To Try Men's Souls - George Washington 1 (9 page)

His head brushed against the peak of his tent, triggering another cascade of water on his bare head and down his neck.

It didn’t worsen his condition. Inside a tent or out, everyone was drenched on this miserable night. At least he had shoes on and wool socks. An adjutant to General Greene had insisted he accept them earlier in the day, along with the tent. He knew he was supposed to feel guilt for having these luxuries——shoes, socks, a tent——while the rest of the army was out in the open tonight, shivering around smoldering fires, nearly all of them barefoot, more than a
few of them all but naked under a blanket cape. Even the best of those, including that worn by “His Excellency the General,” were threadbare and worn.

At least I have this, he thought ruefully, reaching into his backpack and pulling out a leather sack, still half full of rum. He took a long pull on the flagon, resealed it, and stuck it under his jacket. At least it gave a momentary warmth, dulled the pain, the memories, and put off the problem of what he was supposed to write next.

Since coming to America, he had rarely indulged but tonight, in this miserable muck, he no longer cared, and besides, half the army was drunk, the other half wished they were.

The rain, the suffering, the fear——they were almost secondary now. What in hell should I, can I, write?

The American Crisis
. He already knew the title. He had written it twenty times on that sheet of paper now crushed into the mud, but beyond that?

He uncorked the flagon, took another drink, and sat back down on another luxury General Greene had provided for him, a field cot so that he didn’t have to sleep in the mud, the way the men he claimed to be one of would try and sleep this night.

Why did they all look to me? Because they believe I can write? They were the ones who had faced fire at Long Island, Manhattan, White Plains, and still were with the army.

His own service? A joke, other than that he could write.

Common Sense
had been in everyone’s hands for nearly a year now. It had been easy enough to write last winter, safe and warm in Philadelphia, the argument for this war no longer being about Englishmen defending the rights of Englishmen; this was now a war about a new nation, a new concept, an ideal called America. We are Americans now and will die for the right to live free.

He had written it because he had to. It had flooded out of him in a dream, a burst of energy pent up for nearly his entire life, a life of degradation, poverty, and tragedy. His pen had given him, at last,
the means to lash back at the world, the Old World he had fled in disgrace and abject poverty, where he had left behind an embittered wife and the threat of debtor’s prison.

Squatting on the wet cot, rubbing his hands against the cold, he could not help but smile at his current state. Poverty? At least in prison, if you had a few pence to bribe the turnkeys, you could get a dry room, even a fire and a cooked meal. Here? Hell, the only money the sullen citizens of Newark would take for food or a dry corner in a shed was British or Spanish silver. The wads of paper money being handed out as pay were all but worthless. More than one soldier had sarcastically used a five-dollar note as kindling or, in a more dramatic statement of crude humor, publicly wiped himself with it to the laughing taunts of his comrades.

Yet I would not trade being here rather than being back in England for a hundred pounds sterling. He was feeling more than a bit woozy as he took another pull on the flagon of rum. Despite his cynicism about all that life had handed him so far, he felt for the first time that he belonged to something. He had helped to start something. Now he was being asked to ensure that it survived, and that was exactly why he was drunk.

He was not sure what to write.

Two years ago he had been an utter failure, a stay and corset maker like his father. That had ended when his first wife, Mary, died trying to give birth to their child. He drank himself half to death after she and the baby were put into the ground. Friends helped to get him a job as an excise collector. My God, he thought ruefully, I actually collected taxes for that damned king. Finally lost that position, too, sinking the ship when, among other things, he had written a protest pamphlet demanding better conditions and pay for the excisemen who squeezed the taxes for the crown. It was hard to admit to another reason, that, more than once, rather than showing up for a day’s work, he was passed out drunk. Even tried a tobacco shop. It failed. Tried a second marriage. It failed, and as he looked back upon
it, he could not blame Elizabeth for pushing him out of her bed and life. Perhaps memories of Mary had haunted that second marriage and brought it to a rapid and untimely end.

He opened the flagon, looked at it, and forced the cork back in. He knew where this was leading. Finish off the rum, collapse on the cot, shiver through the night, and, at dawn, fall back in with the troops, swarming southward, away from British-occupied New York, panic-stricken in retreat. And not a word on paper to explain why.

They want me to explain why. They look to me to give meaning to their sacrifice and pain. Their eyes look hauntingly in expectation.

“I’m cursed by my own success.”

And penniless as well. That was the joke of it. He could picture his friend Dr. Benjamin Rush shaking his head at him and his self-inflicted poverty. It was Rush who had literally carried him off the boat two years earlier when it docked in Philadelphia, half the passengers near dead from typhoid, and nursed him back to health. It was Rush who had told him to write, that writing was his God-given mission for “the Cause.”

Common Sense
had sold over a hundred thousand copies so far, the most popular work ever written on this shore, and yet he had barely collected a pound for it. One evening Rush had run a calculation for him, how many hundreds of pounds he should have in his pocket this day, and he had given it all away, telling publishers to print it and be damned who made the money. In his passion for “the Cause” many another had freely published his work and he had pocketed only a few guineas, which he had quickly drunk away.

Rush called me a bloody idealistic fool and blessed me for it, he thought with a sad smile. Published it for “the Cause,” and now I sit here penniless, half drunk, freezing. And they want me to write another uplifting, compelling, reassuring pamphlet. General Greene had openly begged him for it. Rush had sent him a dozen missives, each one with more pressure than the last, even “His Excellency” George Washington had sat him down and said, “You have to write something! Anything!”

“Damn them.” He sighed and stood up, his head brushing the inside of the tent, the sodden canvas spilling more water onto his bare head.

He had given his hat away the day before to a piteous freezing scarecrow standing picket, shivering with fever. He took an old scarf, hanging on the inside of the tent pole where it was supposed to dry out a bit. The wool was wet, stinking of sweat and filth. He covered the top of his head, and tied it under his chin, pulled back the flap of his tent, and stepped out.

The rain was easing slightly, coming in fitful bursts, a cold edge to it. Snow by morning most likely, he thought. Maybe a blessing; maybe it will just make the suffering worse.

The vista before him was pathetic. The small village of Newark, a few hundred homes and shops huddled along the banks of the Passaic River, was packed to overflowing. It was shrouded in mist and the smoke from hundreds of sputtering, hissing campfires. Every house in the village had been requisitioned for the sick, staff, or officers; the citizens who had cheered them all so loudly in the summer, had withdrawn in silence, hiding their livestock and food in the nearby marshlands, demanding payment for dry firewood, howling with rage when desperate men told them to go to hell and took the wood anyhow. He hated this place, hated all of New Jersey for that matter, which, now that the army was in retreat, had, overnight, gone Tory. Even now he could imagine the citizens of this village pulling the Union Jacks out of hiding places in the attic, eager to hang them out their windows when this forlorn army decamped at dawn and continued its retreat toward Philadelphia. By this time tomorrow the pursuing British and Hessians will have marched in . . . with shining guineas and German coins in their pockets.

It was rumored that the British general Howe was preparing a proclamation for the citizens of New Jersey: If they would step forward and sign an oath of renewed allegiance to King George, all would be forgiven and hard currency paid for goods acquired and to any who would take up arms to suppress the traitorous rebels. It was a rumor
he knew was most likely true. By tomorrow night the “citizens” of this town would be lining up to sign it, and to be paid for doing so.

The American army, or what was left of it, was encamped on the low hills above the town, if the site could be called a camp or the men an army anymore. When they abandoned Fort Lee six days back, the army had been forced to leave behind most of its artillery and rations, hundreds of wagons, even its tents. So fast was the retreat that even the food on the hoof, cattle and swine, had been abandoned as well. Now they starved, stood around smoldering fires, sodden, and tomorrow they would most likely freeze. Tomorrow, there might not be an American army at all. The Revolution would have frozen to death.

One hell of a cause I belong to, he thought. Damn, why does it always seem to rain on armies in retreat?

Not even sure where I am going.

Looking, but for what? For the first powerful sentence that everyone needs and that I can’t write.

He was tempted to turn back from this fool’s venture, go inside the tent, and get drunk. No, not now! He pushed against the wind, the rain, and the biting cold.

“This is the time of crisis,” he had written, then a few more lines. He had taken a drink, and froze, not just from the cold but from the lack of inspiration, not knowing what he was to write next. “The time of crisis is at hand,” and then another drink. “This time of crisis will try us . . .”

Oh, the hell with it!

Twilight. The leaden overcast was disappearing into blackness. The choking smoke from campfires made of green wood, mixed with the mist rising from the river and fetid marshlands on the far side of the Passaic, made all seem like something out of Dante, a dark, foreboding Hades for the condemned souls of the Revolution he had helped to inspire.

He could easily turn to his right at this moment and head down
the few hundred yards to the house where Nathanael Greene had set up his headquarters. He knew he’d be welcomed, honored, given a place by a fire, perhaps even some food, and always something to drink. Though Greene was a Quaker and held against liquor, he did not deny it to his staff, and as was typical of officers, he always seemed to have enough.

The thought was tempting, but then Greene would come and sit by his side, smile in his friendly fashion and give him “that look.” The look so many gave him. That he was a conjurer, a minister of the soul of this Revolution, and could magically spin out of air the words that would somehow dispel the gloom, the cold, the mist and rain, the hunger. His words would warm, revive, and renew the fervor all had carried in the halcyon days of summer.

If I go there now, he will ask, “Have you written it yet?” Or far worse, “I’ve been thinking, maybe you should write this.”

Damn all of them. He could not resist. Reaching into his torn jacket, he took out the leather sack of rum for one more pull. He recalled a nursery story about a goose and its golden eggs. In the end the greedy owners had cut its throat.

Well, maybe not a knife to my throat, but if it goes on much longer like this, most definitely a rope around my neck. If the British capture me and find out who I am . . .

He pushed on through the mud and filth, angling away from the village.

He had pitched his tent with men of the First Continental. Pennsylvania. A rough-hewn lot, mostly from beyond the Susquehanna or down from the northern frontier of the Wyoming Valley. They seemed impervious to this suffering. Their whole lives had been suffering and they didn’t even know it. Nearly all were riflemen, usually tasked during the retreat with covering the rear guard, to hold the pursuing Hessian dragoons and jaegers at bay.

He slipped past a group of frontiersmen standing around a green wood fire of hissing embers and dark coals. A few looked up.

“Mr. Paine,” one of them said.

He hated that. Mister Sir. It is only “private” now, or as we called each other, not too long ago, “brother” or “citizen.” He nodded an acknowledgment and pressed on.

A knot of men was gathered around. He caught a glimpse of flapping dirty wings. Someone had snatched a chicken, and lopped its head off. Soon he was gutting it, and another was helping by yanking out fistfuls of feathers. One chicken for a dozen hungry soldiers. The fire they planned to cook it on was barely alive, more smoke than heat. They would most likely eat it half raw rather than wait for it to cook through.

“The crisis is at hand.” He watched as the chicken was neatly quartered and thrown into a pot, the water not yet at a boil. Several looked at him warily, not recognizing him in the deepening gloom, their looks conveying warning that another beggar around the pot was not welcome.

“For want of a chicken a revolution will be lost . . .”

Shakespeare was becoming popular once more. Steal a line or two from him. Few here had most likely ever read Shakespeare; no one would notice or care if he wrote about bands of brothers. Some brothers, he thought, looking hungrily at the chicken in the iron pot. He pressed on.

Shortly after the adoption of the Declaration, he had put down his pen and enlisted. It was all the rage of the moment, joining. Of all things, he had fallen in with the old elite unit of the City of Brotherly Love——the Philadelphia Associators they called themselves. Many had turned out in natty uniforms of blue with red trim, armed with roughly made muskets; they had been ferried across the Delaware with much fanfare and started north to the war. They never got north of Amboy. There they were ordered to hold against the threat of the huge British forces disembarking on the other side of the tidal waters that separated Staten Island and New Jersey. In the ensuing months they had collapsed into drunken idleness while the battles raged on Long Island and Manhattan. At times they
would wander to water’s edge and shout insults at their British counterparts on the other shore, even trade a few harmless shots and gestures.