by Howard Fast
Mary says: “You’ll not drag me into your charnel house. You’re an evil man.”
“Am I? You’d both make a fortune in Philadelphia whoring for the British.”
“You’re a bad man.”
“I’ll have a look at those two now. Thought they’d be dead and spare me the trouble.”
He examines us wearily, shakes his head.
“You’ll live—it’s a wonder.”
Jacob says: “You’ve news? We march soon?”
“March? Where? How? There’s no army left—maybe a thousand men with the strength to walk out of this place. Maybe less. Three thousand deserted. Maybe half the Maryland line, two New York regiments, a Massachusetts regiment. God only knows how many dead. I’ve cleared a hundred bodies out of my hospital in one day. I can’t stand much more. Drives a man mad. I spoke to Washington—a stubborn, ox-like man. I told him, There’ll be no man alive in this encampment, come spring. No one man living. You’re sitting in a valley of the dead. He said, Doctor, I’ll be alive. I asked for medicine—bandages. I said to him, Here’s a fair rich country of two million people. A congress sitting. What the hell is the Congress sitting. What the hell is the Congress sitting for? I don’t know, he said. They give us nothing. They complain I demand too much. Then he cried like a baby. I said, Your excellency, I’ve seen a sight of tears—they won’t bring us food. He said, I know—I know.”
Jacob shook his head. “No—you’re lying.”
“I’m lying. Look at me. I don’t give two damns for your suffering here. I don’t give two damns for your cause. I’m no patriot. I’m a doctor. In the beginning I took it. I said, let them be damned. I’ll do my leeching, and I’ll learn. Maybe I’ll help a poor damned soul. Well, I’m broken.”
Jacob said, plaintively: “We can’t go back—there’s no going back now.”
“Why not? General Howe would take his surrender.”
Ely said: “If it’s like you say, why don’t the English attack and make an end of it?”
“They’re noways discontented in Philadelphia. Why should they waste a man? Two months more—there’ll be no army for them to attack. They’ll win the war by sitting on their behinds in Philadelphia and begetting children on the good Philadelphia women.”
“There’ll be men to fight,” Jacob muttered.
“Dead men.”
Then he went out. We heard, a few days later, that he had shot himself. A Pennsylvania man, back from the hospital, brought us the news. He said: “The little doctor’s dead now.”
I remember how we stared at him, shook our heads.
“Blew his head open with a pistol.”
Jacob whispered: “He would not do that. He was a good, strong man.”
“Well, he’s dead. There’s no doctor left to care for Pennsylvania men.”
After that, we sat around the fire. Each of us was afraid to speak.
Finally, I asked Ely: “What now?”
“I don’t know,” Ely said.
Jacob takes his musket and goes out for relief sentry. But his steps are slow. Charley Green crawls back into bed, his woman with him. She has taken him back as naturally as if he had never gone. Kenton’s woman is looking at me. She smiles.
Ely bends over and begins to unbandage his feet. I go to my bed, and Kenton’s woman follows me. It doesn’t matter—Kenton is dead. Bess is dead.
A long time later—and Ely still sits by the fire. What does he think? Ely Jackson is a farmer man out of the Mohawk Valley. A simple farmer man; there’s no great depth to Ely. What drives him?
I turn over—back to the woman, and try to think that she is Bess. I am getting a strange answer to my longing for Bess. More and more often, she will come back to me. I feel her growing inside of me, becoming a woman. I think of the boy Allen who took the woman from the Virginians. That was long ago. She was no fit woman to be a man’s wife. She was a camp follower, and a prize for any man who was strong enough to take her. She was a prize for me. She was a rare, good prize, a slim girl with a body to keep a man warm at night. I took from her, and she wanted nothing, and finally, she died.
I lie with Kenton’s woman, and I feel a curious grace from Kenton over me. I would have hated the woman, but I don’t hate her now. Somehow, hate has gone out of us.
We heal slowly, Charley and I. At first, Kenton’s death hangs over us. I can’t get out of my mind the picture of Kenton as he stood in the sunlight, in front of the scaffold, Kenton with his bare head golden in the sunlight I am as close to Charley Green as one man can be to another.
Finally, I speak of Kenton. I tell Charley how he died, word by word. I watch Charley cry, unashamed. It is a curious thing how strong men come to find a relief in tears.
One day, I go to my musket. A man from the Rhode Island brigades brought back our muskets, Kenton’s and Charley’s and mine. I clean it carefully and rub off the rust with sand.
I go out on sentry duty. We must fill a quota from our dugout, and it is too much for Jacob and Ely to do alone. I go out on a cold, clear night, when there is a new moon in the sky. I walk slowly, thinking how many times before I’ve walked this same beat, looking over the snow-covered meadows and hills.
When I meet the Pennsylvania man whose beat intercepts mine, we stand together for a while, talk a little. I have no hate left for Pennsylvania men.
“A cold night,” he says.
“The back of the winter’s broken, I think.”
“It’s noways different with the cold.”
We stand and listen to the wolves howling. There are more wolves than ever near the camp now.
“I can’t call to mind such a lot of wolves in farm country.”
“They come after the dead. It’s said a wolf in winter can scent meat on twenty miles of wind.”
I think of the German boy. I glance down the slope, and in my mind’s eye, I can see him crawling up, falling in the snow, stumbling to his feet and crawling on again. A German boy thinking of his home in the Pennsylvania highlands. We are a strange lot, Dutch and German, and Puritan men from the seaboard, and Jews from overseas in Poland, and men from the southland, Scotch and Irish and Swedes, men from the Valley country in the north, black slaves from the Virginias.
I spoke to Ely and Jacob the next night. Jacob had come back from the commissariat with a little rum. We had a gruel of cornmeal. We sat around the fire, eating. Some Pennsylvania men had come in to ask news and to have a little talk.
I said to Ely: “It seemed to me that Kenton knew something when he died ——”
“How was that?”
“He was noways afraid.”
“He was a strong man,” Charley said.
“Not only strength. Why do we go on, Ely? We’re not paid. They starve us. We’re sick for sight of our homeland.”
“We’ll be free men,” Ely said.
“There’s nowhere free men in Europe.”
“There’ll be free men here,” Jacob muttered.
“But we can’t win the war. It’s said the British have twenty thousand men in Philadelphia. A thousand men can’t fight twenty thousand——”
A Pennsylvania man said: “There’s a wilderness road over the mountains into the land of Kentuck. It’s said that Washington has sworn to take that road before he lays down his command. Beyond the mountains, he can fight on for years.”
“For years?” we asked incredulously.
“For years,” Jacob muttered, almost to himself. “For years.”
“I’m sore tired,” I said.
For two days, there is no food, a roaring cold wind out of the north. No sunlight. A sleet that forms a coat of ice over the ground. We crouch in our dugouts, staring about like trapped animals. We eat the leather straps from our muskets, boiling them for hours in water. We tear cloth into fine bits, cook it and eat it. Bark from the trees. The few trees left in the forest are stripped bare of their bark.
We fly into rages easily. A word from Charley has Jacob at his throat. Ely and I tear them
apart, while the women fill the dugout with their screams. Charley is weak as a baby. His woman has left him. He’s too sick to satisfy her. She goes to Pennsylvania men in other dugouts, and Charley demands her back. She comes into the dugout, and they spit at each other like a pair of cats.
“Let the woman decide,” Ely says.
She says: “Ye’re no men for a woman to want—filthy, rotten beggars.”
“You’ll come to one of us——”
“As I please. I’m a free woman.”
“A dirty slut.”
“You don’t call me a slut. I was a good woman once. I had no wish to be dragged around by a rotten rebel army.”
Finally, she goes back to the Pennsylvanians. Charley lies in his bunk, sobbing weakly. I offer him my woman, Kenton’s.
“No, no—keep her, Allen.”
I fall into an insane temper of rage. I threaten the Pennsylvania men. I tell Charley that when my strength comes back, I’ll kill them, every one that’s had his woman.
Ely cries: “By God—we’re no strangers! We’re men together through hell. We’re no men to be at each other’s throats.”
Ely keeps the fire going. Ely cuts wood in the forest, goes out into the sleet by himself. Ely nurses us the way he’d nurse children. He humors us …
He sits at night, and tries to bear the pain in his feet. He no longer uncovers his feet.
A parade is called on the day of March seventh. The troops crawl out of their dugouts. The brigades assemble. Less men than ever. We march out to hear a message from the Congress read.
Rumours go about. A rumour that we retreat southward.
“They’re going to break camp.”
“It’s over now——”
“A British attack, and we’re to defend the forts on Mount Joy.”
“Congress would know nothing of a British attack. Congress knows nothing of anything. God damn their souls——”
We stand shivering, waiting. At last, Wayne rides up with his staff. He dismounts and walks up and down our line. He says: “Attention, brigades.”
We try to form ourselves erect. He shakes his head, and walks back to his horse slowly. He stands there, looking over the grey hills in the direction of Philadelphia.
A young officer comes forward to read the message. We stand tense, waiting. He reads:
“From the Continental Congress to the Army of the Republic: In recognition of the men’s courage in bearing their privations, we hereby appoint a day of fasting and prayer——”
We laughed. By God, we had not laughed like that in days and weeks. We laughed until we were trembling and weak. Then we turned round and marched back.
I remember how Wayne had not moved through all the reading. He mounted his horse slowly, like an old man, and rode down the hill to his quarters.
PART THREE
THE BATTLE
XVII
IT HAS been raining all morning. We sit in the dugout and try to understand that rain is falling—not snow but rain. The fire burns low, but we put no wood on it. The dugout is warm. The rain on the roof is like a corps of drummers beating out a roll.
Mary cries. She sits on the edge of a bed, sobbing, her lean figure swaying back and forth.
Curiously, Ely asks: “You’ve a sorrow, Mary?”
“No——”
“Then why are you weeping?”
“The rain—do you hear? I thought the world was lost in the cold.”
“It’s rain——”
“Rain,” Jacob says, nodding, “rain out of the sky—a beautiful, fair rain.”
Anna lies in my bed, her head swaying a little to the beat of the raindrops. Near the bed, the roof is leaking. She holds out a skinny hand and lets the drops splash off it. “I mind,” she whispers, “how it was when I was a girl. We clung to the kitchen in the rain. It was a special day for kitchen work. Baking and sewing and weaving cloth. If I had a loom, I’d weave out a fine cloth to make coats.”
I go to the door and open it. Trees are like shadows. Clouds hang low to the earth, and the rain pours out in a great downpour, each drop biting a hole in the snow. Already, the snow is giving away.
When I turn back, I can hardly speak. I say: “Ely, what’ day is this?”
“A day in March—I can’t think of the exact day.”
Jacob said: “I call to mind how the Jew spoke of the spring coming. He had no sight of the spring in this country.”
I whisper: “We’re alive—Charley, me, you—we’re alive to see the rains.”
“A fair land in spring.”
“But we’re alive. We’re talking, moving.”
Ely nods. He walks around aimlessly, touching the rough frames of the beds, reaching up and touching the leaks in the ceiling. He sits down by the fire.
Jacob goes over to him, says gently: “You’re disturbed, Ely?”
“I’m noways disturbed. I’m thinking.”
“We’ll go back to the Mohawk some day, Ely—a free land for people to live in, a green, beautiful land.”
“We’ll go back,” but with no faith in his voice.
I go to the door again. I’m like a child. I cry: “Ely—Ely, the snow melts!” I take my bayonet, stand out in the rain and dig through to the ground.
I come back into the dugout, dripping.
“You’ll take cold,” Ely says. “Don’t be a fool, Allen.”
Charley whispers: “You were digging in the ground, Allen. It’s not soft so quickly.”
“We’ll bury them,” I say. “They’ll lie in peace. All those who died—they’ll be no longer unburied and prey for the wolves. We’ll dig in the ground and bury them.”
“In peace.”
I sit down on my bed, laughing.
Jacob says: “I call to mind how it was in the Mohawk, April—a month of rain and soft skies. The blossoms would come out on the apple trees in the month of May. I’ll never forget the blossoming of the apple trees.”
“There are apple trees in Valley Forge,” Charley says eagerly.
The rain is dripping through the ceiling with a steady patter. We sit around and look at it, let it drip from our hands, watch the little puddles of mud it makes on the hard dirt of the floor.
“The cold is in my bones,” Charley says sadly. “Come years—I’ll never get the cold out of my bones. I’ll never get out the cold they flogged into me at the whipping post.”
“I dream of a hot sun——”
“I have a dream,” I say, “to lie down in soft green grass with the sun on me, with a bit of cloth over my eyes, with a breeze overhead.”
“With a lass?” Mary asks.
I shrug my shoulders.
“A hot sun,” Charley nods.
Jacob, looking into the fire, says: “The army will come back—there’ll be new men. Militia will gather. We’ll march …”
The door swings open, and Kirk Freeman, a Pennsylvania man, bursts in. He stands there panting, dripping wet.
“What is it?”
“The ice on the Schuylkill—it’s breaking up.”
We follow him. All along, men are out of the dugouts, standing in the rain, listening. From far off, a dull booming.
“The ice!”
“It’s thunder——”
A ripping crash. Someone laughs shrilly.
“Get back into shelter!” Ely calls. “We’re not fit to stand out in the pouring rain!”
We go back inside. Some Pennsylvania men come in, and one of them has some rum. He tells a detailed story of how he came by the rum. Eight Pennsylvania men were on guard at the commissariat. Coming off duty one evening, they intercepted two McLane raiders, with a tub of foraged rum slung between them. The sergeant of the Pennsylvanians signed for the rum, as a captain, and they took it to their brigade and got drunk. For that, the sergeant had ten lashes, the others four apiece. But it was worth it.
The Pennsylvania man has what is left of the rum. There’s a long drink for each of us. We heat it over the fire, drink it slowly.
There’s a toast to liberty—“To John and Sam Adams, may they be hanged!”
“To the Continental Congress, may they rot in hell!”
“May they have dysentery until their bowels rot out!”
We sit around the fire, tasting our rum, listening to the rain. We are lulled by the steady, even beat of raindrops on the roof.
The Pennsylvania men talk of Kenton. “He was a strong man—a bright flame of a man.”
“He was a man to fight and to win—never to know pain or sorrow.”
Charley is already a little drunk from the rum. We are not used to hard drink, and there’s not enough food inside of us to sop it up. Charley says:
“He died for us. There was no man had such a fear of the gibbet as Kenton. But he died for us.”
“God damn Muller’s soul. He remembered the deer. He took it out on Kenton.”
“There are good Pennsylvania men who won’t be forgetting a gift of two fine buck deer.”
“Something for Muller to remember.”
Ely said: “Let Kenton rest in peace. There’s no score in the encampment but has been paid out in blood.”
“There’s no peace for a man who dies on the gibbet.”
“Peace enough.”
Some of the Pennsylvania men brought in their women. The women shift from man to man. There’s no hate. A man dies, and his woman is left behind. We have suffered too much to be jealous. They’re a strange race, these women of the camp. Many a camp follower was a good woman once. Her man was going to war; they married and came along together. Then her man died, or he deserted, leaving her behind. No place for her to go; she fell into the life of the camp. These women went from man to man. What a man needed—They had seen how we were like beasts, but still men. Maybe they kept us being men.
We lie in front of the fire, and we sing sad Dutch songs, songs that were sung along the New York and Pennsylvania rivers for a hundred years.
And the rain beats on the roof.
It rained for two days more, and then, on a grey, wet day, the order went around for a grand review of the entire army. Muller brought the news himself. He came into the dugout and said: