To Try Men's Souls - George Washington 1 (4 page)

It had taken the utmost of tact to manage them in a situation that would have caused any regular officer of the British army to howl with rage or derision or both. Yet manage them he did, slowly earning their begrudging respect.

As they set to work building their fortifications around New York Harbor, reinforcements flooded in from the other states, transforming the army. There were tough backwoodsmen from the frontiers of Pennsylvania, western New York, Virginia, and the Carolinas joining spit-and-polish regiments from the tidewater of Chesapeake Bay and unruly militia by the thousands from Jersey, lower New York, and Connecticut.

His army swelled until there were more men than the entire population of Philadelphia, America’s most populous city. The worry then, added to when the invasion would strike, was simply keeping so many men fed, housed, and healthy and not at each other’s throats. As to the feeding and housing, the need had been met, for the countryside was rich; supplies could be floated down the Hudson Valley and drawn in from the fertile Jersey countryside. As to health, that soon broke down as it would in almost any army that stayed in camp.
Smallpox struck thousands, and hundreds perished, but such was to be expected even in the best tended of armies. As to stopping the men from going at each other’s throats, that had proven near impossible at times.

Though he would never admit it within the hearing of a single living soul, the New Englanders struck him as a haughty and ill-bred lot, lacking in the refinements a gentleman planter of Virginia expected of them. He was not the only person in the command to carry such feelings, and nearly all others expressed them openly, vocally, and at times violently. He actually started to pray that the British would return, and soon, for, if not, the army might very well rend itself apart.

And they had come, as if in answer to that prayer, and proved reality a curse.

In the first week of July the vanguard appeared; in the next weeks, more and yet more——ships of the line, frigates, fast sloops and brigs, supply ships——and then the transports brought regiment after regiment of England’s finest. How ironic that with each passing day he could ride down to the narrows between Long Island and Staten Island and with telescope watch the ranks disembarking onto Staten Island. Regimental standards he remembered with such admiration from the last war floated on the breeze, and when the wind came from the west he could even hear their bands playing. And alongside men who were once old comrades were the blue uniforms of the regiments from Hesse and Hanover, men who at first were merely scorned, but soon would be feared by every man in his army.

The Howe brothers, Richard in command of the navy, William the army, had made their arrangements in a ponderous, leisurely fashion, the intent obvious, to overawe before the first shot was fired. There had even been diplomatic protocols observed, of offers of reconciliation if only Washington and his rabble would ground arms, renew allegiance to the king, and return peaceably to their homes.

The offers, of course, had been met with scorn and contempt. Officers around him had boasted that once swords were crossed, it
would be the British who begged for mercy; before summer was out the entire lot of them would be sent packing to their humiliated master, George the Third.

Another gust of wind swept in from across the frozen plains of New Jersey, racing across the river, causing him to shiver again as the frigid rain lashed his face.

Few boasted now, few indeed.

This day, Christmas Day, had dawned clear and cold, the ground frozen, dusted with a light coating of snow. With a moon near full tonight, the weather at first appeared to be perfect for this move, roads frozen solid, light from the moon to guide them . . . and then by midday the harbingers of what was coming appeared. Glover’s Marblehead men, checking their boats, would raise their heads and in their nearly incomprehensible New England dialect pronounce that a regular “nor’easter was comin’.”

With John Glover, the taciturn fisherman from the tempestuous New England coast, there was not the personal bond of affection that he felt had evolved between himself and Knox, but here was a doughty man he knew he could rely upon.

He had seen such weather often enough back home at Mount Vernon, the wind backing around to the east, clouds rolling up from the south, the broad Potomac tossed with whitecaps, temperature at first rising and then plummeting, as it now was.

The plan for tonight had been that by sunset the army would be mustered and already moved by individual columns of battalions to the points of embarkation. That plan had collapsed as the last rays of the sun were blanketed by the lowering clouds already lashing out with icy rain driving in from the east. The army was to have made its first move to concealed positions within a few minutes’ walk from the riverbank while it was still light. Some of the men were not yet out of their camps, and all semblance of an orderly preparation, which once darkness closed in was to have been unleashed by a fast rush to the boats and then across the river, was already falling apart.
Now the far shore was an indistinct blur, waves kicking up midstream, ice floes crashing and bobbing as they swirled by.

The plan had been threatened with collapse even before it was supposed to start. Only now were troops beginning to move toward the river, and boats that should have been in place were still being maneuvered out of concealment. His hopes of bringing the boats alongshore at a dozen points for loading and then off-loading on the far shore were dashed by the rising of the river, tossed now with waves and blanketed with ice floes. Every single man, horse, and gun would have to be funneled to one narrow dock at the ferry and then off-loaded at an equally small dock on the opposite shore. Already it was obvious it would take twice, three times as long to complete the crossing.

A shiver ran through him.

A company of riflemen and several companies of his trusted Virginians, who would be the first to cross and establish a picket line, sloshed past him, kicking up icy slush. The riflemen at least had some semblance of uniforms, their famed round hats and fringed hunting jackets, long ago white, now filth-encrusted and stained to gray, brown, and black, patched and repatched; a lucky few still had boots or shoes, but many had burlap strips wrapped around their feet, and more than a few were barefoot. They did not see him standing in the shadows and passed in loose order, complaining and cursing.

“Damn this, damn all of this,” a voice echoed, and they staggered past, not recognizing their general in the shadows. “I tell you the captain said it’s off, he heard from . . . Come next week I’m going for home . . .”

“Just shut up and keep moving,” a deep voice boomed. “This is going to work.”

He marked with his gaze the last man in the column, a sergeant from the looks of him, someone who still believed and was urging his men onward.

The sergeant fell out for a moment to retie the burlap around his feet; obviously an older man, for in the fading light Washington could see his gray beard. He had the look of a man who, in spite of all
privations, was as tough as seasoned hickory. Looking up as he finished retying his foot wrappings, the sergeant saw who was watching. He merely stood up, gave a casual salute, and without comment or flourish turned and pressed on, disappearing into the shadows and mists.

He could not help but smile. A time perhaps, he thought, when I looked like that. I was too young for a graybeard, but the hunting smock, loose leggings, a lean, strongman, moving with a casual ease that spoke of experience in the woods——that was once me.

Was it really twenty years past that he had marched with Braddock to that ghastly defeat near Pittsburgh? The years prior to that surveying the valley of the Shenandoah, venturing even as far as the Ohio. So many nights like this one, but huddled under a lean-to in winter storms, a good fire going, the day’s take of game roasting, there was no battle ahead to worry about, other than a concern that the natives might decide to change their views and pay a visit during the night. More than one of his comrades of those days had simply disappeared into the wilderness, a rumor perhaps drifting out later of a quick death in an ambush or a very slow and lingering death by torture.

Yet he had ventured westward as a young man, and at times still he dreamed of those days when he had gladly accepted the risks. That in part had been the thrill of it all. To explore land seen by only a handful of white men, to never know what he would experience around the next bend of the trail, to stake out more land in a day than an English baron could ever dream of owning.

Good days those, fine days. He could climb a ridge and see the unexplored world spread out before him, a vista stretching to eternity. Most of the English soldiers he knew in the last war had found the dark forests, the wilderness, disorienting, frightful even. They longed to return to England, its ordered fields, well-tended lanes, and teeming cities.

That was a difference between us so profound. Beyond the issues of the rights of free Englishmen, defined now as Americans, there
was something deeper, harder to define, and the men who had just marched past him, echoing his own youth, perhaps symbolized it.

Beyond the Ohio he had explored in his youth there was the Mississippi. The few he knew who had seen it said the Ohio was merely a brook by comparison. And beyond that the Missouri, and beyond that river there were vague distant places that kings in Europe claimed were theirs but had never seen, and would trade back and forth as lines on a map, and mountains that supposedly dwarfed the Alps.

England could no longer rule this land; Englanders had no sense of it as we who were born to it did. They could never comprehend it unless they had trekked it for months at a time as he had. There was a time long ago when he had longed to travel to England, the motherland as some still called it, even invited there by comrades of old with whom he had served in the war against the French. But he knew now he never would, unless it was in chains to face a hanging. He grimaced at the thought, remembering what Ben Franklin had said about hanging together or hanging separately for what they now did. No, not the rope if we lose this night; they will not take me alive, and I will never surrender.

He turned to look back at the waters of the Delaware. Dark, foreboding. He knew those gathered nearby were waiting, most likely praying that he would end what they thought of as this mad venture. Knox had indeed said it outright earlier in the day with his booming voice, though his artillery chief did not know he was listening.

“It is one turn of the cards tonight, gentlemen,” Knox had said solemnly when he thought his General was beyond earshot, “and if trumped, it is the end for all of us.”

As the skies lowered and more and more men turned to look upward, muttering that it was going to be a blow, he could sense their wavering. But there was no turning back. The army was at a ragged end. Enlistments of all but a handful expired at the beginning of the new year, but six days off. An army once thirty thousand strong on
the day independence was proclaimed had collapsed to a pitiful frozen few. He could muster five thousand tonight. In days it might only be five hundred.

That is why I cannot turn back, he thought, though common sense tells me that I should. My instinct tells me we have no choice. It is not for mere symbolism that I chose “victory or death” as our password for this night. It is a gamble, but it is the only gamble we can take.

The plan was well-nigh impossible to execute even by a professional fighting force trained to it for years, as were the English and even more so the Hessians, the finest professional soldiers to be had in Europe.

His army was to cross in three parts, his main force here, nine miles north of Trenton; a second, diversionary force at Bordentown, downriver from Trenton; and then, just before dawn, a third force directly below the town to block any escape by the garrison they planned to attack at first light. Even if, by some strange device, he could speak instantly to the commanders of his other two forces and monitor each step of their moves, even then such an attack at night was a challenge near to overwhelming, as he knew almost all of his staff believed.

The men were poorly fed, many having wolfed down the three days of so-called rations within minutes after receiving the leathery beef and hardtack. The march this night would be a hard one on ice-covered roads, which by the feel of this storm would soon turn to slush and semifrozen mud. Of the five thousand reported as present, the surgeon’s report this day declared barely half fit for duty, and a night of hard marching would most likely mean hundreds of them collapsing before dawn. And that report had been given before this storm rolled in.

Dr. Benjamin Rush, an old friend, had come up from Philadelphia several days ago to visit and inspect the army. Congress as usual was looking over his shoulder even though in a proclamation of two weeks back, after fleeing Philadelphia for Baltimore, they had all but
given him dictatorial powers to recruit a new army and command it. He trusted Rush, though, and welcomed him. Rush was a man of optimism and encouragement who swore that in spite of the unrelenting defeats a new spirit was beginning to rise up in defiance.

“Perhaps we Americans need a good thrashing now and again to wake us up,” Rush had said.

He could not reply to that, for he was the commander who had been thrashed, and soundly. From Long Island all the way across New York and New Jersey to the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware, he had been beaten in every stand-up fight, and now, as his army lost morale and men, he was reduced to a final desperate act.

He had shared with Rush his plan to somehow strike back before the end of the year, to achieve some victory that would boost morale and in turn encourage at least some of the men to stay with the colors and renew their enlistments. The comment had been made that it would be “victory or death,” and those three words, at that moment, had not in the least sounded like a line delivered by an actor upon the stage.