The Proud and the Free (24 page)

Because your rank came from us, and now we have taken it away.

I see, he nodded. And you are absolutely adamant about the general and the marquis?

We are that.

Will you take
me
to Wayne, along with one of the Troop?

Connell and Levy nodded.

If you wish, Bowzar said.

Laurens looked back at the Light Horse and the two officers; he sighed, shrugged his shoulders and walked back along the road to where they were. It was at least ten minutes he stood there talking with them, and then we heard him addressing the Light Horse. A word here and there told us he was asking for a volunteer, but there were no volunteers. He stood apart and raised his voice, and still there was no response. Then he returned to us alone.

I have no love for what you've done, he told Bowzar ruefully, but so help me God, I prefer the foreign brigade to those. Take me to Wayne, will you?

Take him along, Jamie, said Bowzar, and then come to us at the Hall where the Committee meets.

So Laurens and I walked back to Jacob Hyer's inn. For a while, we walked in silence; then he said to me:

Well, Sergeant, you have sure as hell stood the world upside down, haven't you?

A little bit of it, perhaps.

Well, he shrugged, I think you will take us back, Sergeant, though God knows maybe we don't deserve it. There's nothing else to it, as I see it. Someday, perhaps, your kind will get angry with the gentry and do us in proper – and when I think of those damned Philadelphia fops, I'm not all regrets. Only there are harder men than those, Sergeant; and that's something to remember.

It is indeed, Mr. Laurens, I answered.

Sweet taste to that
Mister,
eh? But you will call me Colonel, Sergeant, and when the time comes, I'll enjoy the taste as much as you are enjoying your lark today. How is it in the Book?
Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? –
or something like that. You need a new seasoning, Sergeant, and you have not found it.

And you're damned arrogant for a man who walks on this road by grace of the Committee.

Let us say confident, not arrogant, Sergeant.… And there are my good comrades.

For we were now at the inn, where Wayne and Stewart and Butler stood shivering in the cold, looking down the road and waiting. Laurens laughed and waved at them, and Stewart ran over and embraced him. I left them there talking and walked down to the parade, where five regiments were drawn up to arms with knapsacks and whole equipment, and where the drummer lads stood cold and blue waiting for the signal that would send them into battle – in the strange inhumanity of armies of the time, which chose children to lead grown men to slaughter. Jack Maloney and Jim Holt and Sean O'Toole were in command here, and I told them what had transpired on the Philadelphia pike and of Bowzar's call for a meeting. We dismissed the regiments, and then together we walked over to Nassau Hall, where the rest of the Committee already awaited us. In the other big room, to the right as you entered the Hall, the body of the Polish man was laid out on a bench, awaiting the building of a coffin and burial, and it was covered with the wolf standard of the 10th Regiment. Good-by, I said to myself, good-by and farewell, lonely Polish man. But no one said anything aloud, and we went into our headquarters to hold our meeting. We lit the candles, for night was falling now, and we listened to Chester Rosenbank, who was there by invitation and with no good words.

The Committee, he said – his solemn, German face owlish and regretful, his little blue eyes watering behind his spectacles – the Committee has asked me to report on the state of our supplies; I humbly submit the report.

Speak up, Chester! said Dwight Carpenter, and the schoolmaster looked at him reproachfully as he removed his glasses and wiped them with a rag of cloth. He had for his report some scraps of paper, and now he assembled these in front of him, squinted through his spectacles, cleared his throat and began to speak. He was not quite like anyone else in the brigades, but then, I may ask myself who was? From one or another of the states, they might have been cut from a whole cloth, but we were a union of difference, of distances, of extremes; and this German schoolmaster, who could sit for hours, dreaming over his flute and Johann Sebastian Bach, and would spend hours more teaching our fifers counterpoints and harmonies, was a very good soldier indeed and one of those who had enlisted in the first Pennsylvania regiment organized in Philadelphia in March of 1775. But soldiering had not made him other than he was before, and he spoke to us as he would to a classroom, explaining a painful and unhappy problem.

Considering first the question of ammunition, he said, I can be most explicit. We have at present in the whole encampment two thousand, seven hundred and twenty-two men – that is today. Our previous counts – well, they have not been wholly accurate. In this, I include the drummer boys and the riflemen, but not the forty-three men who are in the hospital; because when I discussed that with Andrew MacPherson, he insists they must be left here if we move. Now we have, all told, fourteen thousand and thirty musket balls, less than five rounds to a man even if you exclude the riflemen and the gunners. With rifle shot, we are better off, with almost seventy pellets to each rifle, and we have gunpowder to the amount of twenty-one hundred pounds. This does not include the contents of the individual powder boxes, since I have no way of determining that. But that is not good either, for until New Year's Day, no regular inspection was made of the powder boxes, and a good deal was used for flinting and for purging sick stomachs too. This, however, we have put a stop to. It is my estimation, nevertheless, that we have not enough powder in the boxes for the balls, unless they are undershot. We have, for the six guns, forty iron balls and twelve stone balls. We also have fifty-two rounds of grapeshot, which makes exactly one hundred and four cannon rounds, and for that, you see, there is plenty of powder for undershotting but not for dueling. But since we have so few balls, we cannot go dueling anyway. The grape can be recast for musketry, but that would leave us open, and the men would not like it. We have neither bar shot nor chain shot. That is the way it is with the ammunition.

This finished the first part of his report. We should have known, but we didn't know, and I saw many a face go pale as we listened.

But I myself, said Levy, counted eight hundred bars of lead. In the hospital alone, there were three hundred bars.

We never finished rendering those – and the rest we left. Just as we left the four dismounted cannon at the redoubt at Mt. Kemble, and two hundred cannon balls and fifty bags of grape with them.

If they are still at Morristown – began O'Toole.

No, no, said Jack Maloney. The Yankee soldiers are already there. If we should raid the place …

His voice trailed away, and no one else spoke. Once again, Rosenbank cleared his throat.

As for food – he said – we are no better. We have meat and flour for two days and corn meal for a third day. That's all – and what we have is only because the farmers brought it to us and gave it to us. We have no money to buy, and the farming men here in the neighborhood – no matter what they feel, they cannot support three thousand men. If they give us all their food, what will they do then with no money in exchange? We have eleven tents that are any use; the rest we had to cut up for shoes and overalls, but they were no good anyway. All the men are shod, but not for marching. For perimeter duty all right, but not for marching. We have some cows, but if we eat them we can't milk them. But we have no fodder, so I thought I would trade with the farm folk for corn meal. That will give us enough meal for two days more, but then we will have a lot of sickness if we eat only corn meal. We have twenty-three oxen and forty-seven horses, and if we leave the wounded here, we can begin to kill the oxen; then we can burn the carts for firewood, but that is like eating our fingers to feed our bellies, like eating the horses, which would be like eating our feet to feed our bellies … Our feet, our fingers … I've thought all I can about it, I don't know what to do. There is food on the farms, I guess, but if we should take one grain of it, well, that would be the end – yes? It would be the end?

It would be the end, Levy answered. One chicken, one ear of corn – it would be the end.

Anyway, it's the same, someone said.

All right, Bowzar nodded, smiling. Thank you, Mr. Rosenbank – giving him that term because he was a scholarly man and deserving it – we are very grateful. Will you stretch the food as far as you can? Don't let the men go hungry, but don't waste food.

Food I would not waste, Sergeant Bowzar.

No. That's true. Well, we thank you. We are grateful to you. Maybe someday, if we ever have medals, we will be able to give you a medal.

A medal would be nice, said the schoolmaster thoughtfully as he rose to leave. When I go back to school teaching, it will be nice to wear a medal. Good night, he said. Good night.

He walked out, breathing on his spectacles and polishing them and rubbing his eyes. He will be weeping when he is outside, I thought.

Medals, said old Scottsboro.

Well, gentlemen? Bowzar smiled.

Medals, old Scottsboro mumbled.

If the British – said Levy, almost to himself – are marching on us from the east, and the Yankees from the north and the gentry from the south, all our problems will be solved, no? I won't mind a finish the way a soldier should finish, the way the Polish man finished.

Time for that, said Bowzar. There is the Jersey Line still, and nobody knows what they will do …

But before the night was over, we knew that too. All things came to us that day. Johnny Laurens came to us in Nassau Hall, knocking on the door and then smiling as he walked in, his greatcoat open, his youthful, handsome face flushed and healthy. He stood strong and tall and confident, looking at the twelve of us as we sat around the table, never bothering to remove his cocked hat, for we were twelve small, shrunken men who had prodded our dreams too much – whereas he stood there as one who had never overmuch had the need of dreaming.

Forgive the Jew Gonzales, he said, for I talked him into bringing me here, after he had intimated that you might meet all night long. What I have to say will not wait all night long.

What have you to say, now that you are here? Billy Bowzar asked him coldly and bitterly.

Only this: that Joseph Reed, the President himself of Pennsylvania Country, will come here and talk with you and treat with you on the terms General Wayne laid out. I am empowered to say that – your terms and General Wayne's terms. You must take this or leave this.

And what be them terms? asked old Scottsboro.

Three main points – the rest can be settled if you talk with the President. The points are these.
One:
No reprisals to be taken against any member of the Line.
Two:
All soldiers whose enlistment has expired to be discharged.
Three:
All proven bounties to be paid.… On your part, you must pledge the discipline and will of the men who remain.

That is very little you give us, said Bowzar slowly.

Or a great deal, depending how you look at it.

We will let you know tomorrow, Bowzar said.

Laurens smiled, nodded, and then, as by a sudden impulse, saluted. He turned on his heel then and left.…

The salute lasts in my mind. We were finishing, but a brigade officer of the Line saluted us; and I sometimes wonder whether if Johnny Laurens had not laid down his life so soon, we might not have been remembered a little better – and then I wonder why we should want a better memory. What is the memory for all such things as we did? Johnny Laurens had a smile and a gentle manner and the juice of life ran strong in him, but there was never a moment's doubt where he stood. They stood in one place and we stood in another, and so it was until the end, and I must get on with the end, for I have told much and yet there is much more to tell.

Leaving the Committee to talk, I went out into the night and on my rounds. Filled with a great restlessness, I could not remain there with them and listen to them debating what could not be resolved; for when all is said and done, they were good, brave and strange men, not proud but filled with the sense of freedom, and thereby their debating came to nothing at all. If they had been adventurers, they could have embarked on some wild and terrible adventure; but though they came from all parts of the world to fight in the foreign brigades, they had come to have a deep love for the land on which they fought, for over many a year they had sealed a pact on it in blood. So they who led an army had no place to lead it – and they talked on and on, and at the back of their minds was the thought that surely they were not singular, and if the Jersey Line rose to join them, and then the Connecticut Line, could not the Revolution go on, in terms of the simple folk who did the fighting?

In a sense, they were not wrong; the bird that pecked in us pecked in others – even though we did not know it; even among the Yankees, for the Massachusetts troops had put their names to a petition, laying out the same demands that we had. And their officers responded more cleverly than ours: they marched; men who march have less time for brooding than those who sit still, and though their feet bled and though their limbs froze, the Yankee troops marched on and on through the forests of the North. Southward they marched until word came that the Midland armies had done strange and frightening things. But this we did not know, and we had no way of knowing it until that night, when, in my restlessness and loneliness, I walked from point to point on the perimeter of our Princeton defenses.

What a cold night that was – when a twenty-two-year-old lad walked among the defenses of an army he and a few others led! The curious Midland midwinter thaw had vanished, and the mud had turned into steel, with a thousand knifelike edges. As the cold increased, I heard that snapping, brittle winter sound, the small agony of the land's surface, and I drew closer the blanket I had thrown over my coat. I was out of my thoughts now; I went from fire to fire, exchanging a few words here and there in the easy way of men who have known each other a long time. At each place, it was
All's well –
but well only because no enemy was fool enough to come through those frozen woods and fields at night. And then I came to the bridge, where the two Jersey men were, half-frozen, crouching so close to the flames that they singed the edges of their clothes. Oh, like great, beaten dogs they were, with their dirt and their beards and the misery in their eyes.