Conceived in Liberty

by Howard Fast

  Jacob whispers: “There’s a man. No officer, but a man to lead men.”

  “A rare, strange man,” Ely agrees.

  Then the noise dies away. The General’s head drops forward, and his face is twisted with pain.

  “A play actor,” Charley murmurs.

  “You are still my men,” he says simply. “I want no more from you than to believe I am still one of you, not your General. We must build houses here—live and endure. We must.”

  Then he rides away. The brigades break. The parade becomes a seething mass of men, a roar of sound. The women flow forward and mingle with the brigades.

  The Pennsylvania men hold some kind of order. Wayne rides down the line and stops in front of our little group. We stand apart.

  “You’re not my men,” he says.

  Ely replies: “We’re the Fourth New York, sir.”

  He takes a little book out of his pocket and thumbs through it. The pages flutter in the wind and try to tear loose. “Disbanded?” he asks Ely.

  “There are eight of us left.”

  “I’ll list you with the Fourteenth Pennsylvania. You’ll take orders from Captain Muller.”

  “We’ll not become a Pennsylvania regiment,” Jacob says sullenly.

  “You’ll obey orders!”

  “To hell with your orders!”

  “Who’s in command among you?” Wayne says coldly.

  “We have no officers,” I say. “They were killed.”

  “You’ll join the Fourteenth—or you’re under arrest.”

  Jacob raises his musket. Ely tries to hold him back, but Jacob shakes loose. He says to Wayne: “You’re not talking to a German farmer. By God, I’m half-dead already, and I’d be all dead as soon as to crawl for an officer.”

  The Pennsylvanians had gathered round us now. An officer pushed through them, and Wayne said to him: “Captain Muller, have your men cover him, and shoot him if he fires.”

  I felt a single spark like that would set the field on fire. I felt that I was looking then at the finale of the revolution. But Ely put his arms around Jacob and forced the musket down.

  “They’re your men, Captain,” Wayne said. Then he rode away, and I stood there with the rest of them, feeling all sick and hot inside. I felt sick the way I had been sick at Breed’s Hill, and not since then. I pushed close to Jacob.

  The Pennsylvania men were laughing. There were some women there, giggling and making eyes at us.

  “I’ll have no mutiny in my ranks,” Muller said. “You’ll take orders, my fine beggars, or you’ll stump along.”

  “You can go to hell, sir,” Ely told him, gently.

  He couldn’t fight Ely’s eyes. He turned around, bawling for them to form their ranks.

  We form to march back. Jacob is still trembling, and his face is black. Ely holds onto his arm. Kenton has his arm round a tall, thin woman, whose face is a mockery of any decent woman’s face. A Pennsylvanian pushes through and claims the woman.

  “She’s my wife,” he said.

  “She’s a slut and I’m paying her,” Kenton says.

  “She’s my wife——”

  The other women are laughing. Kenton’s wench spits in her husband’s face. A deep roar of laughter goes up.

  “A rare lot of women these Pennsylvanians have,” Charley Green says.

  We march back. The sky breaks open, and it begins to snow. We stumble on through the snow.

  IV

  A deep peace and a great stillness, and a wind to wash clear the skies and show the stars. There is a great silence over the face of the world, and it is Christmas Eve.

  We have been here days—or weeks. We lose count of days until the word goes round that Christmas is a day away and there will be extra rations of rum. The word goes round that there will be chickens, that Captain Allen McLane and his foragers captured a British convoy train with a thousand chickens. But nobody believes and nobody is very much excited about Christmas. Another lean day. There are enough officers to take care of a thousand chickens.

  It’s night now, and I have sentry duty. It has snowed three times since we got here. There is six inches of loose, sandy snow on the ground. When you walk, it swirls up and seeps into crevices in your foot-coverings. As long as anybody can remember, there has never been such a winter as this.

  I walk one hundred and twenty paces and back—for two hours. I walk slowly, dragging my musket. At the edge of the forest, where the beat ends, I have a clear view of the frozen Schuylkill, of the King of Prussia Road and of the road to Philadelphia, blue rolling hills that sweep away until they are lost in a mystery of night. A fancy of lights on the horizon—perhaps Philadelphia. Philadelphia is only eighteen miles away.

  I wait there for Max Brone. He’s a German boy, a weed of a back-country lout from the hills around Harrisburg, who has the beat with me this night. He speaks only a few words of English, and his face is twisted with pain and homesickness and cold. He’s better than no one at all. The silence can drive you mad.

  I reach the limit of my beat and stop. The moment I stop moving, the cold eats in. It seems that we are here at the edge of the world—with no barrier between us and the cold of outer space. I wear two coats, my own and Kenton Brenner’s. But both are worn thin. The snow has crusted around my feet, and they are balls of ice. My hands are wrapped in a piece of blanket; with them and with my elbows I hold my musket. But no keeping out the cold; I try to kick the ice off my feet.

  As I wait there, I see Brone toiling up the slope. He is bent over, almost crawling on all fours. He doesn’t see me until he is quite near, and then he starts back.

  “All’s well,” I say.

  He straightens up and sighs. His breath comes out in a cloud of frozen moisture. He leans his musket against himself and beats his hands against his sides.

  “I vas feard,” he says. “Gott—it’s lonely.”

  We stand together for a while, silent, only moving in little jerks to keep the cold off. A wolf howls. His howl begins with a quiver, strengthens and climbs into the night. A dog’s bark answers. I feel little shivers crawl up and down my spine, and Brone’s face drawn taut.

  “I’d like to get a shot at that one,” I say. “I’d make me a nice cap and a pair of mittens out of his wool.”

  Brone answers: “I tink—ven I valk alone, dey’re vaiting.”

  There were no wolves here when the army first came. Farming country that has been farmed for years doesn’t have wolves. Eighteen miles away, there was a city of twenty thousand people.

  “There are more every day,” I say.

  “At home, tonight, dere vud be a fire. A roasting pig. Ve drink all night—and dance.”

  We stare at each other, and I nod. I look at him and try to see him, a thin, short boy with a frost-bitten face, a sparse yellow beard and wide-set unintelligent eyes. No imagination and no hope. I say to myself, why? I say to myself, what have you ever dreamed to follow a terrible nightmare of revolution?

  He’s the same blood as the Hessians. We don’t hate the Hessians. But the Pennsylvania Germans do; they bear hate for the Hessians as I have never known men to bear hate. I’ve seen them torture dying Hessians, kick at them, prod them with bayonets, and taunt them in German.

  I turn round and walk back. No words of parting. I glance over my shoulder and see him toiling and sliding down the slope. I see him as a picture of myself, and I try to forget the picture, closing my eyes and stumbling forward.

  At the other end of my beat, I stop and stand for a while, leaning heavily on my musket and gradually dozing as I stand. I am falling asleep. A delicious sense of parting with the world creeps through me. Bit by bit, all sense of cold vanishes. Through half-closed eyes I can just make out the half-buried dugouts of Scott’s brigades. This night merges with other Christmas Eves, and I hear my father’s slow, monotonous voice reading the story of a Man. With that, the whir of my mother’s wheel. The lulling hum of the wheel puts me to sleep. Outside is the great flat forest of the Lake
country, the mysterious kingdom of the Six Nations where we have made our home. All that is mystery and dread, but foot-thick log walls close it out.

  My father’s voice: “Allen—” And my mother, gently: “You wouldn’t sleep while the Words are being read, Allen?”

  I come to myself with a terrible, heart-stabbing fear that I am freezing. I try to move and I lack all power of movement. The fear runs through me and exhausts itself. I give way, and the delicious apathy creeps over me.

  Then a hand, stabbing from the far outside, beats down my shoulders. I give way and crumple forward in the snow, bruising my face on the hammer head of my musket. The snow in my face brings me awake. I roll over and Edward helps me to my feet. He’s big and strong, and it’s a relief to feel his wide hands under my arm.

  “I was sleeping,” I say.

  Edward spits on his sleeve, and we watch fascinated as the bit of water freezes.

  Edward shakes his head. “A cold wild night—get in to the fire.” He shivers and shakes himself, like a huge, tired dog. “Get in to the fire,” he repeats.

  I nod and stumble away. He stops me and gives me my musket. Mechanically gripping it, I make my way toward the dugouts. Tears come easily; I feel them on my lids, freezing.

  The Pennsylvania brigades are quartered on the hilltop facing the road to Philadelphia. A first line of defence; the attack will come from the direction of Philadelphia. We built the dugouts the second and third days at the encampment, half in the earth and half of logs, log fireplaces lined with mud. Ten or twelve men are crowded into each dugout. The doors face the forest, and the forest offers some shelter from a west wind. But the storm winds blow from the east and bite through the spaces between the logs.

  I came in and stood with my back against the door. I let go my musket, and it crashed against the dirt floor. The water began to run from my feet in little puddles.

  Ely was sitting on the edge of his bunk, watching me. Jacob picked up the musket, wiped it carefully, and put it in its rack. Ely poured me a drink of rum.

  “The last, Allen.”

  I gulped it eagerly. It burnt my throat and warmed me inside. I started for the fire, but Jacob pushed me back.

  “You’re frozen, Allen.”

  I dropped to the floor, stretched out my legs before me. Slowly, feeling came back, darting pains in my hands and feet. Ely bent down and peeled the outer layer of bandages from my feet.

  Charley Green lay in his bunk with his woman. Charley was no man for fighting; he was the sort of man who is only half of himself without a woman. God knows what took him away from his Boston printer’s shop to this hellhole where we were. When I think of Charley, I think of a small, fat man with children round him, of a small, fat wife. But the fat had gone. His skin hung in loose folds. Now he lay in his bunk with his woman, and they must have been asleep, because they didn’t move when I came in. Kenton sat on the edge of his bunk, his woman curled behind him. She was a Pennsylvania woman, thin, with light hair and pale blue eyes, speaking a Dutch dialect. She was free with her attentions; it’s hard for a woman to be anything else in a dugout with ten men. Vandeer stood in one corner, older than ever, hardly speaking and never smiling, dreaming of a little log parish-house, where the Sabbaths came regularly with six calm days in between. Henry slept. Brone was still on sentry beat. The last was a Polish Jew, a thin, strange man from Philadelphia, tall, hollow-chested, his brown eyes deep sunk in his head. He had been in America only a year, and he spoke no English. But she spoke Dutch, which most of us could understand. He sat next to the fire now, his head bent, his lips moving slowly.

  “Praying,” Kenton said. “He has no understanding of what night this is.” Kenton had never seen a Jew before, and I think he was afraid. “A heathen,” Kenton said.

  “Edward spat on his sleeve,” I said. “It froze before you could count three.”

  “I call to mind a gypsy at Brandywine—before the battle. He said a winter to freeze the marrow from the land.”

  Ely had bared my feet. Now, as he knelt over me, his long, grey-streaked beard brushed my hands. He worked my feet slowly. I had to turn my head away, but Ely worked them as if they were his own.

  “Feeling, Allen?”

  I nodded.

  Jacob stood over us, watching with a professional eye. The dugout was hot and close, but draughty, full of body-smell, thick heat and stray curls of cold air. The chimney drew badly, and the log roof was shielded with a layer of blue smoke. The rank odour of bad rum pierced through everything else.

  “The foot’s a small part of a man,” Jacob said.

  Kenton’s woman sat up and said: “A stinking filthy pair of feet—ye’re no more men than pigs!”

  “You shut up,” Jacob told her. “You Goddamn slut, shut up!”

  “Kenton—Kenton, hear his foul tongue?”

  Kenton shrugged and smiled foolishly. Kenton was a peaceful, easy-going man.

  Charley Green woke up, leaned out of his bunk and looked on, mildly curious. His woman shouted:

  “A fine lot of men—to curse a poor woman!”

  “It ain’t none of your matter,” Charley said.

  “I’m sicka seeing that slut,” Jacob muttered.

  “Hear him, Kenton!”

  “I’ll not have you speaking of that, Jacob,” Kenton protested, mildly.

  Jacob turned round, his fists tight clenched. I watched them, too drunk with warmth to move. Ely went on kneading my feet, as if he had not heard. The Jew kept his eyes on the ground.

  “I speak as I please,” Jacob said.

  Kenton stood up. Vandeer pushed them apart. “Ye’re no men, but beasts,” Vandeer muttered. “There’s no love or fear of God left in you.”

  Jacob went to the fire, opposite the Jew, and crouched down. Kenton relaxed on the bed, and when the woman tried to caress him, he pushed her aside. Ely bound up my feet.

  “A cold night. I pity Edward,” Ely said simply.

  Vandeer stood in the middle of the dugout, his arms raised, his mouth half-open, the skin creased loosely in folds about his eyes. Then, abruptly, he dropped his arms and went to his bunk.

  Jacob poured some thin corn broth from a pot next to the fire and offered it to me. I drank it slowly, enjoying the warmth of it.

  “It’s a hard thing to get the cold out of yer bones,” Ely said.

  The Jew looked up and said, in Dutch: “The cold of Siberia bites deeper—”

  “Siberia?”

  Green understood no Dutch, but he caught the word. “A frozen land in Asia.”

  “You were there?” I asked the Jew. “What great journey took you such distances?”

  He groped for words, for space that was the length of the world. “Two thousand of us went there—the Czar’s prisoners.”

  “From what land?”

  “Poland.”

  “I knew a Polish man,” Jacob said. “He died on Brooklyn Heights.”

  “You escaped?” Ely asked curiously.

  “I escaped—” He opened his coat and shirt, showed us a cross burnt into his breast. “They branded the Jews—said we made the revolution. But I escaped.”

  I closed my eyes; I tried to see a journey across a world. When I glanced up, the Jew’s head was bent over, his lips moving slowly.

  “Why were you fighting?” Ely said in English.

  The Jew didn’t answer. Kenton said: “Tell us, Ely, why are we fighting? I swear, by God, we’ll be an army of corpses before this winter’s out. I keep saying to myself why—why? I didn’t have no call against the British. I never seen a British man before the war that did me a mite of harm. We had two hundred acres clear, and we would have cleared a thousand two years come. We never paid no taxes. All right, I did it. I was a damn-fool kid. I told my paw there was a sight of Boston men making an army to war on the British. I told him I was going, and he laughed in my face. He said he knew Boston men and he’d seen the British fight. He gave two months before they’d hang Adams and Hancock.”

&nb
sp; “Why’d ye go?” Jacob demanded.

  Kenton put his face in his hands.

  Jacob said, bitterly: “By God—there’s no army to be made outa swine like you.”

  “Easy, easy, Jacob,” Ely whispered.

  “On a night like this—Christ was born,” Vandeer said tonelessly. “In the name of liberty you’re ridden with whores and scum. Ye’re a stubborn, hard-necked people, and God’s hand is on you.”

  “To hell with your preaching!” Charley cried.

  Kenton’s woman screamed: “Shut yer dirty mouth! You ain’t no men—ye’re a pack of filthy, rotten beggars!”

  Jacob rose, took two long strides to the door, and plucked his musket from its rack. He faced Kenton’s bunk and said:

  “Another word outa her and I’ll kill her, Kenton! No damned whore can make mock of me!”

  Ely sprang in front of him, pushing the musket to one side. Vandeer said, shrilly:

  “If you need to shed blood for the black hate in you—kill me, Jacob!”

  Kenton’s woman was sobbing hysterically. Ely took Jacob’s musket. In Ely’s hands, Jacob was like a baby, mouth trembling. All the terror of the past week had come to a head in him—and finally burst. Ely led him to his bunk.

  “We’re a long time together, Jacob,” Ely said softly.

  Now there is silence—as if we had used ourselves up for the time. Only the sobbing of Kenton’s woman, and Kenton makes no effort to quiet her. He sits with his head in his hands. The Jew is motionless by the fire.

  We hear the wind outside. A wolf howls—mournfully. I look from face to face, bearded faces with long, uncut hair, men who have lost all pride or consideration for their bodies, men in rags, huddled together for warmth. The women are not women any more. I tell myself that; I have to; otherwise I’ll go insane. I tell myself that there are beautiful, clean women somewhere, beautiful, clean men. I think of a woman’s body the way I used to dream of a woman’s body, white and perfect——

  Kenton’s woman sobs: “We come along with you—you go to hell, but we come along with you.”

  Nobody answers. We listen for something, the way men listen when the silence is deep and lasting. We hear steps outside in the snow—to the door.