by Ron Carter
Suddenly Richard raised his arm and pointed. “There!”
William pivoted, searching in the blinding rain for several seconds before he saw it. Twenty-five yards to the west, the five-foot-tall iron uprights that had supported the sixty-foot flagpole on all four sides were peeled outward, nearly touching the cement block in which they were anchored. One-half-inch thick, they were warped, twisted, nearly unrecognizable. Awestruck, the two brothers started across the grass, heads ducked against the rain, when they slowed, staring. Furrows, like small trenches, had been ripped a foot deep in the earth, to run in ragged, zig-zag patterns in all directions from the base of the flagpole. Several ran toward the house. The deepest one reached the porch, and they could see it had raised stones and broken the mortar.
The men cautiously approached the cement base and stopped. They could hear the hissing as rain pelted the four mangled strips of iron. Richard reached to touch one and jerked his hand back from the heat. They peered at the ground, searching for the flagpole but saw only tiny shards of scorched wood scattered in all directions. William pointed, and they walked to a large, blackened, distorted lump of smoking copper, still hissing in the rain.
“That was the ball on top of the flagpole,” William murmured. It had once been round, sixteen inches in diameter. It was now blackened, unrecognizable.
Richard spoke. “Where’s the flag?”
The two moved through the grass, searching, and William stooped to pick up a strip of charred cloth two feet long. On each end was a blackened brass eye, with an iron snap still in place. The remaining two feet and the third brass eye were missing. Without a word William handed it to Richard, and he recognized it as all that was left of the heavy strip of canvas with three brass eyes through which snaps were placed to hang the flag. There was no other trace of the Union Jack.
For a time the two brothers stood still with the rain driving against their backs. These two had command of more men, more firepower, than any other two men on the earth, save kings and cabinets. Thousands of cannon, tens of thousands of men, hundreds of thousands of muskets, but they stood cowed in the growing awareness of their own insignificance, their own smallness. They looked around at the trees that were split and uprooted and thrown about and at the debris that was scattered everywhere by the fury of the storm, and they felt a creeping consciousness of how helpless they were in the face of the incomparable power of Nature and He who controls it.
The wind slackened, and the deep purple clouds and the lightning and thunder passed as the storm moved toward the narrow neck of water separating Staten Island from the New Jersey coast, where the Raritan River empties into the sea. With rain dripping from their noses and chins and fingertips, Richard looked at William.
“It appears Doctor Franklin was right about his lightning rod. We’ll have to remember that.”
William faced his brother squarely. “Doctor Franklin thinks he can bring France in against us. Could he be right about that, too?”
For a time the two men faced each other in silence, neither caring to answer the question. Then Richard turned back toward the house, and William followed.
“Will you have damage among your ships?”
Richard nodded. “Probably, but we’ll be ready by the ninth.”
By four o’clock in the afternoon, Staten Island and all of New York were bathed once again in hot, muggy July sunlight. By five o’clock, eighty wagons heaped high with huge canvas bags filled with laundry, each marked by regiment and company, rumbled eastward from the massive British camp, the six-foot-tall wheels mired halfway to the axles on dirt roads that had been turned into quagmires. Draft horses strained to pull the loads, slogging through puddles of rainwater and mud that reached to their knees and splattered their bellies. By six o’clock sixty more wagons settled into the ruts while the horses dug in and labored. The drivers cursed and gigged their horses and plowed on, mumbling under their breath in the ancient rite of all enlisted men.
Don’t mean nothin’ to them officers—they just give the orders and it’s the rest of us got to do the work—gather the laundry, they said—no reason—never is—just do this, or do that an’ don’t ask why—just do it.
East of the vast British camp, the thousands of wives and families of enlisted men and the traditional camp followers stood with hands shading their eyes as they studied the incoming wagons. These were the women who for a pittance washed and ironed the clothing of an army, cooked to feed them, and nursed the sick and wounded. Bound by family, or by choice, to the lives of soldiers, they had long since accepted the hard, unsparing lives of nomads, uprooting themselves with the army, moving, settling again, ready for the next move. In the deadly heat of battle some of them moved among the men, comforting the wounded, carrying water, sometimes stepping up to load or fire a cannon for one who had fallen. They were the unsung heroines who do the mundane, necessary things that hold armies together.
Short, stocky, gray, and aging, Milly Stringer squinted at the incoming wagons, counting. She spoke between teeth that were brown, decaying.
“More’n seventy of ’em, and there’s bound to be more comin’. Laundry. We better get out the kettles and scrub boards and start the fires. How they expect us to git clothes clean in this mud?” She shook her head. “There’ll be little sleep tonight.”
Beside her Sookey finished her count and nodded. Tall, slender, round-shouldered, Sookey’s black face and black eyes showed a weariness that seemed to hover over her continually. She had never known her real name, or if she had one. She had been called Sookey all her life, first on the Virginia plantation where she was born in the slave quarters, then in Massachusetts, where she had stopped when she ran away as a girl of thirteen. She coughed her hacking cough and answered Milly.
“Looks such. Land, would you lookit them wagons. Looks like cotton harvest all over again the way they’s loaded. Never seen so much laundry in one pile.”
By nine o’clock, in the glow after sunset, more than a thousand fires burned beneath black cast-iron kettles, and the women had settled into the mind-dulling sequence of washing. Carry steaming water to the brass wash and rinse tubs—cut brown soap and stir to a froth—in with the shirts—the pants would come later, then the socks—start the back-breaking work of rubbing the hot, wet laundry on the corrugated scrub boards—fold it and wring it until your fingers cramped—into the hot rinse water—poke it down with a stick—repeat it—wring it out—put it on a clean board for those who would hang it on long, strung lines—dump the dirty water—fetch fresh—start again. Don’t think—don’t question—don’t dream—don’t mind your hands are smarting in the heavy lye soap—skin cracking—don’t think about being soaked from your shoulders to your ankles—disconnect your mind from all around you—scrub—rinse—dip—fetch—repeat it—repeat it.
At midnight Sookey put her hands on her hips and struggled to straighten her back. “Goin’ to fetch a drink and set down a minute,” she said and coughed as she made her way stiff-legged to her tent. She paused at the entrance to drink long from the wooden canteen hung on the ridge pole, then sat down on her cot. For a time she sat with her elbows on her knees, hands buried in her face. Then she lowered her arms and sat in silence, watching the shadows of those passing between her tent and the campfires and listening for anyone approaching. Satisfied, she reached beneath her cot into the small canvas bag where she kept the few things she needed, or valued, in life, and drew out a small pad of brown parchment paper and a piece of lead that served as a pencil.
Without a light she held her face close while she made crude marks on the parchment, then silently mouthed what she had written. Satisfied, she folded it twice, replaced the pad and pencil in her bag, and slipped it back beneath her cot. Again she waited for a time, then stood and bent forward to walk out through the tent flap into the heat of the fires and boiling water and a muggy July night. She walked a different route on her way back to the kettles, and on the way she dropped the folded parchment beside a twelv
e-year-old girl, who covered it with her foot until Sookey disappeared. Quickly the girl bent to sweep it up, then stuffed it into her apron pocket. Five minutes later she was at the edge of the clearing, where she paused, looked about for a moment, then thrust the paper beneath a rock near a scrub oak tree and walked casually on. Within minutes a seventeen-year-old boy plucked the paper from beneath the rock and disappeared in the darkness. At two o’clock in the morning, with the oarlocks wrapped in burlap to silence the oars, a rowboat silently pushed off from Staten Island, moving west toward the New Jersey coast on a moonless night. At eight o’clock in the morning a picket at the Middlebrook camp of the Continental Army raised his musket as he watched a rider come in at a gallop. Ten minutes later General George Washington unfolded the small brown piece of parchment, laid it on the worktable in his quarters, and examined every mark.
“7–3. Two hundred wagons laundry—more coming. S.”
He read it once more, then a third time, mouthing the words to be certain there was nothing hidden, nothing he had missed.
In thoughtful silence he leaned back in his chair. General Howe is preparing to make his move. Will it be by land or by sea?
He drew a small brass saucer from the drawer of his workdesk, raised the chimney on his table lamp, touched the parchment to the flame, laid it on the saucer, and watched it burn to a small ash.
Notes
British General William Howe, his origins, military history, experience in America, attitudes toward Americans, and his personality characteristics are described. See Higginbotham, The War for American Independence, p. 68; Mackesy, The War for America, 1775–1783, pp. 74–78; Leckie, George Washington’s War, pp. 145–48.
The battle of Princeton was described in volume 3, To Decide Our Destiny, chapters XVI and XVII.
The tremendous British armada sent by King George III to subdue the rebellious colonies is described. See Mackesy, The War for America, 1775–1783, p. 82; Leckie, George Washington’s War, p. 258.
The Americans spent the winter of 1776–1777 at Morristown, New Jersey, as described in volume 3, To Decide Our Destiny, chapter XIX.
British General William Howe realized he could not draw General Washington into battle on open ground and that he dared not attack the Americans in the mountains. See Leckie, George Washington’s War, pp. 344–45.
Lord Germain, British secretary of state for the American Colonies, sent General John Burgoyne to Quebec, Canada, with eight thousand troops under orders to proceed south down the Hudson River to New York to cut the northern colonies, now states, from the southern colonies. See Mackesy, The War for America, 1775–1783, pp. 131–32; see also volume 4, The Hand of Providence, chapter III.
The British knew the French were shipping arms and supplies to the Americans in 1777. See Mackesy, The War for America, 1775–1783, p. 127.
The British also knew that if France entered the war on the side of the Americans, Spain would likely follow, and, further, they knew that Catherine the Great of Russia would not help the British. See Higginbotham, The War of American Independence, pp. 130, 226–38.
Over the winter of 1776–1777, General William Howe sent four different proposals to Lord Germain in London, each addressing the problems of subduing the Americans. Howe knew the only British solution to the American rebellion was to eliminate both General Washington and the Continental Army and, further, that General Washington also knew it and therefore would not be drawn into a battle that might bring those results. Howe concluded the British should abandon New Jersey and go directly after General Washington and destroy him and his army. Included in the plan was the taking of Philadelphia, which the British saw as the American capital city and therefore critical to the conquest of America. Howe proposed taking it by sea to avoid marching across New Jersey and exposing his army to American attack, and Lord Germain agreed. See Higginbotham, The War of American Independence, pp. 177–83; Leckie, George Washington’s War, pp. 344–45.
British Generals Stuart and Clinton violently disagreed with General Howe and openly said so. See Mackesy, The War for America, p. 123; Higginbotham, The War of American Independence, pp. 181–83.
General William Howe’s brother Admiral Lord Richard Howe was commander of the British fleet sent to America, and the brothers agreed to load the army onto two hundred sixty ships on July 9, 1777, and sail for the Delaware River with the first favorable winds. See Mackesy, The War for America, p. 125; Higginbotham, The War of American Independence, p. 183.
One of General Washington’s greatest spy networks was among washerwomen for the British army. Sookey is a fictional person; however, she is used to represent hundreds of such washerwomen who rendered invaluable espionage services to the Americans. See Flexner, Washington, The Indispensable Man, p. 119.
The road north from Middlebrook, New Jersey
Mid-July 1777
CHAPTER III
* * *
Caleb thrust the last small piece of dark brown bread into his mouth, followed by a soft, crumbling piece of white goat cheese and reached for his wooden canteen. He drank the tepid water, smacked the corncob stopper back into the spout, and leaned back against the trunk of the maple tree that was shading him and half a dozen other soldiers of Company Three, the Irish company of New York’s Ninth Regiment. He tipped his head to squint through the leaves that made a lacy network of the blue sky and the overhead ball of fire that pounded down on them. About one o’clock. Five more hours.
Sweat plastered his hair to his forehead and ran in small rivulets down his face. His shirt was stuck to his back where he had carried his bedroll. Huge mosquitoes and summer insects buzzed and clicked, swarming. He covered his face with his arms for protection and closed his eyes to let every muscle in his body go limp while he tried to think of nothing. He did not move nor open his eyes when the raspy, decidedly Irish growl of stocky, red-headed, red-bearded Sergeant Randolph O’Malley passed nearby.
“Awright, finish your eats. Five minutes. We march in five minutes. Stragglers get double picket duty. Five minutes!”
For one full minute Caleb did not stir. Then, with other silent, sweated men he walked the ten feet to a running brook and sank his canteen, swatting at the clouds of mosquitoes and flies that rose from the thick summer grasses and flowers and the water. He watched the bubbles cascade upward, then stop, and he jammed the stopper home before he splashed chill water on his head and face. Back at the base of the tree, he slung his bedroll on his back once more, hung his canteen about his neck, picked up his crude spear, and made his way back to the two faint wagon wheel ruts winding through the New Jersey wilderness.
He stood tall, searching for Sergeant O’Malley and the place where Company Three would take its place in the two-mile-long column. Caleb was the only soldier in the company who was armed with a handmade pine spear, and he carried it at his side. The spear marked him for what he had been two short weeks ago—a young innocent-come-lately filled with dreams of glorious soldiering. He had carried the spear proudly over his shoulder for one week before he understood that it drew silent, sarcastic smiles. He had begun carrying it low.
He picked out Sergeant O’Malley thirty yards north and worked his way forward, pushing through silent men who were focusing themselves on but one thing—survival through another five hours of marching in the worst sweltering heat of the summer. The morning march was vivid in every man’s mind. By ten o’clock all talk had ceased. By noon canteens had been drained to replace sweat that ran dripping. More than a hundred men had dropped from heat exhaustion, seven of them from the Ninth Regiment. One had died. Others plodded on with glazed eyes, muttering, out of their heads, held between the wagon tracks by those around them. The officers rode nervous, sweat-streaked, lathered horses that threw their heads constantly against the insects that swarmed about their eyes.
They had called a halt at noon and ordered every man into the shade to move as little as possible while they ate the hard, brown bread and cheese that had been rationed ou
t at the morning mess. The officers dismounted, unsaddled their horses, rubbed away the sweat and caked lather with burlap, and led them to the nearest stream to let them drink, slowly at first, then their fill.
As Caleb pushed through the milling soldiers toward O’Malley, he was startled by a voice to his left.
“Are you needin’ help with that spear?”
In the moment of hearing he recognized the heavy Irish brogue of Conlin Murphy. He did not stop. He turned his head only enough to see the sneer on the broad, bearded face and the smiles of the men who had heard it, then walked on with rage swelling in his chest. He reached to touch the pink line of tender skin that had knitted on his left cheek. It would leave a scar. He silently repeated what he had said to himself a hundred times since Murphy pounded him senseless two weeks before. It isn’t over, Murphy. It isn’t over.
He took his place in Third Company and waited while O’Malley walked up and down the line of march, waving and shouting his men into a semblance of rank and file. As he passed Caleb he paused for one moment to quietly ask, “Murphy givin’ you trouble?”
Caleb shook his head. “Murphy’s fine.”
“In a pig’s eye,” O’Malley muttered and moved on while Caleb waited for him to bawl out the order, “Foorrrrd, harch!”
At two o’clock the sun was at its zenith, hammering heat down like something tangible, and a halt was called. The men stumbled to a nearby stream to drink and refill their canteens before dropping to the ground to lie in the shade for half an hour, their precious rest plagued by the relentless hum and buzz of the ever-present cloud of insects. Then they were on their feet again to endure another mind-numbing march of four hours. Finally, at six o’clock the order came rolling down the column.