild enough for us to be comfortable in the open. We raised up all the tents we had, built our fires foursquare, twenty to a regiment, and laid triple pickets around the place; that is, at no time in the night did we have less than three hundred men standing guard, and our cannons were loaded with small grape and short powder and set to sweep every approach. This was the trust of Angus and myself, and it was amazing how, in the short space of a few hours, the hundred men of the Citizen-soldier Guard had become expert at the business of organizing and provosting a bivouac. I can say without boasting that though I have seen many a display and bivouac of soldiers since then, I have never seen the discipline or the co-ordination that existed in the Line during the time of the rising. Each Committee we had created was functioning in part at least, and small though that part might be, it was better than the bitter hatred which had prevailed under the officers, the discord and resentment.

Meanwhile the Committee of Sergeants, augmented with other committee heads and leading men from the regiments, had begun to meet in an old stone barn which stood at the end of the parade.

MacGrath and I, and the Gary brothers with us, did not come to the barn until well after nightfall; by then at least forty people were present in the big, drafty room, which had only half a roof and was lit with pitch torches. Two logs had been dragged in for the men to sit on; the rest sat on the floor or on the old feed trough. It had turned cold with nightfall, and the men were wrapped in scarves and in their threadbare blankets, bulked up with shoddy goods and looking strangely small now that their beards were gone, like sheared sheep. When Angus and I entered, old Lawrence Scottsboro was speaking, and it took a while for us to get the drift of what had gone on. Sometime – my memory lapses here, and I cannot recall whether it was after or before we came – they raised the thought of a march westward; yet it was on that the old man spoke, that ever-present dream and refuge and last stand of the army of the confederation, ever since the confederation had come into being. Always in the past, when matters were so low that no one believed they could sink lower, when our nakedness was past nakedness and our hunger was past hunger, when the other Lines of the other states had shrunk into skeletons of a few hundred men each, when no army and no resistance was left but the foreign brigades of Pennsylvania – when that came to pass, the last card was brought from the deck and it was said that we would march westward over the mountains into the wild and lonely land of Fincastle, as we called it then, and make a new republic there, and war on from there if need be for a hundred years against the British enemy. But this was always the kind of dream that desperate men make for themselves, and it was like smoke, blown away by a close examination or even a puff of wind. Yet this was being spoken of now, and the old man Scottsboro was recalling how he had marched with Braddock in the great destruction that the Frenchmen and the Indians had brought upon them, and this and that about how it was to fight in the dark woods. And as we listened, a colder chill than the weather crept over us.

You may not understand now what a deep horror we had in those times of the dark and awful forest, where the trees were seven feet through the trunk, and where a man could walk a fortnight and never see the sky or properly know when it was daybreak or nightfall – and where a child could go out of sight and never be seen or heard of again, and a grown man too. You are town bred and country bred. But we had with us in the Line many, many of the lonely Scottish buckskin men from Fincastle, who had been driven there because not an acre of open land existed but was pledged to a man of property who had the King's guns to shoot down those who poached on it; and yet these men shook their heads somberly at talk of a retreat across the mountains.

Yes, we could lose us, said Scottsboro, choosing his words slowly and painfully, and the nation would lose us too. And we would not set up a republic, but only a company of lost men who would turn bandits in that bitter land.

Lawrence Scottsboro was an ancient among us, a small, knotted man, wrinkled, with only four teeth in his whole mouth, and on and off racked with the rheumatic pains which were the special reward to each and every one who followed the soldier's trade. He, like Jack Maloney, had no father, no mother, no kith nor kin. He had licked and scraped from a camp kettle when he was seven years old, and he had not the slightest notion where he came from or who he was or of what blood. Scottsboro, as you know, was the old wooden fort the British built on the upper reaches of the Hudson River, so long ago – and now not even a stick of it remains – and that was the name he took, since it was the first place he could root out of his memory. And he had grown up in the camps of the British regiments, lickspittle at first, serving and scrounging and running to heel with a fist at his forelock – until he was old enough to beat a drum and then to carry a gun. Often I have heard him remember the endless marches he made, the uncounted miles from garrison to garrison, fort to fort, post to post – in the dirty, miserable, meaningless life a redcoat Regular lived, the cane on the shoulders, the filth, the loneliness, the depraved practices among the ignorant, hopeless, undersized men who sold their souls and their lives for the mess of pottage King George served out. He became a corporal and a sergeant and then a master sergeant, and you would have said that there was never a thought or a dream in his obedient head; but the bitterness had made a score, and when the farmers beat the British into Boston in 1775, he and two others cut off a redcoat captain's head and brought it to the Yankee farmers as enlistment papers. But he was an army man and nothing else, and in the great rout of 1776, when the Yankees ran away, he saw that the foreign brigades remained to fight, and he joined the 1st Regiment of Pennsylvania – which was my regiment then, until they took me out to be sergeant in the 11th.

This old man, such a hard and bitter old man, now spoke with gentleness and wisdom and said:

Because we are not a folk, but an army. We be soldiers, and of soldiers and soldiering I know something, laddies, for I was under the weight of a gun before the lot of ye were born. There is no good in soldiers except what comes from the folk they soldier for – and if you soldier for that bastard King, as I did so long, what are ye but a buffer, a pimp, a bruiser, a blower, a hooker, a prigger, a whip jack – and it don't matter ye wear a red coat on your back. Now, what virtue is in us? I been rolling that round and round in this old head of mine, for we are as hard-bitten and scraggy a lot of men as there are in this whole world over, and I know, I tell you. I seen hard men a-plenty, but I seen harder in these foreign brigades. But I look around at my comrades, and I find them gentle, so gentle I got to go and put my cloak over my face and cry, which a grown man shouldn't need to do. I ain't but a simple man, as ye know, but I think there is a deeper virtue in freedom than we sense – and that is why the country folk come with food. That is why. We are their soldiers for freedom, but we got no virtue apart from that. I don't know how to say that to make it plainer, because it ain't too plain in my own head. But if we go away from them, from the Jersey and Pennsylvania and York and Connecticut and Massachusetts people, we become something else, and all what is bitter and hard in us will erupt like a boil that breaks. When ye come down to it, that is why we let the gentry cane us and whip us and starve us these five years – we got a deeper attachment than them. But if we do like Connell and Carpenter says and go into the deep woods, then God help us indeed. I don't know what we can do, but not that.

He's right, said Billy Bowzar then. We are in a war because people have suffered and people struck back. If we go to a place where there are no people, we are all through. It would be better to lay down our guns and go home.

And where is home for the foreigns? asked the Jew Levy. Here is my home.

Me thought is this, said Danny Connell, that Scottsboro is an old one, and the heart is out of the old ones. Me old father he said, If ye are going to make a rising, then go through with it and be damned!

Christ, when I hear an Irishman talk! cried Jack Maloney. Do ye make a rising for the sake of a rising? Then ye would rise all alone, ye damn fool! We made a rising because the men wanted it, and now we have cast out the officers – but what the old man says is right, and don't make mock of him. I tell you, I will not run away to the mountains! I will lay me down and die first! I will crawl first to Wayne and tell him, come back and lead me again!

I am sick to me belly of hearing ye talk about the Irish, began Danny Connell, but Billy Bowzar cut in and held them.

You have neither of ye the floor, and hold your peace. This is a Committee meeting, and that it will be. If you want the floor again, put up your hand and ask for it, and when your turn comes you can speak. But I'll not have us shouting back and forth like a gabble of red Indians.

He then recognized Abner Williams, who remained silent for a while before he began to speak. There had always been a little of mistrust in our attitude toward Williams, not only because he was a Yankee with the long, narrow, aloof face that so many of the Yankees have, but because he was a man of college education, strange with our women, apart from our jesting, and had made such remarks as to the effect of his believing as little in God as he did in King George III, except that one was there and you could put a hand on him and the other had a residence unknown. While this wasn't taken well by the Protestants, it went even worse with the Romans, who pointed out that it was logical for the Yankees, who had cast out the true God, to make the next step and defame their own false God as well. Also, he spoke a different tongue from us, a different way of the English; yet he stood for us, and from him the officers took much that they would never take from us. He too had come to us in the great rout and had remained with us, and we knew that he, like the Jew Levy, was full of many books and many mysteries. So we hearkened when he spoke and studied his words, always conscious that we were ignorant men, most of us by far knowing no letters and few numbers. And for all our dislike of the Yankees, they were like the Jews in this matter of reading and writing, scrounging for it, even if they were just common folk like ourselves.