To Try Men's Souls - George Washington 1

by Newt Gingrich

  The American army, or what was left of it, was encamped on the low hills above the town, if the site could be called a camp or the men an army anymore. When they abandoned Fort Lee six days back, the army had been forced to leave behind most of its artillery and rations, hundreds of wagons, even its tents. So fast was the retreat that even the food on the hoof, cattle and swine, had been abandoned as well. Now they starved, stood around smoldering fires, sodden, and tomorrow they would most likely freeze. Tomorrow, there might not be an American army at all. The Revolution would have frozen to death.

  One hell of a cause I belong to, he thought. Damn, why does it always seem to rain on armies in retreat?

  Not even sure where I am going.

  Looking, but for what? For the first powerful sentence that everyone needs and that I can’t write.

  He was tempted to turn back from this fool’s venture, go inside the tent, and get drunk. No, not now! He pushed against the wind, the rain, and the biting cold.

  “This is the time of crisis,” he had written, then a few more lines. He had taken a drink, and froze, not just from the cold but from the lack of inspiration, not knowing what he was to write next. “The time of crisis is at hand,” and then another drink. “This time of crisis will try us . . .”

  Oh, the hell with it!

  Twilight. The leaden overcast was disappearing into blackness. The choking smoke from campfires made of green wood, mixed with the mist rising from the river and fetid marshlands on the far side of the Passaic, made all seem like something out of Dante, a dark, foreboding Hades for the condemned souls of the Revolution he had helped to inspire.

  He could easily turn to his right at this moment and head down the few hundred yards to the house where Nathanael Greene had set up his headquarters. He knew he’d be welcomed, honored, given a place by a fire, perhaps even some food, and always something to drink. Though Greene was a Quaker and held against liquor, he did not deny it to his staff, and as was typical of officers, he always seemed to have enough.

  The thought was tempting, but then Greene would come and sit by his side, smile in his friendly fashion and give him “that look.” The look so many gave him. That he was a conjurer, a minister of the soul of this Revolution, and could magically spin out of air the words that would somehow dispel the gloom, the cold, the mist and rain, the hunger. His words would warm, revive, and renew the fervor all had carried in the halcyon days of summer.

  If I go there now, he will ask, “Have you written it yet?” Or far worse, “I’ve been thinking, maybe you should write this.”

  Damn all of them. He could not resist. Reaching into his torn jacket, he took out the leather sack of rum for one more pull. He recalled a nursery story about a goose and its golden eggs. In the end the greedy owners had cut its throat.

  Well, maybe not a knife to my throat, but if it goes on much longer like this, most definitely a rope around my neck. If the British capture me and find out who I am . . .

  He pushed on through the mud and filth, angling away from the village.

  He had pitched his tent with men of the First Continental. Pennsylvania. A rough-hewn lot, mostly from beyond the Susquehanna or down from the northern frontier of the Wyoming Valley. They seemed impervious to this suffering. Their whole lives had been suffering and they didn’t even know it. Nearly all were riflemen, usually tasked during the retreat with covering the rear guard, to hold the pursuing Hessian dragoons and jaegers at bay.

  He slipped past a group of frontiersmen standing around a green wood fire of hissing embers and dark coals. A few looked up.

  “Mr. Paine,” one of them said.

  He hated that. Mister Sir. It is only “private” now, or as we called each other, not too long ago, “brother” or “citizen.” He nodded an acknowledgment and pressed on.

  A knot of men was gathered around. He caught a glimpse of flapping dirty wings. Someone had snatched a chicken, and lopped its head off. Soon he was gutting it, and another was helping by yanking out fistfuls of feathers. One chicken for a dozen hungry soldiers. The fire they planned to cook it on was barely alive, more smoke than heat. They would most likely eat it half raw rather than wait for it to cook through.

  “The crisis is at hand.” He watched as the chicken was neatly quartered and thrown into a pot, the water not yet at a boil. Several looked at him warily, not recognizing him in the deepening gloom, their looks conveying warning that another beggar around the pot was not welcome.

  “For want of a chicken a revolution will be lost . . .”

  Shakespeare was becoming popular once more. Steal a line or two from him. Few here had most likely ever read Shakespeare; no one would notice or care if he wrote about bands of brothers. Some brothers, he thought, looking hungrily at the chicken in the iron pot. He pressed on.

  Shortly after the adoption of the Declaration, he had put down his pen and enlisted. It was all the rage of the moment, joining. Of all things, he had fallen in with the old elite unit of the City of Brotherly Love——the Philadelphia Associators they called themselves. Many had turned out in natty uniforms of blue with red trim, armed with roughly made muskets; they had been ferried across the Delaware with much fanfare and started north to the war. They never got north of Amboy. There they were ordered to hold against the threat of the huge British forces disembarking on the other side of the tidal waters that separated Staten Island and New Jersey. In the ensuing months they had collapsed into drunken idleness while the battles raged on Long Island and Manhattan. At times they would wander to water’s edge and shout insults at their British counterparts on the other shore, even trade a few harmless shots and gestures.

  That had been the war experience of his “brothers” among the Associators. As word came back of the unrelenting disasters on the far side of the Hudson, the ardor of his comrades had cooled. The welcome offered by the citizens of Amboy in July had turned to outright hostility by October. When food and liquor were no longer offered for free by grateful citizens, instead were charged for, and then refused, the Associators simply took them.

  In the end they had broken up and gone home. One or two a night at first, then half a dozen, and finally the entire command; the men cursing the useless Continental Congress, the ungrateful louts of New Jersey, and even Washington, who they said had actually been bribed to divide his army up so it could be cut apart piecemeal. They had decided they would not be one of those pieces.

  His brothers in days of sunshine and warmth had melted away in the autumn cold and gone home, leaving only a few like himself, without unit or command, to fend for themselves.

  “We who were patriots in the sunshine?” He wondered. Start with that?

  Leaving Amboy, he had walked to Fort Lee, just in time to come running back pell-mell like the others with the British and Hessians at their heels.

  On the road north he had passed hundreds going the other way. Most of them were men from the New Jersey militias, but some came from as far away as Virginia, every one of them sick to death of it all. He had camped with a few, chanced meetings on the evening road, they curious as to why he was going the other way, calling him a damn fool until they heard him speak his name. A laughing few claimed he was a damn liar. Tom Paine most likely was safe and warm back in Philadelphia, eating roast goose, drinking fine port wine with all the money he had made deluding them. A few believed him; a few even drew out his pamphlet, torn and battered. One man wept, sitting by a campfire with him, holding Common Sense, starting to read it, and he had realized suddenly that the man could not read; he was illiterate. He had heard it read so many times that he had memorized the first few pages and kept the unreadable pamphlet as a talisman from a time when he believed.

  They had fallen asleep side by side. When he awoke next morning, his comrade of the night was gone, slipped away, but he had left half a loaf of bread behind as an offering. It was one of the few times he had cried across all these long bitter months.

  “Pangs of physical hunger must not d
eter us now, for we hunger for a greater prize, a prize our souls have longed for . . . and that is the prize of freedom . . .”

  He shook his head. Damn, it just would not work.

  He headed into the gloomy mist rising above the Passaic and skirted the edge of the town. If I go into the town I will go into a house, and they will recognize me if there are officers; they will lure me, and I’ll get drunk. Something told him he could not afford that blessed oblivion this night. He would stay with those whom in his heart he still called comrades and fellow citizens.

  What was left of the Jersey militias had been posted as sentries along the bank of the Passaic. The logic of it was simple enough. In the hills around the town the rest of the army was camped. Any men from Jersey wanting to desert would have to cross through the ranks of these men from Pennsylvania, the more disciplined troops of Maryland and Virginia, and the soldiers of New England, for whom desertion was nearly impossible since the British blocked the way north.

  In reality, though, few seemed to care if a knot of shivering, bedraggled militia staggered through their camp, heading south and west. There might be a few taunts and curses, but no one stopped them. For that matter, even for those who were staying, enlistments would be up either on the first of December or of January of the new year, and then nearly all who were still here could legally walk out. Not even “His Excellency General George Washington” would dare to stop them.

  The gloom deepened, occasionally relieved by the dull orange flicker of a campfire some lucky souls had managed to stir to life. There was a flaring up of one nearby, and he wandered over. Another home owner in Newark would awake at dawn to find his well-made, whitewashed picket fence gone. Yet the scene there was not of momentary celebration. Paine heard sobbing. A young boy squatting in the mud was cradling a prone form, an older man, beard gray, features pinched, by the firelight the face ashen, lips drawn back in that grimace the dead so often have. He thought for a moment of his Mary on the blood-soaked bed, the dead baby nestled in her arms, and forced it aside. No, that would break me. The others around the weeping boy were silent, heads bowed, one of the men kneeling down to hold the lad.

  “It was his heart. It just must have gave out while you were getting the wood. We’re sorry, Jamie.”

  The boy was inconsolable. Tom wanted to stop, to kneel down, to offer a word, but knew it would be a useless intrusion. After all, what could he ever say or write for this boy? Was this worth it to him now? If we lose, it will, of course, be meaningless. And even if we win? Could I ever write something to let him find meaning in the death of this old man, most likely his father?

  Several looked up at him. He sensed they recognized him. Strange how so many seemed to know who he was. There were even a few nods, but he did not draw closer to the beckoning fire. It was touched at this moment by death that seemed without meaning. He backed away.

  He turned into the gloom. Just go to your tent, get drunk, try to write something tomorrow——it did seem a reasonable thought. The flagon was still inside his jacket. He looked into the darkness. If another was close by, he would feel uncomfortable drinking and not offering to share. He saw no one, and he took a long swallow, feeling again the momentary blessing of warmth.

  He walked on, nearly tripping into a shallow ditch and then retching. It was an open latrine, and in the shadows he could hear a man suffering the agonies of the flux, or dysentery or typhoid. Memories of the nightmare crossing from England, when the drinking water in the lower hold of the ship was discovered to be foul once out to sea and already too far along to turn back. Nearly everyone on board had come down with typhoid.

  So much for the free passage that Benjamin Franklin had given him when the two met in England. He still wondered why. What had Franklin seen in him that others had not, recruiting him to venture to America and try his skills there, providing passage and even sending a letter ahead by fast packet to Dr. Rush, his friend, to take the corset maker, failed tax collector, and occasional writer under his wing once he landed in America?

  He backed away from the foul sink, struggling not to vomit, edged around it, and pressed on toward the river. Why he headed there he was not sure. It was not the most pleasant of streams, banked on one side by marshlands, lined with a number of tannery mills on this side that dumped their refuse and filth into the waters, a filth to which the people of Newark seemed immune.

  He caught sight of a flickering glow and angled toward it. Half a dozen men were gathered about a low fire that suddenly flared up high. As at the last one, these men had apparently slipped into the town to steal something dry and seasoned to burn on this rainy night. A fresh-faced boy, chin mottled with wisps of a scraggly beard, came to his side.

  “Brother, can you help me?” he gasped.

  The boy was staggering under a load of firewood. Thomas reached over, taking more than half of it, the boy groaning, thanking him. As they approached the fire, he saw two fish dangling from the boy’s belt: carp, big ones.

  “Our Jonathan, back from the hunt as well” came a greeting. A couple of men rushed over to help him the last few feet, taking his armload of wood and, without thought of need an hour or two from now, tossed all of it on the fire. Within seconds the dried apple and cherry wood crackled, spreading warmth for the moment.

  “Fish, no less!” The boy, obviously proud of his find, untied them from his belt and handed them over.

  “You go fishing as well?”

  He laughed softly. “No, they were hanging in the woodshed I visited, so I figured to bring them along.”

  “Fine bunch of thieves we’re reduced to, stealing a few stinking carp!”

  The others around the fire fell silent. Tom could see the resemblance between the forager and the young man complaining about the fish.

  One of the men drew out a knife, a short, beefy man with hands like ham hocks. He spilled out the guts of the two fish, and without bothering to scrape off their scales, he drew the ramrod from his mud-splattered musket, impaled the carp, and bracing the ramrod with a log, put the fish out over the fire to roast.

  Tom stood watching, still holding the heavy load of firewood. When the short, beefy man beckoned for him to dump his load by the side of the fire, he did so and found that the logs were a dry spot to park himself on, and so he sat down. Carp or not, there was enough food for all of them, and he felt something of an invitation for having carried the wood the last few feet.

  “You look familiar,” the young forager said, and extended his hand. “My name is Jonathan. Jonathan van Dorn.”

  “Tom,” he replied quietly.

  “Just Tom? What regiment you with?”

  “Was with the Associators out of Philadelphia.”

  There were several snorts of derision. He took no offense.

  “So what the hell are you doing here? Word was, all your friends ran for home a month ago.”

  “What unit are you?” Tom replied.

  There was a pause.

  “Jersey militia, out of Burlington County.” There was a slight defensive tone in Jonathan’s voice.

  “Well, heard nearly all of you boys ran off as well.”

  He said the words lightly, as if offering a joke in reply, but an uncomfortable pause ensued.

  “But you and me, we’re still here,” Tom finally added, and that broke the tension.

  “Stuck here for tonight,” came a voice from the other side of the fire, “but tomorrow? Word is we’re running again.”

  Tom looked over at the man who had spoken.

  “That’s my brother James,” Jonathan announced. James nodded, and Jonathan introduced the others, Peter Wellsley, Elijah Hunt, their sergeant, Bartholomew Weiner, who was cooking the fish, and several others, all that was left of the Burlington militia. It was Bartholomew who broke the moment, not looking back as he tended the roasting carp.

  “You’re Tom Paine, ain’t you?”

  Tom nodded his head. “Yup.”

  “Thought so.”

 
“You’re Tom Paine?” Jonathan gasped and extended his hand. “An honor, sir.”

  Tom took it. It was an American custom he was still not quite used to, this shaking of hands. Every American seemed willing to shake every other American’s hand. In England one only did so if the other was of the same class and station. He liked the custom. It was almost a symbol of what they were fighting for.

  “So, why are you here?” Jonathan asked.

  Tom shook his head. “Studying.”

  “Studying what? How to freeze? How to die from the shits?” Bartholomew quipped.

  “You could say that.”

  “Why ain’t you off with the officers down in the town? They’d let you in. I heard even that George Washington himself likes you, tells people to read what you write. He’d give you a warm bed for the night.”

  “Kind of prefer the company here.”

  No one spoke for a moment. It was embarrassing. He could see the open admiration in young Jonathan’s eyes, the cynical glance from his brother James, the weary indifference of the sergeant.

  A gust of wind whipped around them, sending up a shower of sparks. Turning away from the smoke, he caught a distant glimpse of glowing lights on the far side of the river.

  “They over there?” he asked.

  “Coming up thick as fleas on an old dog,” Bartholomew snorted, and then, clearing his throat, he spat. “We’ll most likely pack and be gone come dawn.”

  “Not soon enough for me,” James announced.

  Tom looked over at him and saw that a couple of the men to either side were nodding in agreement, heads lowered against the wind.

  “Stow it,” Bartholomew snapped.

  “And I suppose you are going to make me?” James retorted. “I thought the Declaration was about our freedom. Well, damn it, I have the freedom to speak my mind.”