Proceed, Sergeant Lamb

by Robert Graves

  ‘Oiled, Sir.’

  ‘Pungey with peach.’

  ‘Raddled, Roaring and Rumfustianate, rascal.’

  ‘Stingo’d, Stewed and Soaked, stinkard.’

  ‘Tagged and tarnation Trammelled.’

  ‘Unhinged and unusual Unsteady.’

  ‘Vinous and Virginia-valiant.’

  ‘Wine-logged and Whiskey-wet.’

  ‘—Have at you, Major! To crown all, you are altogether X-Y-Zee’d. And there’s my hand on it.’

  ‘I kiss it, you most lovable rogue of a Captain. God’s mercy, now, let us toss down another glass of I care not what—whether peach julap, or brandy-sling, or rank Boston kill-devil, or sweet sangree mantled over with nutmeg—to seal fast our enduring friendship, and drink damnation to Congress!’

  A silence then falling, I passed on from below the window and pushed open the side door. Spying a man who proved to be the landlord, I said: ‘Mr. —, over by Hilltown, recommended your peach-whiskey to me. May I pray you to fill my can?’

  He filled it without a word, refused the money I tendered, slapped me on the shoulder, wrapped a cold beef-steak in a newspaper, which he then thrust into my hand, and with an expressive command to silence, by squeezing his own lips between forefinger and thumb, pushed me gently out again into the yard.

  With the meat and the peach-whiskey we managed to coax another few miles of travel from Happy Billy Broadribb. He led us off the great road and down the track which led to Valley Forge, where General Washington’s men had shivered and starved during the winter that Smutchy and I had starved and shivered in the open huts at Prospect Hill. Near the cross-roads was a sign directing us to a shoemaker’s dwelling, and there we had all our shoes repaired by a German workman and his apprentice while we sat by the fire in a corner. They were Hessian deserters, I believe, and showed more anxiety lest we be displeased than curiosity as to our history or intentions. For ten shillings we were all now tolerably well-shod but only Broadribb, and for another five we bought a new pair of shoes for him. We then returned into the woods and exchanged our good clothes for his bad, as we had promised. After another deep draught of the peach-whiskey he seemed determined for the present to continue with us to New York. That evening we made no mistake, but were nobly entertained in a mansion on the banks of the Schuylkill by a lady who was a near relation of General Lee. She provided us with straw pallets in the attic of her house and then, after a lavish supper brought us by a negro, we slept like pigs for near twenty hours.

  Her husband, a nervous and loquacious gentleman, dressed in a very dandiacal fashion, came up to discourse with us as soon as he learned that we had awakened; and enlarged upon his firm attachment to the Royal Cause. His observations, however, always came round to the same point, namely what a monstrously dull city Philadelphia had become since the British had marched out. He said that the subscription dances which had succeeded the fashionable balls of those golden days were a mere mockery, that even the best-bred ladies must now spend all their days in sewing shirts for Washington’s rabble, that the odious French strutted and leered about the fine brick walks of the City as if they were conquerors. ‘Ichabod, Ichabod,’ was the burden of his song, ‘the Glory has departed.’ We let him run on, listening sympathetically, though we could not feel that in times like these a curtailment of his frivolous enjoyments warranted so loud a howl. At least he had a good and handsome wife, a fine house, attentive servants, money in both breeches pockets, which he jingled all the while as he spoke, and, by his own boast, ‘a hale constitution, thank God’.

  On the evening of March 8th, after we had eaten a very good supper of turkey and cold meats, this poor, forlorn lover of pleasure came to tell us that his canoe was at our disposal at midnight, and that his servant would put us across the river. He gave us the name and place of abode of a friend, a young Quaker, who lived a few miles this side of Germantown and would assuredly take us in. This Quaker, whose house we reached without misadventure, lodged us in a loft above his stable. He happened to have been acquainted with Major André, when that amiable and unfortunate gentleman was imprisoned at Lancaster in 1776, and his children had taken drawing lessons from him. He was as strict in his persuasion as my former friend Josiah, and confirmed me in my good opinion of the sect. He told us among other things that the Friends of Philadelphia had a year or two previously passed a law to excommunicate from their society any member who should pay a debt in depreciated Continental money; even though at this time it was treason to doubt the goodness of the paper, and though they themselves must accept it from their own debtors at its face value. They had also concurred not to take part in any privateering or contraband trade; and our host mentioned without self-glorification that he had been obliged by this law to restore to the English owner his part of a prize captured by a merchant ship in which he was interested. But he regretted that a number of his fellows had taken an active part in the war, forgetting their principles: so that he had been often accosted with ‘Wilt thou take a gun?’ and ‘Can we expect thee on the parade to-morrow?’ He told us that: ‘Our poor halting brother, Nathaniel Greene’—the glancing reference was to the General’s limp—‘is of that company of backsliders.’

  Upon leaving his house at midnight, we came about dawn to a creek, the name of which escapes me, that lay between Germantown and Bristol. It was swollen with the late rains. We chose to cross at a place where it was very broad, but only about four feet deep. Half-way over was a small island. No bridge or ferry or other means of passage offering, ‘Come,’ I said, ‘there’s nothing else for it but to wade over.’

  ‘Ay,’ said Smutchy, ‘now to strip off our clothes and make bundles of them to tie about our necks! Heigh, you, Billy Broadribb, you have sleep still in your eyes. The cold dip will freshen you.’

  Broadribb slowly removed one shoe and stocking and felt the water with his bare toes. He drew them out again with a cry. ‘Now, in the name of Almighty God,’ he complained, ‘you cannot surely expect me to pass through this liquid ice before I have breakfasted?’ He began to blubber. He had been so pampered by the gentleman of pleasure and by the honest Quaker, that he could not return to his former hardships. ‘O, Sergeant Lamb,’ he cried, ‘my heart is almost broken, you know, with hardships. I am sure I will never survive if I wade into this river. And you can’t deceive me about my pardon—the Commander-in-Chief will never grant it, that I swear.’

  We proposed to carry him over on our backs, to give him half the money we had with us, which would have amounted to near two guineas, and of course renewed our assurances as to interceding for his pardon; but all in vain. He drew on his stocking and shoe again.

  ‘Very well, then,’ cried Smutchy, ‘with Sergeant Lamb’s permission, I will now carry out in earnest what I threatened before. I will beat the bad manners and cowardice out of you with the butt of this horse-pistol and then I’ll shoot you out of hand.’

  ‘You have my permission, Sergeant Steel,’ said I, for this seemed the only means left of persuasion—the Quaker not having supplied us with any intoxicants, and our can being now empty.

  Happy Billy Broadribb turned about in great terror and was off like a mountainy hare. We ran after him, but we were all bare-footed in readiness for the crossing, and could not pursue him far because of thorns and stones. He abandoned us there, taking with him his new shoes, our better rags, and the money we had advanced to him. We never saw him again, but agreed that it was good riddance; his cowardice had depressed our spirits.

  We were already shaking with cold but, not wishing to postpone our trial further, waded in. That half-mile of water was indescribably cold. When we reached the island, we found that we had almost lost the power of our limbs. We rubbed and slapped one another to restore the flow of blood and danced about like Indians. Robert Probert, whose skin was bluish white in colour and his body shaken with a sort of palsy, cried in his sing-song Welsh voice: ‘By Devil’s damnation, no indeed, I cannot blame that poor fellow Happy. It is awful co
ld, I am. Indeed, I cannot blame poor old Happy.’ Yet he was the first to wade into the second branch of the creek and the first to emerge. Smutchy gashed his foot very badly in the course of his passage, an injury which he did not discover until some time after leaving the water, all feeling being departed from his legs. We had to support him, for the next two miles of our journey, as he could not put his injured foot to the ground. Fortunately the house to which the Quaker recommended us proved hospitable. We were there concealed in the barn, and I was given salve and bandage for dressing Smutchy’s foot. Our victuals, though plentiful, consisted wholly of corn-bread, honey and cider. Pennsylvania produces a remarkable quantity of honey, near every house boasting seven or eight bee-hives. It is said that bees were altogether unknown in America before the coming of the white men, as is proved by the name for the bee in most Indian languages being ‘the Englishman’s fly’.

  Thus far we had been most successful. We were close to the great Delaware River, about twenty miles above Philadelphia. Somehow we must find a way across it into the State of New Jersey. Unfortunately our hostess, who was the widow of a former British officer, could give us neither assistance nor recommendation in this matter. She told us that it was as much as her life was worth to make fresh enquiries on our behalf: she was already highly suspect to her neighbours. We must act on our own initiative.

  We set off at nine o’clock the same evening and passing a small house, observed a poor old woman chopping kindling wood in a shed. ‘Depend on it,’ said Tyce in an undertone, ‘either the woman is a widow or else her husband is away. It is the men hereabouts who chop the kindling, and in the early morning.’

  My experience having been that widows and other lonely women are seldom vindictive, and that they welcome company, I ventured to follow this one into the house. I asked her, could she direct me to the nearest ferry-house. She eyed me attentively from crown to foot and seeming to approve of her examination, replied in very genteel accents: ‘Come in, with your companions. You will be safe. I can see that you are a British soldier by your walk and carriage. If you would pass for American you must relax the muscles of your neck and not pout out your breast so proudly; and in putting down your feet you must not crack down the heel first as if to wound the ground, but must use the ball of your foot.’

  She had a bed-ridden husband upstairs, who had been in the service of the regal governor of Georgia, and her only son was at New York with Fanning’s Provincials, in the King’s Service. We were entertained very kindly and insisted upon paying her for her bacon and stirabout, when we left her in the morning and went to the ferry-house two miles away.

  We had hardly entered the building before we found that we had run into a nest of hornets. Eight boatmen had just come in from the river to refresh themselves with apple-jack. They were from the neighbourhood of Trenton, forty miles up the river, and were bringing a raft of seasoned timber down on the flood-water to Philadelphia for use in the shipyards. Two of them carried rifle-guns. One, who had already, as we watched, drunk off two gills of apple-jack in succession, and now called for more, sang out: ‘These four scarecrows keep very mum. Why don’t they speak? Why don’t they declare themselves? I’ll be blamed if I don’t believe that they are on the other side of the question. How say you, neighbour Melchizedek?’

  The landlord spoke up: ‘Now, now, boatmen, don’t seek trouble for yourselves or this house. They are poor, honest Germans, I warrant, who haven’t the gift of English. Kommen Sie, mein Freund,’ he added, addressing me. ‘Trinken Sie etwas?’

  I thought it best to appear cheerful and undismayed, and adopting a North of Ireland accent, which came easy, I called for four gills of apple-jack and told him that ‘we Londonderry people aye keep our own company’. Then I added fiercely: ‘Drink up, Phil, drink up, Corny and Sandy and you too, you big lump of a Robbie, before any good liquor be spilt. If these impudent tarry-faced rogues mislike our company, they must mind themselves.’

  At this they rose with one accord and went into an inner room, the landlord running after them, I suppose to deter them from violence. Smutchy said: ‘I have my pistol, but that will only be good for a single shot.’

  ‘Let us sell our lives very dear,’ cried Probert with all the ardour of a Fluellen.

  ‘I believe that no buying or selling is necessary,’ said the imperturbable Tyce, ‘if we now seize the ferry-boat and make across the river. How say you, Sergeant Lamb?’

  He was right. I bade them go ahead to the ferry, since Smutchy was delayed by his bandaged foot, while I called the landlord out and discharged the reckoning. I protested very angrily to this Melchizedek at the uncivility of the boatmen, and vowed to be revenged on them, soon as the remainder of my party of ten men came along the road. This speech covered our retreat in good order. I then sallied out and hurrying down to the river found my companions already in the boat, and Smutchy sitting behind the terrified negro-boatman with the pistol pressed against his black nape. I leaped in, we cast loose, Tyce seized the spare pair of oars and we were half-way over the river before the alarm was given. We were within range of their rifle-guns but Smutchy halloed at them as a bullet whizzed by us: ‘Another shot, and by God, we kill your old mungo.’ They then desisted.

  Soon as the boat touched the opposite shore, we ran into the woods and were before long secure from our pursuers, as we had above a mile and a half start of them.

  ***

  It would be tedious to continue detailing our travels in the same particular style: it is enough to say that in all the different places in America through which I have marched as a soldier, been carried as a captive or travelled in regaining my freedom, I never found people more strongly attached to the British Government than the inhabitants of New Jersey. I aver this with the most awful appeal for the verity of my words, despite the malignant assertions of the historian Belsham that ‘such havoc spoil and ruin’ had been made in this very part of the country by our licentious soldiery, particularly the Germans, under General Howe’s personal inspection and command as ‘to excite the utmost resentment and detestation of the inhabitants’. A historian ought to record the truth, and the truth only, whether of friend or foe. It must be admitted that the Hessians were addicted to plundering in the European style, so that their officers found difficulty in curbing their petty thieving of poultry, forage and the like; and that even so fine a corps as The Thirty-Third, when short of fuel in wintry weather, had here distrained upon the fences of the Whig farmers. I will also grant that there are rogues in every army, whose occasional crimes discredit their comrades. But had the British troops in America coolly and deliberately murdered Mr. Belsham’s father, mother and all his relatives before his very eyes, he could hardly have been more rancorous or uncandid in attributing to British officers the direction or encouragement of atrocities. The officers who served in these campaigns were gentlemen, or noblemen, of the first families in the Empire for wealth as well as honour: men without any earthly temptation to the acts charged against them, and whose high spirits would have revolted at the bare mention of petty plunder and rapine.

  But to return to my narrative. For the next week these good people of New Jersey ventured their own lives and property to secure ours, and smuggled us on from house to house in short stages, as the slipper is passed from haunch to haunch in the children’s game of ‘Cobbler, Mend my Shoe’. This country was full of troops, and the nearer we came to New York, the more numerous they grew. We went by way of Moonstown, Mountholly and Princeton, at which last place we were actually hid overnight by one of the masters in Nassau College. It was a fine, plain stone building of four storeys and a wide extension, but seemed to us rather a grammar-school, than an University College. We were concealed in the College Library. It surprised me that the books consisted almost wholly of old theological works, some placed in the shelves upside down, and all without any regularity, and having no scientific, historical or geographical treatises among them that I could see. At one end of the Library stood
the famous Mr. Rittenhouse’s orrery, but a year or two previously it had been hurriedly taken in pieces and removed from this place by the Americans—for fear, I suppose, that our officers would wish to add it to their plunder! Nor had anyone been found to restore it to working order. At the other end of the room were two small cupboards, named ‘the Museum’. They contained merely a couple of small stuffed alligators and some curious fishes: which presented a very dilapidated appearance from having been the constant playthings of students at the commencement festival each year. No studious youth with a taste for the sermons of Attenborough, South or Bishop Berkeley came to disturb us during the hours we were here.

  Since writing the above passage I have heard it asseverated by an American gentleman of some credit, a graduate of Nassau College, that the smallness of the library as I found it was due to the depredations of the rude Hessian soldiers quartered there, before General Washington’s victory, at the close of the year 1777, dispossessed them of the place. He added with indignation that scores of the choicest volumes were used for fuel by them in the Franklin stoves. I sympathized with him that by perfect exactness of stupidity these boors had rejected all the dead and dry tomes as unsuitable for burning, while choosing only the greenest and least combustible timber of the tree of knowledge.

  The last stage of our journey was to the town of Amboy, which lay opposite Staten Island, divided only by a river from the British outposts. We arrived within two days’ march of it on March 19th. We had a guide with us, whom we believed to be worthy of trust. He took us to Elizabethtown at eleven o’clock that night, and pausing outside the place told us that we might safely march through, as the inhabitants were in bed and no Americans were stationed in it. However, the news had that day reached us, published in a Philadelphia newspaper to the following effect: ‘William Broadribb, an acknowledged English deserter, was on March 9th taken up at Germantown by an Officer. He was tried the next day by a Military Court at Philadelphia on the charge of conducting four men, supposed to be British soldiers, towards New York; and the fact being proved he was summarily condemned to be hanged. The sentence will be publicly carried out in terrorem similium, in the usual place of execution, punctually at noon to-morrow, unless it rains.’ This warning struck terror in our guide’s heart. He now said to us: ‘Lest I should happen to be seen with you, and they serve me as they served this Broadribb, I will make a circuit. Let us meet on the great road at the top of the next hill beyond the town.’