To Try Men's Souls - George Washington 1

by Newt Gingrich

  The lieutenant looked his way and their gazes locked. It was a long-drawn-out matter of but a few seconds. Protocol demanded that Jonathan come to his feet and offer some sort of salute, but he did not want to stir, to wake Peter from his deep slumber, and besides this man had insulted him.

  The moment held, and then the lieutenant nodded.

  “Luck to you, New Jersey.”

  Startled, he could not reply.

  “You read that Paine like you know it by heart.”

  “Like I said, I met him once,” Jonathan replied.

  “I’ll see you in Trenton, and we’ll give them hell.”

  Startled even more, Jonathan offered a salute in reply, even as he remained seated so as not to disturb Peter.

  “Luck to you, too, sir,” he replied.

  The lieutenant forced a smile, then shook his head, looking out through the door at the wintry blast.

  “Ah, what the hell, chances are we’ll all be dead come dawn anyhow. Frozen or shot. But what the hell.”

  Jonathan could not help but smile.

  “Then I’ll see you in hell, sir. At least it will be warm there.”

  The lieutenant shook his head and laughed softly.

  “See you in hell, Jersey,” he replied, and then went through the barn door, slamming it shut behind him.

  Peter was still asleep, and though struggling to control his cough, Jonathan could not help but let a spasm overwhelm him. It did not wake his friend.

  Peter was still shivering in his sleep, and Jonathan reached around, and pulled up his own frayed blanket around his friend. A loving gesture but also a pragmatic one, their body heat would help warm each other, and he held him closer. Not Diana to be certain, but at this moment he loved his friend just as intensely and cherished his warmth. Peter’s shivering died away, and like a child his friend drifted deeper into slumber, again whispering something he could not quite understand, but it sounded as if he was saying something to his mother.

  From outside the barn Jonathan could hear orders being shouted for the men of the Maryland line to fall in and form ranks. Men were cursing the cold, the war, the weather, each other, cursing everything one could ever imagine. He could hear them sloshing off, drifting their way to the ferry dock.

  Now that the barn was no longer packed to overflowing with men, there was at least one blessing. The wretched stench of a hundred or more soldiers packed tight together was gone. The stink of unwashed bodies, foul uniforms, of so many suffering from dysentery and every other damned illness imaginable was washed away as the icy wind shrieked through the cracks between the boards and eaves. The only men still inside were Peter, Jonathan, and the troopers of the General’s personal guard. The one drawback to the Maryland line’s leaving——the temperature inside the barn plummeted in a few minutes to well below freezing. He started to shiver.

  The remaining troopers stretched out on the floor of the barn. Sergeant Howard, who had befriended him, walked by, looked down at the two of them, and reaching into his jacket he pulled out a leather sack of rum and offered it.

  Jonathan gratefully took it, swallowed a few gulps, the hot warmth of the rum coursing through him, hitting him hard so that his head swam.

  “You feeling better, son?”

  “Yes.” It was a lie. His chest felt like it was on fire.

  “That stuff will cure you right quick.”

  “It certainly does.”

  “Good for you, lad. Rest easy now. They’ll call us when the time comes. It might be hours yet.”

  The sergeant, like a mother hen checking her chicks, moved on, leaving the two of them alone in the pig stall. If not for Peter asleep in his arms he would have crawled out of the stench and found some hay or straw to rest upon, but he did not wish to disturb his friend, and so, curled up with him, he sat beneath the flickering candle.

  Sleep would not come again.

  He tried to conjure up the image of Diana by his side but it would not come. Besides, with Peter asleep in his arms, the thought seemed strange and uncomfortable. What would Diana say if one day he should tell her of this moment and admit the secret desires he harbored. That would never do, for her father was a deacon of their church and surely she would be repulsed by such thoughts.

  The cold crept in around him, icy tentacles that penetrated the thin, worn, damp blanket and threadbare uniform so that he began to shiver uncontrollably. He wished the sergeant would come back again and offer another drink, and then another. In the army he had learned to drink. At least for a few minutes a drink would ward off the cold that seemed part and parcel of this wretched existence, not just warding off the cold of the body, but also the cold of the soul.

  But he could not bestir himself, and besides, it would break what dignity he still had to go and seek a drink from another.

  His thoughts drifted to that night they camped before Newark. Not the memory of his brother James deserting. That was a memory he worked diligently to wash out of his soul forever. Instead, it was of his friend Thomas Paine.

  I can call him my friend, he thought, for he called me brother. Thomas Paine called me brother, and he remembered how his friend so readily produced the sack of rum and shared it with him and the others around their campfire, and without complaint accepted the miserable head of a carp and ate it without protest. Jonathan had been more than eager to offer him the choice morsel that he had been allotted.

  He remembered how, after Paine had left their company, he could not get to sleep thinking about it. A new custom was emerging in the army. Soldiers were asking the famous author to place his signature on copies of his pamphlet Common Sense. He had lacked the nerve to ask, and besides, on such a miserable night how could one do so without pen or quill? Perhaps when this is all over I’ll seek him out. Perhaps he just might remember me and I will ask him to sign it and we will laugh together about our shared meal and forget how it ended with my brother James deserting. Perhaps, just perhaps, I somehow helped him, for he had written down what I said to James. “You try my soul!”

  Could I have helped him to create that? Jonathan wondered. If so, then maybe all of this is worth it, he thought, as he held Peter closer to stop his own shivering.

  After Mr. Paine had left their miserable fireside, Sergeant Bartholomew had acted so strangely. Gone was his gruffness and endless stream of obscenities. Bartholomew had sat by the fire, poking the coals with his bayonet, muttering to himself.

  Poor Bartholomew. When they finally reached Trenton and from there retreated across the Delaware, the skiff Bartholomew was in upended crossing over to Pennsylvania. Powerful man that he was, Bartholomew could not swim a stroke and disappeared in the ice floes and swirling current.

  He wished he could write to the poor man’s wife to tell her of her husband’s fate, to somehow, like Mr. Paine, find the words to explain. But he did not have paper or ink and pen to do so. Nor did he even know where his sergeant had come from, for the man rarely spoke of his family, his wife and the five children he had left behind to go and fight this war. He had joked that he had joined the army so he could have a night of peaceful sleep without squalling brats and a wife pestering him to help make another. All of them had seen through that. He loved them, he missed them, and now he was drowned, as dead as if struck down in battle, and his family would never know.

  When this is over, I will seek them out and tell them, Jonathan resolved.

  Peter sighed and nestled in closer by his side. Jonathan pulled their blankets in closer around Peter’s shoulders and his own, settling back.

  On the other side of the thin boards that separated him from the raging storm he could hear the wind howling, feeling the cold sweeping in, hear the distant sound of the men of the Maryland line loading aboard the boats to cross over to the Jersey shore.

  “Get some sleep, boys.” It was the sergeant whispering. “The General can’t go over there without us. We got a few hours yet. Get some sleep.”

  Jonathan closed his eyes, but sleep wou
ld not come. Each breath was a labor, and with each breath he fought not to cough and awaken his friend.

  His thoughts raced.

  “These are the times that try men’s souls,” his friend had written.

  But for this moment, the warmer thoughts of a girl who had kissed him but once made him smile, and for a few precious moments he did drift off to sleep.

  McConkey’s Ferry

  7:30 P.M. December 25, 1776

  Unable to conceal his impatience, Washington stood up, abandoning the warmth of the fireplace, and left the tight-packed room. Several of his staff prepared to follow, and he looked back at them, shaking his head.

  He stepped out into the storm.

  The troops waiting before the ferry house were motionless, heads bent low against the storm, some muttering, some cursing, and mingled with the howling of the storm the sounds of incessant coughing, rattled breathing, men hawking and spitting and coughing again.

  Benjamin Rush had warned him of this.

  “One night out in bad weather now and I tell you, sir, half of the men will be down with inflammation of the lungs and die from it. Can you not find warm dry quarters anywhere and just give them a few days rest?”

  No rest tonight, he thought grimly and felt a wave of pity as he walked along the side of the road, staying in the shadows, studying them intently.

  Rush was right, most of them were indeed sick. Sick, emaciated, ragged, barefoot, shivering from the wet and cold. Even as he watched, one simply sat down in the mud and slush, head bent, shaking uncontrollably.

  An officer standing near the collapsed soldier came to his side and knelt down, his words hard to hear.

  “Come on, William, lad, back to your feet now.”

  The officer put his arms around the soldier and tried to lift him up, but the boy just leaned against him as a dead weight.

  “Sergeant Compton,” the officer sighed. “William here is finished. Find a dry place to put him and report back.”

  The sergeant nearly picked the boy up and staggered off into the dark.

  The officer saw Washington in the shadows and came to attention.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” he announced nervously. “William is a good man, but his lungs have been really bad for days. We told him he could report sick, but he tried to come anyhow.”

  Washington nodded.

  “He and you tried your best. Carry on.”

  The officer, obviously relieved that he would not face an upbraiding, turned away.

  The unit was close-knit, perhaps the young soldier a nephew or neighbor before the war the way the officer had almost tenderly tried to rouse him.

  Another boat was loaded and pushed off, and the suffering column staggered forward a dozen feet and then came to a stop again.

  More muttering, cursing, and the incessant coughing the only sounds from those enduring agony and waiting.

  He turned away, angling down to the riverbank, downstream from the ferry dock.

  Yet another river. Across the years of peace after the last war he had ordered many of the best works from England on the art of war and read them at his leisure. At a moment like this it is almost too painful to recall quiet evenings on the porch of Mount Vernon looking over the broad expanse of the Potomac, often with Martha by his side in the next chair, sometimes sewing, often reading or catching up on her correspondence. Other times, late at night on winter evenings, sitting by a warm fire, the only sounds were the crackling of the blazing logs of hickory and chestnut and the soft gentle tick-tock deliberation of the clock in the corner gradually luring him to a comfortable nap in his chair, book falling to the floor by his side.

  Books describing the great battles of the past, the campaigns of Marlborough, Frederick of Germany, and, farther back, Caesar. How Caesar in little more than a week bridged the mighty Rhine, four times as broad as this river, flung his legions across on a raid, and then, when it was completed, actually tore the bridge down. To have but one legion of those troops on this night, he thought wistfully.

  There was no bridge here, though. There had been one on the Raritan less than a month ago, he remembered, and that had been a near disaster . . .

  The Raritan Crossing, Brunswick, New Jersey

  December 1, 1776

  They had been harried since the break of a fog-shrouded dawn. Ever since the retreat from Newark his worst fear had been that Howe would fling a blocking force across the narrow strait dividing Staten Island from Jersey and push forward to block the single bridge and ferry dock at the Raritan River. His advance guard, however, had reported the way ahead was clear, and Greene had pushed his exhausted command forward to seize the crossing and prepare for the rest of the army to follow.

  The bridge was secured, but by dawn and the resumption of the exhausting march, Hessian troops were upon their rear and pressing in. He feared that, as the Romans were trapped by Hannibal against the Po, his army would bunch up, with their backs to a river having only one crossing, and disintegrate in panic. Such a position was often described in the books he had read as the last day of an army, and the river by evening would be running red and choked with the bodies of the slain.

  The cold fog shifted over to lowering clouds out of which came a cold drizzle, mixed with occasional flakes of snow and driving sleet. Riding alongside the column, he saw the men pressed on, not as they once had, with élan, eyes afire, believing some “mischief” as they called it, awaited them ahead. They shuffled along woodenly, moving fast, to be sure, but doing so with fear in their eyes, faces drawn and pinched from exhaustion and hunger, nervously looking over their shoulders. Passing woodlots bordering the road he could see tracks where more than one man had broken from the column and dashed into the woods. Some most likely had offered the usual excuse, that with the bloody flux running rampant in the army they had to relieve themselves, even though he had given specific orders that proprieties and modesty were to be forgotten; if a man was seized with such needs he could fall out by the side of the road but no farther. From the tracks he could see that few had returned to the march. Cowering in the woods, scores of men——perhaps hundreds——were breaking off from the column, never to return. They would wait until the armies had passed and then slip off for homes in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, or the faraway frontier of Virginia.

  The Raritan was not a large river at all. Though swollen by the early winter storms, it was still narrow enough that a bridge could span it and afford a dry crossing. Knox had arrayed a battery on the north side, guns dismounted, on a low rise just outside of the village of Brunswick. He rode up to him.

  “Amazing, sir,” Knox exclaimed. “Yesterday, they could have sent just a few boats up this river from Staten Island, seized the bridge, and destroyed it.”

  Washington said nothing, studying the narrow single-lane crossing, just wide enough for the artillery and the army’s few remaining supply wagons to get across.

  Greene came up to join them.

  “Sir, half my command is across. Your orders?”

  “Good work. Deploy on the south bank and be ready to defend the crossing as the rest of the men get across. Knox, be ready to pull your guns out quickly and find some good ground on the south shore.”

  There was the distant rattle of musketry. He turned about and headed north without waiting for a reply, followed only by Billy Lee.

  Riding against the stream of the column he could see that the men were picking up their pace. As always, the mud, the damnable mud, clung to them, caking the rags wrapped about their feet. One man, lucky enough to have shoes, suddenly stopped, cursing, pushing back against the current, the clinging sludge having sucked a shoe off his foot. He went down on his knees, feeling about, trying to find that precious shoe, men stumbling over him, the column bunching up.

  “You there!” Washington cried. “Fall in and keep moving!”

  “My shoe, sir!”

  “Fall in and keep moving.”

  The soldier shot him a defiant stare but then reluct
antly gave up the search and fell in with the retreating ranks.

  He felt a wave of pity for him in spite of the disruption he had caused, the knot of men who had been slowed untangling and resuming their pace. The loss of a shoe, if the temperature fell, might very well mean a frozen foot by tomorrow and amputation a week hence.

  More musketry, and as he drew closer he could distinguish the sharp crackle of rifle fire. Our men or the Hessian’s mounted jaegers?

  He was approaching the rear of the column, now bunched up, any semblance of unit cohesion, of anyone in command, gone. A wagon sat in the middle of the road, front axle snapped, sagging, team already cut loose, driver vanished. It was stacked with barrels stamped SALT BEEF, and his heart sank. There was no time to attempt to retrieve them. There were enough rations to feed a meal to a thousand men, but of so pitiful a condition the pursuing British troops most likely would scorn them and set them ablaze.

  Men flowed around the wagon, not bothering to stop for a minute to bust a barrel open and fill their haversacks. With the enemy closing in from behind, they were too afraid.

  “The bridge is just ahead, boys,” he repeated again and again.

  The retreating column began to thin out. Stragglers were staggering with exhaustion, struggling to escape, looking back over their shoulders, eyes wide with fear. A wounded man, lean, tough-looking, blood dripping from his hand, answered his unasked question. “Sons of bitches shot me, sir, but I got one of ’em, an officer from the looks of ’im” he announced coolly and pressed on.

  Now a thin ragged line of riflemen, and in the center of the road a lone artillery piece, a four-pounder that suddenly fired, kicking back, mud spraying up under its wheels.

  The gun was retreating by fire. A lone mule pulled the field piece by ropes attached to it, the crew working to reload as the driver urged the mule on with harsh prodding, several of the gunners pushing at the wheels.

  He looked past the gun and could see the pursuers, jaegers, some mounted, others on foot. The flash from a rifle, a ball singing past, another flash, another bullet——they were obviously aiming at him. If musketmen, their aim would be a joke, but these jaegers were nearly as good as his own riflemen. On a calm dry day they were able to pick a man off at two hundred yards.