What he did understand was that it was all taking longer than the generals had expected, and that most of the officers and sergeants who had been around him in the dark, listening to the plan, had suspected this very problem. They would be late, and for all they knew, Lord Howe was trying to defend Chad’s Ford with a handful of men while they picked their way through the maze of tracks and minor roads north of the rebel positions.
Jeremy and Stewart came up on horseback as they came to a bend in the road. Just beyond, he could see a vista of open ground, farmland, and a plowed hill with some woods in front of it. There were Continental regulars all along the line in front of them.
Stewart watched the line in disgust. Jeremy threw his hat on the ground and then had to dismount to fetch it, which made him angrier.
Caesar grabbed their bridles and pulled them back before Stewart’s bright red coat could be seen.
“Go back and tell the column to halt,” said Stewart, taking his glass from Jeremy and dismounting. He handed his horse to Caesar, who handed it directly to one of his men and followed him into a stand of trees that shaded the corner of a stone-walled field.
Stewart lay down behind the wall, worked a stone loose and pushed his glass through. Caesar crouched behind him.
“It appears we are too late,” he said. Behind them, Virgil was all but physically restraining a party of red-coated officers who wanted to go ahead into the field. Sergeant McDonald and Lieutenant Crawford came up, and then several other officers from their battalion. The staff officers were kept back.
Caesar could see the Continental troops start to move. Every one of them lying in the corner of the field took a breath together as the long blue and brown lines suddenly began to form columns on their center or rightmost companies and march away. It wasn’t well done; every battalion seemed to have its own manner of forming a column, and the enemy brigades were slow to move.
“Appearances can be deceiving,” Stewart announced, closing his glass with a snap. “Apparently our country cousins are determined to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.” He ran back to the knot of mounted officers around the bend and reported what he had seen, and the general ordered them forward. It was just past three o’clock by Jeremy’s repeater. And the enemy, perfectly positioned to stop their thrust, was marching away.
Lafayette reined in his horse by George Lake and looked over George’s company. He had an air about him that made other men want to follow him, although he was as young as their youngest man. He looked like an officer, and he was well equipped and so well uniformed that he made most of the other officers look shabby. Certainly George Lake, whose only claim to elegance was the superb sword that hung from a double frog at his waist, had no business standing next to the marquis’s horse.
“Monsieur,” said the young marquis companionably. “Can you direct me to the General Greene?”
“Yes, sir. General Greene is just there at the head of the road. What’s happening?” George had seen the fine marquis often enough since their first meeting to qualify as an acquaintance. Lafayette shook his head.
“Our General Sullivan has allowed himself to be flanked again. I gather he does this with some regularity?”
George nodded, remembering Long Island and the painful, rainy retreat. His mouth set bitterly.
“Do not worry, George. General Washington has all General Greene’s division in reserve. Sullivan need only hold until we arrive, and we shall win a victory that will end the war.” He laughed. Everyone knew that he was ambitious to command a division himself, and that he could be a demanding companion. But Lafayette was already well loved, not least because he always referred to the Continental cause as “ours” and “we”, where so many of his French and German compatriots referred to it as “yours” and “you”.
He reared his horse a little, showing away, and waved his hat.
“Get ready to advance, George!” he called, and galloped off.
Down the ranks in the old company, Bludner said something coarse, and the men around him laughed. But they did it nervously, like schoolboys.
The whole battalion of lights raced across the open fields toward the copse at the foot of the little plowed hill in front of them. It was a disciplined run, but they had all dropped their packs at the stone wall and none of them expected to cross so much open ground without a great many casualties. Caesar’s men started a little in front, because he had put them there where their brown coats would lie unnoticed in the autumn fields. And they ran a little faster.
They were a quarter of the way there and not a shot had been fired at them. It didn’t seem possible and Caesar had to force himself to look up at the woods, rather than down at his feet. If he was about to take a volley, it seemed better that he not know it was coming.
That was not proper thinking for a soldier. He looked up, and almost stopped in astonishment. He was watching the better part of a battalion leaving the woods and falling back. He couldn’t reckon why, and feared a trap, one so cunning that its purpose would be hidden from him or Captain Stewart or even Lord Howe.
More than halfway now. Some of the newer men were panting with exertion. The veterans were running easily. One or two held their weapons high, ready to take a shot the moment a target was offered. Most ran with their muskets across their bodies. Stewart’s company was close behind, and the other lights were almost up with them on both sides. Well off to the left, he could see Captain Simcoe and the Fortieth grenadiers moving along. Simcoe stood out because of his heavy gray horse.
Caesar knew he had slowed unconsciously when he had seen movement in the wood, and the whole company had slowed with him.
Captain Stewart rode up to him. Jeremy was nowhere to be seen.
“I…think…they’re…leaving…the wood,” said Caesar in time to his pounding feet.
“Get into it and start shooting. Make as much noise as you can. Make them watch us and not what’s coming behind us.” Caesar raised his musket in salute and Stewart took off his cap for a moment, and then rode off.
Now he was close enough to start looking for a route in. Usually a wood was densest at the outside edge, where the sun had full play and the brush could grow thickly. Most woodlots had little paths and this one was no exception. Caesar still expected to be met by a volley any second, and he looked at the company. They were well spaced out in extended order, each file pair two paces separate from the next, across sixty paces, or almost a third of the front of the wood.
He knew they were all loaded. He knew that speed was all that mattered. He blew his whistle twice and yelled, “Charge!” And they gave another spurt of speed, and were into the trees with a crash.
George began to think that they were going to run the whole way to wherever the British might be. The column moved too fast, so that the men got spread out and some had to fall out or fall behind, where the stragglers got mixed into unfamiliar units and wrecked their order of march. Despite all that, they were marching faster than George had ever marched, and they were moving toward the musketry.
Despite their desperate skirmish in the early afternoon, the men were acting as if they had plenty of heart. George had stopped wondering where his captain was. The man was plainly dead, or captured. Now George wondered if he could command the company in action by himself. He was about to find out.
The woods were empty of all but a terrified picket who fired once and fled without causing a casualty. Caesar leapt over some fallen trees and hurried to the side of the wood facing the enemy, who were formed a little over one hundred paces away.
“Keep your order, then!” he yelled. “Come up to me and To Tree!” To Tree was the British Army’s innovative manner of getting soldiers who were trained to linear warfare to take cover in a wood. The Company of Black Guides had something of the opposite problem, as they generally had a tendency to take cover if cover were offered, whether ordered to or not. They all but vanished into the treeline.
Caesar blew one long note on his whistle. He s
houted “Skirmish” at the full reach of his lungs, and all along the line, the file leaders picked targets and began to fire at the Continentals. Stewart’s company was already taking the ground to their right, and the light company of the Fortieth had just appeared on their left and was moving into the treeline. Caesar waved at Virgil and Fowver, standing together at the left end of the line. Fowver nodded, saw that Caesar was going for new orders, and moved to take command.
Caesar ran back to the rear of the wood and then along behind it, looking for Captain Stewart or their battalion officer, Major Manley. He saw two horses grazing, but neither was familiar. He ran along the edge of the wood until he reached its southern boundary and there he found all the officers, gathered in a clump and watching the great spectacle of battle laid out by the wood’s height.
Caesar was a veteran now and he had never seen a battle laid out so clearly. The British columns were coming up from the rear and just starting to form their front, first companies forming battalions, and then battalions forming brigades even as he watched.
Across the field and up the low hill, the rebel lines were formed but constantly twitching, or so it appeared at this distance. Caesar knew that the twitches meant they were moving, making little corrections to best occupy their ground. Such maneuvers were common on parade, but most armies in the field depended on the NCOs knowing the axis of attack and keeping a couple of natural objects, say a flower and a fence post, aligned in front of them to keep the line marching in the right direction. Most commanders left gaps in their lines so that miscalculations in marching by battalions didn’t throw off the whole line. The Continental line was clearly in disarray, packed too tight and trying to maneuver in the face of the enemy. And now the Guides and all the other troops in the wood were starting to get hits, causing more confusion.
Far distant, back toward the direction of Chad’s Ford, he could see a column of marching men, and in the foreground he saw one Continental brigade intermixed with another and trying to sort itself out. Almost opposite the wood, a battery of Continental guns, masked from the wood by a little hill and sited in a dip, had begun to fire into the forming British line.
Simcoe was closest to him, and he pointed his riding crop along the distant road from which the enemy column was coming.
“That’s their reserve, Caesar. We must break General Sullivan in front of us before Mr. Washington can bring all that,” he waved his crop at the marching column, “into the fight and stop us.”
“Very kind, sir,” said Caesar, and he meant it. Officers seldom took the time to explain anything.
Stewart rounded on him.
“Seen Jeremy?”
“No, sir.”
“Keep shooting. As soon as they start to break, get at them. Wait for Major Manley’s call, though. He’ll be behind the wood. I’ll be there in a moment.”
The Continental battery fired, almost together, and an entire company of the Seventeenth Regiment seemed to disappear. Caesar was appalled by the carnage a single battery of guns could wreak. None of the men in that company would ever have had a chance to stop it.
A British battery moved ponderously forward, its hired drivers unwilling to get too close to the action. When at extreme range, the gunners had to drag their guns forward on ropes, and they did it with elan. Caesar didn’t have time to watch, and when the Continental battery fired again, he wasn’t there to see the execution it wrought.
Washington was well ahead of Greene’s column now. Too late, he fully understood the confusing welter of messages that had reached him all day. He should have attacked across the ford when he felt that Lord Howe lacked the men to stop him. He could have ended the war in an afternoon, and even now he felt that victory was close. If only Sullivan could hold the hill and the woods to their front, Greene’s men would arrive and even have time to breathe a few times before Washington sent them into the teeth of the British advance.
He looked at his watch. It was half past five, and before his unbelieving eyes, the troops in the wood began to leave it and march back. In moments, the whole edge of the wood erupted in a flame as the British, advancing along an axis that allowed them to use the woods to cover their entire force, took the woods and used them.
He rode forward to Sullivan, who was shaking his head in weary disbelief.
“I’m sorry, General.”
“Nonsense, General Sullivan. You’ve held together nicely. But tell me why we’ve just given the British that little wood to your front.”
“No help for it, sir. I had to make my line straight or the whole of the British attack would have fallen on the kink and broken me. Marshall and Woodford misunderstood and gave up the wood and by the time I tried to fix it…” He shook his head wearily. “I’ve just ordered them to take it back,” he said, all too aware of what that meant.
Greene’s men were twenty minutes away. Washington watched as the British fire began to decimate the regiments moving over the open ground to the wood that, only a few moments before, they had left.
The Continentals came up the hill at them again, firing quickly like regular soldiers and then pushing forward, but this time some hint in their movement, the carriage of their heads or some little flaw in their firing, suggested to Caesar that their hearts weren’t in it. Their first counterattack had almost swept the hill, and indeed, over to the right, the Continentals had gotten right in among the trees and only the reserve under Major Manley and a lightning response by McDonald and Crawford had kept them in possession. The second attack had come to a halt just in front of the Guides, so that they had exchanged three volleys with a Pennsylvania regiment at a range so close that men were hit by burning wads of tow, or felt the blast of heat from every round. But the Pennsylvanians lost their colonel when he tried to lead them forward for a last charge. The Guides and their friends from the Fortieth kept their heads and kept up a steady fire, although Caesar was already finding a place for his men to run to when they broke—only to find that they were going to hold. He loved them for it, every one. It was the hardest fighting he had ever known, and the bluntest. The two forces simply bludgeoned each other at point-blank range. The Guides had the advantage of a little cover in the wood edge, although it scarcely mattered when the range was so close, and Caesar couldn’t imagine how regular soldiers kept their nerve in the open under such an exchange.
The third attack died away before it ever became a serious threat, and all the sergeants in the woods were bellowing for their men to “Cease fire, damn your eyes.” It was merciful to the men retreating from their third brave attempt to take the woods, and soldiers like to give each other mercy, when they can, but it wasn’t mercy that kept them yelling to “Cease fire, there.”
The men in the woods were almost out of ammunition.
Washington sat at the top of the little plowed hill and watched Sullivan’s wing begin to break up. It went down fighting, outnumbered and outfought, but not by much, and it didn’t break like the militia of those early disasters. The enemy was more cautious, and the Continental artillery continued to wreak havoc on the British advance, actually stopping it once when the troops were all broken and swept away. The guns kept firing, and here and there a well-led battalion, or a company that trusted its officers more than it feared the British, held its ground and kept firing. Washington was shaking his head sadly, because Weedon’s brigade, his very best troops, were just too far away to save the day. They weren’t so far that he would lose his army. Darkness was coming, and darkness combined with Weedon’s men would save him from a defeat like some of those around New York, but it was so close to a victory that he could almost say the word aloud in his frustration. Lafayette watched him with something like adoration.
“Let us see if we can rally Sullivan’s men,” said Washington. If he could buy five minutes, he could save a great deal of honor from the day. He rode down toward the Meeting House with Lafayette and his staff.
Caesar watched as the line in front of him came apart, and he listened
for Major Manley behind him. Most of the men were drinking water, and a few were lighting pipes. He told them not to.
“We have to be ready to advance,” he said. Down the line, Crawford waved to him. He waved back.
Jeremy rode up behind him, somehow silent on a horse.
“Forward!” he yelled as if he was the officer in command. No one doubted him. They were all used to getting Stewart’s orders through Jeremy and the long skirmish line began to move out of the woods and up the hill at last.
“We have less than three rounds a man. Where’s Captain Stewart?” asked Caesar, running to keep up with Jeremy’s horse. Jeremy reined in, despite being the only mounted man in the skirmish line and the clear target for any sharpshooter on the hill.
“He’s arguing with some ill-born fool from the staff. Manley took a ball over at the angle and now they are all uncertain about what to do.”
Caesar was struck dumb.
“Captain Stewart couldn’t do it, you see?” Jeremy asked. “I had to.”
The British attack, first sudden, and then cautious, turned sudden again. Just as Washington had a company rallied to send back to the hilltop, he saw red coats and brown appear. The men in brown coats were black, a sight that always moved him strangely. He’d seen the same men before.
The final loss of the hilltop, so suddenly, was decisive. Before he could change the orders of the men he had just rallied, they melted away under his hand. Lafayette was doing no better, and it seemed that his English was deserting him. He had a sword in his hand, and he kept shouting “For liberty!”
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