by Paul Lussier
It was nine o’clock when the king showed up, the fluffy Marie in some shepherdess getup (replete with staff), hanging apathetically on his arm. He was so short and so astonishingly fat, I instantly realized I was wrong about the Hall of Mirrors being the reason Louis and Marie-Antoinette took forever to produce this evidently unconstipated dauphin. Oh, others had claimed he was impotent; that her vagina was crooked; that he had an organ that could enter easily enough, but once in, hurt like hell pulling out—or even that he preferred small boys. They had it all wrong. Louis XVI was just obese and exhausted, and probably by the time he found his instrument among the folds of flesh while attempting to perform his conjugal duties, his moment of passion had passed.
He didn’t walk, he waddled. And yes, no question, he was feeling, not seeing, his way through the crowd. They kissed him, they licked his boots. They complimented him on his shoe size, his bag-wig, his eye color, even his gut (“Bulbous, no? Like mounds of tulips in spring!”).
Never mind that he had the shakes, the sweats, and a ball of phlegm circling somewhere deep in his throat. Il était splendide!
The pushing and shoving was so severe I thought I didn’t stand a chance. But the queen, as promised, cleared the crowd with her crosier. She whispered to the king, “C’est lui, mon roi, qui ma sauve aujourd’hui—le petit Americain qui connais Washington.”
The king summoned me to him. “Tell me something that will please me!” he demanded. There was a collective gasp in the room. Would I pass the test?
So this was it. Rescuing Deborah; saving Washington; protecting the army from dissension, mutiny, murderous executions; the future of America—all of it, this instant, in my hands. “Your country calls,” quoth the story. And that invocation was good enough for me.
A rush of images came to my mind: my father’s trembling hand ripping my beloved Apollo’s head off; Ezekiel swinging in the breeze; soldiers too emaciated to fight; Deborah hurling herself atop her dead daughter’s body; Washington counting on the likes of Deborah and me to win him this war . . . a cavalcade of memories in no particular order or patterned line, eliciting at once great sorrow and gratefulness and fear. Conflicting emotions mysteriously producing in me the confidence, easy and plain, to speak my mind. To share with the king of France my entire story, the ordeal of the Revolution not as written or later conveyed by History, but as it was lived, by me, from its beginnings in the swamp to its pivotal turning point in the halls of Versailles. Down to and including my return to America one month hence in a ship laden with millions of francs in gold coin.
I knew as I spoke the story that it would become true. And it did. The words I found were these:
“Oh, my liege, if only you could see . . . in the sad look in your queen’s eyes . . . in her little shepherdess costume . . . in her all-too-famous royal parades out to hilltops at dawn to watch the rising sun . . .
“. . . In her love of spinning wheels and frolicking in the meadow, playing at being ‘free’ . . .
“. . . In your own wild overeating, as much as three hams, four chickens, and two whole cakes at a time . . .
“. . . In your passing the time playing blacksmith, bent over an anvil . . .
“. . . In hiding out in the woods all by yourself, drinking yourself into oblivion . . .
“. . . In your well-documented desire to touch as many of your subjects as possible, especially those not in brown whom you cannot see . . .
“. . . In your decision to fling open the doors to Versailles to the public . . .”
If only the king could see that America had no monopoly on the urge for freedom. That really the thirst for liberty was no different than his own urge to be done with “caca dauphin,” to depart from the stale crust of tradition and start anew on a different path, one of which we were all deathly afraid but recognized, deep within, was necessary, inevitable, and right.
“My time in the Revolution, Your Excellency, has taught me to look past what I see. And here at Versailles, I see gaudy beauty, to a point. But mostly I see pain, I see blindness, and also I see—in both you and your queen—an urge, wild and fiery and busting through your flesh, to break free.”
The king blinked.
“America isn’t a country so much as a state of mind, good sir. A quest for a new order, based simply on recognition for who, not what, one is. To America, you’re not His Lordship, not King George’s nemesis, not Louis XVI, you’re a fat man who can barely see and happens to have been born into good fortune. And your wife is lovely enough, but really she’s a homely woman who’d be happier spinning flax in a cottage. And would be prettier and less stinky without the wig . . .
“America, Your Majesty, is nothing more than who you are deep inside: that still point you feel compelled to hide, yet wanting out, now or never, before life passes you by. . . .
“By helping America, you help not only France and the colonies, you help yourself, Louis, and your wife, Marie-Antoinette. You help the world and you help me.”
At which point I descended to my knees and with head bowed was preparing to kiss the king’s feet when he stopped me.
“Non, non,” was all he said, pulling his foot from my hand, then wheeling about and retreating through the door from whence he had come, asking that only his wife, and no entourage, follow him.
That night I imagine they dined alone.
I never spoke to Louis or Marie again. I didn’t need to. The letter promising twelve million francs and a fleet of navy ships that was delivered to the Hotel de Valentinois the next morning said it all.
Within a week, I was heading home.
CHAPTER 34
Washington Dies
Hearing John’s story on my deathbed was like being gently lifted from nightmare back to dream. From specious immortality to true life. That’s not to say the story didn’t hurt; the pain it caused me was the most excruciating of my long and lonely life.
The loved ones and doctors surrounding my bed saw only that I writhed in agony, shaking, trembling, coughing blood and sputum, swatting at the air (actually the memory of Hancock and Adams, who weren’t even there). “I am just going,” I intoned. Naturally they took these near-to-final words to mean that I was approaching death.
Not yet. Where I was “going” was to Yorktown, Virginia, to revisit with John Lawrence the final siege. For there was still much work to do before I could die.
As I said at the start of my account of these final moments at Mount Vernon, I knew full well that if I didn’t find George fast, I’d be embalmed for perpetuity. But what I didn’t tell you—above and beyond my terrible fear of being buried alive, which I’d had all my life—was why I so desperately yearned for surety of death. Because like the difference between a butterfly that your mind remembers pinned to a board in an insect collection and that your heart remembers fluttering about in the sun, I wanted, in death, to live in people’s hearts rather than endure merely in History books.
For a man who knows himself is one who is loved. And a man who is loved is eventually understood. As John Lawrence was my opening, I, the father of my country, at the dawn of a new millennium, want to be America’s opening, bringing her to herself as I was brought to George. The opening, in my case, being the one extended to me by my long-lost subordinate officer.
So, like John waking to his war wound in Valley Forge after he’d whipped Alice and realized Deborah was alive, I too was finally waking to my own mortal injury. (I’d never once been shot in war; God was saving me for a particular, more long-lasting agony he had devised.) And I hoped, as with John’s renewed love for Deborah, mine would be renewed for George, abandoned outside a tent on the battlefield at Yorktown. So, to the final siege . . .
It was at this point when Louis acceded to John’s demand, delivering several tons of gold, that I interrupted John’s telling of the story of the Revolution to ask a question (although in my bedroom at Mount Vernon, all they heard was a low groan):
“You called him Louis?” I chuckled.
“Yes,” John replied. “Just as Deborah called you George.”
“Not to my face—you said so yourself, in the story!”
“I did indeed. I stand corrected,” John replied.
“Do let me take it from here,” I demanded. “Let me speak of the last few weeks of the war.” I cleared my throat (the doctors in my room thought I was choking one last time).
“I will speak it as you do, as a tale. Since I can see now that is the only way to hold in view the miracle of how we won the war. For your story has enabled me to see, in this inscrutable pain that has been pressing against me all through my tenure as a hallowed man, the blurred memory that was sitting like a weight inside my soul.” I composed myself.
“The Battle of Yorktown, by George Washington, the man.”
I stopped before I began. “Come to think of it, John, you don’t know this story either, for after Yorktown we never again spoke.”
“Quite right, but we’ll get to that!”
I started anew.
“September 1781. I was waiting for you, John. I was frightened you wouldn’t come through.”
An honest beginning. I settled into my portion of the tale. . . .
If your efforts had not met with success, John, my secret plan of cornering the British somewhere in the South, preferably Virginia, and squeezing Cornwallis from the north and south, would of necessity have been dashed in favor of the only other alternative: wholesale surrender.
It is true, as you said in your story, that for all practical purposes I sat out the war from Valley Forge on. History loves to ignore the importance of the strategic necessity of keeping an eye on Clinton and keeping him in New York. By focusing as it does on the terrible deprivations of my winter at Morristown (soldiers eating their own shoes and all that), and by playing up my preoccupation with plans to one day attack Manhattan (a misguided notion at worst, perhaps: History at least allows me that).
The truth is, History has no business defending my time outside New York. In fact, especially insofar as its perspective goes, confined as it is to events of record or note, I should be roundly denounced, banished from the pantheon of great military commanders, if not tarred and feathered. Even to a man none too bright, such as I was, the idea of attacking New York was anathema. Clinton had seventeen thousand splendidly fed, supplied, dug-in men to my mere eight thousand and eight hundred. And Manhattan was surrounded by water on three sides!
My purpose was twofold. Taking a page from the chapter of Bunker Hill, I wanted to look like a fool to keep Clinton off his toes. Thank goodness he was stupider than I thought—when it came time to make him believe I’d be attacking Manhattan, he took the bait!
A full year before Yorktown I wrote in my journal that I had no intention of ever attacking New York. Why does History consistently ignore this? Because then History is left with even less justification for my hiatus from war than she has already! Far better the “great George Washington” be somewhat misguided in his intentions than be an out-and-out slacker.
Not that I discouraged reports I wanted to attack Manhattan, even if it had me looking the fool. In fact, I did everything I could to make certain such rumors would be spread—even within the ranks of my own side.
In May 1781 I traveled to Rhode Island, where Rochambeau and his few French troops were installed, asking him for his help in the eventual raid. He consented reluctantly and privately mocked me, as well he should have.
In June I wrote Lafayette, informing him of my plans to invade New York. He too thought I was mad, doubly so, since I foolishly committed this folly to paper and most letters I wrote were inevitably intercepted. What the devil was I doing relaying such sensitive information in plain language, neglecting to encode it?
Pity Lafayette didn’t pick up on the other letters also enclosed: one to Martha, filled with domestic detail, and another to my dentist, ordering new springs for my teeth. Quaint touches which I was hoping would work to dissuade Lafayette from believing in the letters’ authenticity (the Washington he knew would never mingle war correspondence with shopping lists!), but leaving Clinton thinking that such correspondence with intimates was proof-positive that I intended to attack New York.
It worked. Clinton went into a tizzy!
Even as I was waiting for you, John, wondering how on earth you were faring (and privately fearing the worst), I was commissioning thousands upon thousands of men to prepare to launch an all-out assault on New York. Everyone was duped, even my own officers and troops, who up to the very last minute were convinced I was out of my mind.
So I say to History, stop protecting me! For you know not what you say! And you do disservice to yourself, to your countrymen, to me!
Actually, not everyone was easily tricked, certainly not the countless schoolteachers and housewives and booksellers I’d sent into New York to further leak the news. Nor were the engineers fooled whom I’d retained to build big ovens across the Hudson, on the Jersey side, to make it appear as though I were setting up camp. Or the bakers I hired to fill the air with the scent of fresh-baked bread ostensibly to be fed to the gathering American troops.
Somehow they all knew. No one said anything, of course. It was just a look in the baker’s daughter’s eye, the engineer’s smirk, the spring in the bookseller’s step, the crowds that awaited us when eventually, albeit quite suddenly, I took that right turn to New Jersey, back across the Delaware, to Pennsylvania and on down, hoping, praying, that a French fleet would be meeting up with us soon.
To the Chesapeake I was bound. It was on faith alone I was operating to keep Clinton away and leave Cornwallis whittled and withered in Virginia, ready to be vanquished. All I had to do was break the rules, create an environment hospitable to planting—till some fertile territory in which the Revolution could grow.
I sent a twenty-six-year-old American boy (you, John) to France, a twenty-three-year-old French boy (Lafayette) to Virginia, and a middle-aged, defrocked Quaker (Greene) to North Carolina, then rolled the dice!
With Cornwallis’s annihilation of the American army at Camden in August 1780 (thanks to General Gates taking to the North Carolina hills!), the South had been placed securely in British hands. I passed over scores of men who were better qualified militarily to appoint pacifist Quaker Nathanael Greene, an ironmaster with a debilitating limp, to rescue the region.
At the time, Greene’s experience was scant, which was good, for this allowed him other qualities I sensed I could trust: his scatological humor was always good for morale, along with his rollicking imitation of Tristram Shandy. Add to this his independent-minded belief that the quashing of injustice was more important than blind obeisance to the chief Quaker tenet never to take up arms (a transgression for which he was read out of the Meeting of Friends).
On hand for him in North Carolina were eight hundred men (as compared to Cornwallis’s thousands) on starvation rations (three days’ provisions). They were demoralized, naked but for codpieces made from moss, addicted to plunder, and anarchic. He took the job with my promise to leave him alone. Every tactic, every maneuver, every line of march or order of battle would spring exclusively from his own brain, I assured him.
Additionally, I made available to Greene one sharpshooter named Daniel Morgan. Now here was a man who knew the land. (In truth, with Arnold he was in great part responsible for Gates’s famous Saratoga victory which Congress loved rubbing my face in so much—but that’s another story.) Morgan was a boyhood friend from my native Virginia and absolutely nuts. Crazy enough to plan (next to Bunker Hill) the most successful battle of the war, based entirely on his acceptance of a soldier’s irrepressible instinct to run like hell when cornered—especially when forced to come within fifty yards of fast-approaching bare British steel.
So, let them run then. All the better for Morgan; for he could turn retreat to account. He chose a plain dotted with widely spaced trees that would give his superior opponent Tarleton and his horsemen easy maneuverability, while at the same tim
e allow them to completely corner his own men by backing them up against a river offering no escape. This was for two reasons: to make his men fight like hell and to invite Tarleton into a trap.
Certain that his dashing enemy would charge ahead, thinking he’d caught the Rebels unawares (for who on earth would freely choose the valley of Cowpens to mount a defensive stand?), Morgan placed the men most likely to run in the front line. He ordered them to receive the first onslaught of the British attack, to defend themselves with just three volleys, and then to run.
They did exactly as they were told. And as a result, the Battle of Cowpens became legend.
Morgan guessed correctly that the running soldiers would give Tarleton the impression of a panicked retreat and that Tarleton, being bloodthirsty, would pursue fast and furiously—pushing Morgan and his men deeper into the plain where, from behind a little sandy hill, four hundred handpicked, camouflaged Continentals would come out from hiding and fall upon Tarleton’s dragoons with more savagery than the war would ever again see.
Even more ingenious, these Continentals were directed to run too, themselves taking cover as yet another hidden cache of American cavalrymen burst upon the enemy’s right flank and rear like a swirling tornado. While at the same time, the re-formed militia swung to the left and the Continentals took dead center anew, firing straight on.
The British didn’t know what hit them. “It was like a whirlwind, the shock was so sudden and violent we could not stand it,” wrote one soldier.
Tarleton fled moments later, having lost nine-tenths of his men: six hundred soldiers. Also two fieldpieces, thirty-five baggage wagons, and eight hundred stands of arms fell into American hands.
For our part: sixty wounded and twelve killed.
For all practical purposes, the British light infantry had been destroyed.
When British General Cornwallis (whom Clinton had sent to shore up the South back in 1779) heard the news, he tried to avenge Cowpens by going after Morgan himself, only to be coaxed by both Greene and Morgan into a not-so-little chase through all of North Carolina and up into Virginia—as far away from the Cornwallis power base in Hillsboro, North Carolina, as they could lead him.