Conceived in Liberty

by Howard Fast

  “A forlorn place without a fire,” Ely says. “I’m not bemoaning the cold, but there was life in the fire.”

  “A dull, lonely place.”

  “I hope we march soon.”

  “I hated this place at first,” I say. “I don’t hate it now.”

  The brigades build fires outside. I ask Ely to go out with me, but he shakes his head. I go out alone. The Pennsylvania men are roasting meat over the fire. We sit round in a circle, drinking, singing.

  I find myself with a woman, a round young girl with light hair. Three or four men are playing for her attention, but I manage to draw her off. I take her back from the fire, where there’s a bit of grass, and we lie down there.

  “Your name’s Allen Hale,” she says.

  “How do you know?”

  “I seen you around. I heard tell you deserted and were whipped nigh to death.”

  “Yes——”

  “My name’s Bella.”

  “You’ve no man?”

  “I had a man—he deserted without me. I never heard word of him.”

  “I’m a fit, fair man for a girl to love.”

  She giggles, and when I put my arms around her, she comes to me willingly. We lie there, watching the blaze of the fire, the dark figures moving in front of it. I pass my hands over her body.

  “They say you’re no man to be without a woman,” she says to me. “They say you took a fair woman away from a Virginian brigade——”

  “Yes.”

  “What was her name? Tell me her name? You’re not thinking of her now—in my arms?”

  “Her name was Bess Kinley.”

  “Did you love her? Were you pained to see her die?”

  I cry, suddenly: “Be quiet, God damn you!” Then, as she draws away in fright, I hold her back. “I’m sorry—I was not meaning to fright you,”

  I come back to the dugout, and Ely sits where I left him, next to the empty fire. He says:

  “Allen?”

  “Yes, Ely.”

  “Allen—make me a promise.”

  “What?”

  “You’ll have faith in the revolution. There’ll be no peace for many years. There’ll be strong men needed.”

  “You’ll be with me, Ely.”

  “No—you’ll be alone, Allen.”

  I go to my bed, and for a long time afterward Ely sits motionless. I can’t sleep—and I watch him.

  I sleep, and I wake later and still Ely sits there. The door is open, and a vague moonlight seeps into the dugout. Jacob’s long form is stretched out in his bunk.

  “Ely?” I say.

  He looks up at me. “I thought you to be asleep, Allen.”

  “You’ll not sit all night, Ely, not resting?”

  “For a little while, Allen—I’m noways tired.”

  I go back to sleep, but even in my sleep I see Ely’s form, bent over the ashes, stirring them with his stick. A man with a deep knowledge—a knowledge that comes out of his heart. A man with a great heart.

  The next day, a May day that is like a benediction. An order comes to the brigades for a grand parade—a review of the entire army. A parade, and then a day of rest and celebration. To celebrate …

  All sorts of rumours; but Melrose, a Massachusetts man, says that he carried dispatches to headquarters. He says that it’s an alliance with France.

  The brigades form, and we talk about it eagerly.

  “A great country over the water. A country that has warred with England these many hundreds of years.”

  “It’s La Fayette’s doing—it’s said that he brought about the alliance himself.”

  “Mark me, Ben Franklin’s the man who had a hand in this. Old Ben himself.”

  “An army they’ll send—an army of ten thousand men.”

  “Washington in tears, crying like a child. That, I saw myself.”

  Wayne is laughing like a boy. He has rum served out while the brigades are forming. We stick blossoms and green leaves into our jackets and our hair. The drums beat out Yankee-Doodle, and we sing it as we march down to the parade.

  Yankee-Doodle went to Boston,

  Riding on a pony,

  Gave all hell to old man Howe,

  Called it macaroni.

  Yankee-Doodle keep it up,

  Keep the lobsters running,

  Let the bastard redcoats know

  Yankee-Doodle’s coming!

  We roar it out, and it echoes back from the parade. We cheer Wayne as he rides up and down our ranks. We sing verse after verse.

  Yankee-Doodle went to hell,

  Claimed it was right chilly,

  Take six months in Valley Forge,

  Hell is willy-nilly.

  Yankee-Doodle keep it up,

  Keep the lobsters running,

  Let the bastard redcoats know

  Yankee-Doodle’s coming!

  We form on the Grand Parade. Washington rides up with La Fayette and Baron von Steuben. Washington sits on his horse, smiling, his eyes wrinkled up with tears. He waves his hand, awkwardly, and begins to dismount. We break ranks. We press around them, half-mad, trying to touch Washington, to touch Steuben. Steuben is crying, frankly the tears pour down his face. Washington nods his head, like a man in a dream. Steuben says:

  “Mine children—mine children——”

  We go back to our ranks, staring around us, at the trees, at the green spread of the Grand Parade, at the cloudless blue sky. We are men out of a dream. The winter was a dream. More than one man is weeping quietly as he walks.

  On the edge of the parade, the officers ladies stand; a little away from them, the camp women. They wave at us and nod. They make little splashes of delightful color.

  Steuben puts us through a parade drill. Bareheaded, he marches at the front of the Pennsylvania and Massachusetts brigades, waving his sword. He’s as happy as a child. He beats his sabre against the ground, in time to our marching. He runs down the line of men, glancing along the ranks, nodding his head with approval. Winded, panting, he stands in the centre of the field, smiling.

  He calls Washington at the top of his voice: “Mine commander, vatch—der bayonet movements!”

  He walks towards us on his toes, his hands spread out. “Ja—mine children, you vill do it for me! Like I teached you.”

  He calls for the bayonet charge, names out brigades for flank attack, marshals in the brigades one after another as covering bodies, pivots us, rearranges brigade formation, and laughs like a delighted child.

  “Such troops—vere in der vorld do you find such troops? Gott—dey’re splendid!”

  Washington speaks a few words. He says: “We have made an alliance with France. What we suffered this winter, you know and I know. Nor shall we forget. I thank you from my heart.”

  He sits on his horse, nodding at us, swallowing hard. He takes off his hat.

  The rest of that day we sprawled over the parade, drinking, eating, or lying quietly, soaking in the heat of the sun …

  The days go slowly, warm days. Lazy days with blue skies overhead. The heavens are a bowl of blue, and Valley Forge is in blossom. The apple trees are like balls of snow, and under the trees the white blossoms make a carpet for the ground. We walk through the woods and try to understand that this is the same place we came into in December.

  We have buried the men who died during the winter, and the crosses make long rows along the Schuylkill. I go there with Ely, and we pick out seven of the graves—mark them for our men. Most of the graves are nameless. We mark a grave for the little doctor, and I carve the rhyme on it very painstakingly.

  He did his work,

  He healed the sick,

  He did not shirk

  To keep men quick.

  God rest his soul,

  Forgive his sin.

  “They’re fair words,” Ely says. “A good rhyme for a man to leave behind him.”

  “He was a strange, hard man.”

  Charley’s grave is a mat of green grass. I am glad that he lies wh
ere he does, looking over the gentle hills toward Philadelphia.

  One night, we sit and talk. We sprawl outside the dugout, around a fire, Ely and Jacob and myself and half a dozen Pennsylvania men. It is a warm, cloudy night, and a mist rests in the valleys.

  “They won’t remember long,” Ely says. “They’ll forget how this winter was.”

  “It’s something to forget.”

  “It was a hard, cold winter—no such winter before in all the memory of man.”

  “My father and my grandfather—take back a hundred year—I can’t call to mind that men ever spoke of such a winter as this one.”

  “It’s something to forget—to have no bitter memory of.”

  “The chill is in my bones yet.”

  “There’ll be no getting the chill outa your bones.”

  Ely says, thoughtfully: “I puzzle sometimes to make out what will come of it.”

  “War’s not a thing for simple men to understand.”

  “It’s like death. There’s no thinking of war or death.”

  But I wonder whether I understood it then, long past when Kenton died, with a vision in his eyes. I have enlisted again—for three years. I can’t think of that, only believe; whether or not there is anything to believe, I must believe.

  The days go on—a lush heat flowing over the land, until men predict a summer as hot as the winter was cold. Valley Forge is ripe with beauty—a grand, flowing beauty, as soft as the hills. The hills are green, except where the Quaker farmers are turning over the land with their ploughs, and there the red-brown furrows make warm gashes.

  Rumours come that we will march soon, but nobody knows where.

  The British will leave Philadelphia. They won’t attack us. Four or five thousand militiamen have already poured into Valley Forge. Our position is too strong.

  We drill and drill and drill. We who have stayed through the winter, the battered Pennsylvania and New Jersey and Massachusetts brigades, are Steuben’s pets. He makes soldiers of us. We were never soldiers before. We were a rabble of farmers, retreating all over the country before the British, defeated in every battle we fought. For the first time, we drill until we are like machines. Steuben is tireless; we must become men of iron; he is a fanatic about that.

  He says: “Soon, soon, mine children. Ve strike dem vun blow—and den der var is over. Vun quvick blow. Soon—soon.”

  It comes sooner than we expect. A rider on a lathered horse pounding up the Gulph Road. He rides through the sentries, screaming out something. The hoofbeats echo through the camp. He reins up wildly before headquarters.

  Word of the rider goes through camp like fire. Nobody knows what word he brings, but it’s taken that he comes from Philadelphia. We gather in groups, talking, guessing.

  “The British march on camp …”

  “They’ve burned Philadelphia—pulled for New York …”

  “They’ve sailed down the Delaware …”

  Night comes. We build our fires. For the first time, I wonder how these fires appear to the Quaker farmers down in the valleys. Strange men-beasts, who call themselves an army; they came out of the night, in the snow. They’ll go back. The Quakers will live on, the way they’ve lived for a hundred years.

  I wake in the night, and I grope for Bess. I mutter: “If we leave here—where will you come back to?” I think of three more years with no woman, three more years. I cry out for Bess, childishly, longingly. I am afraid to be alone.

  The next day, the camp is curiously uneasy. In the morning, Steuben drills us. But he’s a sullen Prussian for once, and he puts us through the drills mechanically. The sun is a hot red blister in the sky. Steuben marches us back and forth until we are wringing wet.

  We lie about the dugouts, discuss rumours. It is certain by now that the British troops have left Philadelphia. For a winter they lay there at their ease, filling their bellies, twenty thousand of them. Twenty thousand men, while three thousand sick beggars starved in the hill country, eighteen miles away. Now the word comes that the remaining British troops, ten or twelve thousand, have left Philadelphia to march overland through the Jerseys to New York. The officers say nothing, and we try to piece things out for ourselves. Half the British forces have sailed away. If Washington attacks those who march through Jersey …

  We look at each other. Only once have American troops defeated the English in battle—that was in Boston, in seventeen-seventy-five, at Bunker Hill, and then we could not hold our ground. Since then, we have been defeated continuously.

  “We’ll know soon,” Ely says. He is oddly calm, as if he had been waiting for this.

  “We’ll know,” Jacob agrees.

  The next morning, the order comes for the brigades to march. The order comes to break camp—a place where we have lived for six months.

  We are very quiet about it. Working in the dugout, putting our few belongings together, we try to understand that we have lived in this place for half a year. The calm is like a blanket over us. We are breaking camp—going into battle.

  I stood in the dugout after Ely and Jacob had gone. I walked around, felt the beds, things we had built with our own hands. I leaned against the low, log walls. I kicked at the few ashes in the fireplace. It was very hot in the dugout then. The morning sun beat down on the roof.

  It might have been years ago that we had built it—Clark Vandeer, Henry Lane, Edward Flagg, Kenton Brenner, Charley Green, strong men hewing the life out of trees.

  Inside, it had been hell and inferno; inside, I had lain with Bess in my arms—loving a woman. How does a man love a woman and not know?

  If I had carved inside, along the logs: Here a soldier of the army, Allen Hale, lay with a girl who was no fit and decent woman—a follower of the camp …

  The musket rack is empty. One day we had brought the muskets to Wayne, eight muskets. Wayne looked at them. Ely said: “You’ll need arms, sir. There’s a fair lot of men in camp without arms.” Wayne answered, dully: “They belong with the men who used them—they belong—I’ll take them. We need arms.”

  Ely called to me now, and I went outside, I closed the door, threw the latch. It would stay closed; it was a place of the damned, and nobody would molest it. Maybe, after years, a pile of rotten timber covering a mudhole. Men of the revolution lived there—half a year. People would look at it curiously.

  “Allen—come,” Ely says gently.

  We join our brigade. It is a hot day, a burning hot day. The sun is a globe of yellow liquid in a sky of cold blue fire. Wayne walks his horse along our line, smiling, nodding—ragged, lean men, but men drawn fine with suffering. Men who will follow him into hell; men without a fear of hell. No fears left.

  He calls out: “Brigades—forward!”

  The drums pick up the tune. No other tune. A doggerel and a fit song for an army of beggars. A trumpet joins in, pricking shrill notes at the sky:

  Yankee-Doodle went to London,

  Riding on a pony …

  The Pennsylvania brigades step out with the Prussian stiffness Steuben taught them. We march past the assembled Massachusetts and New Jersey lines. We walk past a mass of militia. Sitting on his horse, Steuben nods and nods; his face is twisted up; he can say nothing.

  We take up our positions at the head of the army, directly behind Washington’s life guard of Virginians. The tall Virginians look back at us and grin:

  “Come on, farmers—there’s ploughin’ tu be done!”

  We pick up our song.

  Yankee-Doodle went to hell,

  Claimed it was right chilly …

  I look back, and the hills of the encampment are like a lush garden in the summer sun. A little cluster of Quaker farmers and their wives watch us from the parade.

  Ely is on one side of me, Jacob on the other. I don’t look back again.

  XXII

  A CLOUDBURST soaks us, and we march on through the pouring rain. The army is sprawled like a great snake over the hills, each end lost in a mist of rain. When the rain is over, th
e sun comes out again, stronger than ever. The mud on the road is turned to ripples of hard earth, which gradually powders into a fine dust under our feet. Many of us walk barefooted, and the crumpled dirt of the road feels good to our feet.

  The rain soaks our clothes, plastering them to our backs. A film of dust forms all over them; it’s unbearable. We drop our coats into the road, then our torn shirts. The musket straps bite into our backs. We strip to the waist, become a strange sight, an army of the naked.

  We toil on, and at noon, throw ourselves down wearily. We can’t eat much. We’re strung too fine, nervous, waiting.

  Talk is of the enemy. Where are they?—when will we meet them? We hear that the militia is uneasy with fear. We begin to understand why the Pennsylvania brigades march at the head of the army.

  “I put no faith in militia,” Jacob says. “Whatever comes, we’ll drive into it first. If we stand, the militia will stand. But I put no faith in militia to meet an attack.”

  I feel a curious chill of fear. Life was never so precious or good—after the winter. I lived; all through that winter I lived.

  “There’ll be a battle, Jacob?”

  “There’ll be a battle. He cannot keep the militia with him for more than three months.”

  “The last battle,” Ely says oddly.

  We both look at him. Ely says, slowly: “I have no love for battle. There’s been enough death. I’m sore tired, and wanting to rest. You and me, Jacob—we’re no more young. Well be wanting a long, quiet rest.”

  “Time for resting,” Jacob says. ‘There’ll be time enough afterwards for rest.”

  We march on—a forced march. The wagon train and the camp followers are left far in the rear. We’re chasing something. We drag along, and the drum-beat seems lost in a fog of dust. Blood begins to speckle the road—from the naked feet. When a rest is called, we drop in our tracks, too weary to talk.

  It rains again the next day, a solid wall of water, drawn out of the sodden heat. We cross the Delaware River, and come into a country of tall pines and barren sand dunes. The pine smell is heavy and sickening. The mosquitoes buzz in thick droning flocks, biting us until we are covered all over with welts. Sweat drips into our eyes, into our mouths. We are coated with dust.