by Ron Carter
“Well, we got firewood.”
Billy lowered his face and shook his head as he grinned, and the man nearest him suddenly chuckled. The chuckles spread among the men, and despite being dirty, sick, and starving, the men rose from the frozen earth to gather wood. They built fires and huddled about them, waiting for orders that did not come. The sun reached its zenith, and the ragged army made one last hurried trip over the rise to the riverbank to gather quickly what baggage and supplies remained, then scrambled back over the rim to the safety of the woods beyond, with the sound of the Hessians shouting insults across the Delaware.
Their orders came shortly after two o’clock: remain where they were for the night. They would organize a camp tomorrow. They waited with bowed heads to hear something—anything—about food rations, but there was nothing. They stared silently into their fires for a long time before they rose to search through their knapsacks or their blankets one more time for anything they could eat. In fading light they erected an iron tripod over a fire and melted snow in a black pot. They added what little they had found in their knapsacks—half a cup of Indian cornmeal scraped off the bottom, dried peach pits, a crust of bread, a handful of dried peas, a forgotten corncob, a shriveled wild turnip, a chunk of rancid pork—and they boiled it and gathered around to ladel it out into wooden or pewter bowls and stand near the fire to try to choke it down while their noses dripped from the heat, and the ice in their beards and hair melted.
They had no tools to cut trenches in the frozen ground for a place to sleep, so they gathered brittle, snow-covered leaves from the woods and lay on their sides by the fires with their feet to the heat, and pulled the thin cover of leaves over themselves for what little protection it provided against the frost that would settle in the night.
Turlock sat on a log by the fire waiting while the others laid down for the night, shaking with the cold. A sickly quarter moon rose to hover above the black skyline, and silence settled over the camp, save for the sound of hardwood knots popping in the fires and of starving men trying to sleep on the frozen ground. From a distance came the haunting song of a wolf, and then another, and then they were silent.
Quietly Billy sat down beside him, palms stretched towards the fire, and for a time they both stared into the dancing flames and glowing embers in silence, each caught up in a strange, unexpected reverie of thoughts and memories that came at random, on their own terms. The flames dwindled and the charred wood crumbled to send a column of sparks towards the black dome overhead, and the two men laid fresh wood on top. They watched it begin to smoke, and then catch, and the flames climbed.
Staring into the ever-changing flames, Billy was suddenly in the square, austere, orderly parlor of his home in Boston, watching the fire in the big stone fireplace. Cooking pots hung on arms bolted to the sidewalls, and the rich, pungent aromas of ham and custard filled the room. He saw his mother’s face, round, plain, as it had ever been, filled with the pain of a husband lost at sea, and her selfless love for her children and her home. Trudy was there, beginning the magical change from a child to a woman, with her two new front teeth too large and her knees bigger than her legs.
And then his thoughts were with Matthew, tall, serious, with whom he had grown up sharing everything, the brother he never had. And Kathleen, who had loved Matthew for as long as Billy could remember, and whom Matthew loved with all his heart. He saw Brigitte, the everpresent tagalong younger sister of Matthew, spirited, outspoken, and his breathing slowed as he remembered leaving Boston with the regiment, when she had impulsively thrown her arms about him and held him with tears in her eyes. He allowed himself to recall the shocking realization that the child had become a woman—strong and beautiful. He released held breath as he remembered she had given her heart to a British captain, tall, striking, good, and he set his jaw as he remembered once again that he was stocky and plain. He pushed his thoughts back into their private chambers in his mind, to be brought out again at a quiet time and remembered with a gentle reverence.
The quiet words of Turlock brought him back to the frozen camp of starving, freezing men. “Home? Thinking of home?”
Billy nodded.
“Where?”
“Boston.”
“Family?”
“Mother. Sister.” He paused for a moment. “You?”
Turlock shook his head. “No home.”
Billy turned his head to look, and the firelight showed yellow in Turlock’s small, craggy face, and lighted his dark, gray-streaked beard. “No family?”
Again Turlock shook his head.
“Where are you from?”
Turlock drew and released a great breath and vapor rose into the darkness. It was as though he needed to tell a story that had been too long locked up inside. He kept his face forward, towards the fire.
“Somewhere up near Falmouth. I don’t know, exactly. My mother died birthing me. No one ever told me about my father—who he was. The midwife kept me for a few months and then gave me away. The new family put me in an orphanage. When I was nine, they gave me to a sea captain. I was on the sea with him for a time but he was mean—only wanted me for a free cabin boy. His name was Ulysses Edwards. I ran away to join the British army. I learned cannon and muskets, and fought the French and Indians. I was there when Fort Duquesne fell, and General Braddock was killed. General Washington—he was Braddock’s aide-de-camp then—was right there at his side. I remember Washington tried to save him but couldn’t. He buried him in the middle of the road and made us all march over the grave so the Indians couldn’t find the body and cut it. I remember that.”
He wiped at his dripping nose with a grimy sleeve.
“No schooling or money—no chance to be an officer. I stayed with the army until I seen the British meant to hold the colonies down, and then I quit them and joined the militia to fight them. I was there the night we threw the tea in Boston harbor—three hundred forty-two chests of it.”
Billy sat unmoving, startled, caught up in the poignant story.
“I heard about General Washington, and I came to Boston to join with him.” Turlock paused for a time, staring, lost in his memories.
Billy waited, then spoke. “Married?”
For a moment a faraway expression stole into his eyes, and Billy saw his pain. “Who’d want me?”
“Couldn’t you find any of your family? Your mother’s people?”
He shook his head. “Her name was Angela. That’s all I ever knew. I spent some time looking. I finally took the name Turlock because I heard there was a priest by that name who was kind.” Again he shook his head. “All the family I ever knew was the army.”
Billy remained silent for a minute before he asked, “You were captured on Long Island?”
“When the British flanked us and our boys ran for the swamp I tried to get ahead and turn them, but I couldn’t. The Hessians took me.”
“But you escaped.”
For a full minute Turlock did not speak. Billy saw the sick look in his eyes, and waited.
“They put me on a prison ship off Long Island. I never seen nothing like it. We was kept below decks. The smell of dead and rotting bodies …” His voice trailed off and he did not finish the sentence. “Every morning they dumped ten, twenty bodies overboard and took on ten, twenty new prisoners. I lost fifteen pounds in a week and I was dying. I told them I was a gunnery sergeant and I could be useful helping train their troops to the cannon and musket. They sent me to a Hessian regiment that didn’t know nothing about cannon. I taught ‘em for a few days, while I watched for a chance to sneak out at night, but none came. I realized they’d send me away if they believed I was crazy, so I convinced ‘em.”
“Convinced them you were crazy? How?”
A wry smile crept over the leathery face. “Ate dirt. Grass. Talked to bushes. Hugged a tree. Sang hymns all night.” He chuckled for a moment. “The morning I hooked up two oxen to a cannon backwards, they’d had enough. They turned me out of camp and said don’t come ba
ck. I came here.”
Billy couldn’t surpress a grin. “You hugged a tree?”
Turlock nodded his head. “Right in front of a colonel. Scared him.”
They looked at each other, and laughed in the frozen silence. It passed and they settled down again.
“You’ve served your time in the army. Why did you come back?”
For a long time Turlock stared into the fire. “A feeling. I can’t hardly explain it, even to myself. A feeling like there’s something holy about this war. Like religion. Like it would be a sin if I didn’t.” He turned his eyes to Billy, and Billy saw the deep need for understanding, affirmation. “You understand?”
Billy spoke quietly. “I do. That feeling’s what’s holding me here.”
In that moment something happened between the two men—one old and battered, wizened by his hard world, the other young and inexperienced in his sheltered world. Neither tried to put it to words because they could not, and they both turned their faces back to the fire and peered at the flames.
Turlock broke the silence. “Coming here I heard about the retreat across New Jersey.”
Billy slowly shook his head while a haunted look stole into his eyes. “I never knew such a thing could happen. The pain …”
Turlock murmured. “I figured this is where I belonged.”
Billy remained silent, staring into the flames as the images of starving men eating from the pig troughs of the farms they passed danced before his eyes, and of men using their belt knives to cut off toes that were frozen black and putrid.
Turlock continued. “When I was coming here I heard some things. Congress sent Ben Franklin to France a while back. You heard about it?”
Billy shook his head.
“They figured we need help, and France is our only chance, and that Franklin’s our last hope for getting it.”
“I thought France surrendered to England a long time ago.”
“In ‘63, but she’s never got over it. If she could find a way to sting the British, she would.”
He pursed his mouth for a time in deep thought. “I wonder if Franklin really went over there. And if he did, I wonder what’s happening. Do you suppose he can persuade the king to get into this war on our side?”
Notes
One of the more accepted authorities on the Trenton campaign is Richard M. Ketchum, whose book The Winter Soldiers provides the foundation for the factual support for most of this volume.
As the Continental army approached Trenton, New Jersey, General Washington returned with a command of men to meet General Sterling at Princeton, but upon hearing Sterling’s report of a British advance, Washington began a controlled retreat back to Trenton, tearing up the bridges to slow the British (see Ketchum, The Winter Soldiers, p. 201).
The Americans began crossing the Delaware River late December 7, 1776, continued through the night, and finished early in the morning of December 8, 1776. They had scarcely finished when the British appeared on the New Jersey side of the river and began shelling the Americans with cannon. On December 14, 1776, General William Howe declared the British campaign for 1776 concluded, and left for winter quarters in New York City (see Ketchum, The Winter Soldiers, pp. 202-3).
Charles Willson Peale, a famous artist of the Revolution, visited the American camp at that time. He passed his brother, who was seated on a log, sick, half-naked, and emaciated beyond recognition. It was only after James called his name that he looked directly at him and recognized him. Charles recorded the condition of the American army at that time as “the most hellish scene I ever beheld” (as quoted in Ketchum, The Winter Soldiers, p. 204).
The inhuman conditions on the British prison ship, as described here in the novel by Sergeant Alvin Turlock, are accurate (see Leckie, George Washington’s War, pp. 182-83).
The road from Aunoy to Nantes, France
December 10, 1776
CHAPTER II
Vapor trailed from their flared nostrils, and steam rolled from the hides of the two old brown horses as they threw weary legs and listened to the rumble of the ancient coach behind. For four hours the driver had pushed them on, alternating from a walk to trot, then an easy lope, then a walk, pacing them, saving them so they would not break down in the middle of the oncoming night. The dirt road was rutted and pitted from the fall rains and early December snow. The old coach had been built fifty years earlier, sturdy but with no springs. The passenger van was slung to the frame on great leather straps that kept it swaying constantly but did little to soften the unending shocks that wrenched the coach and shook the silent passengers inside.
Before boarding the battered old coach in the small French coastal fishing village of Aunoy, the driver had shoveled hot, glowing coals from the tavern stove into a metal box and two men had set it on the floor inside the van. With an old, frayed wool blanket over their legs to hold the heat, the passengers had kept their feet warm as they made their way towards the town of Nantes, to the southeast, until the coals cooled. They kept the blanket over their legs and feet to hold in what little warmth remained, and clasped their hands in their laps away from the biting cold. The sun had settled behind the flat coastal skyline, and the world was slipping into a stark, frigid, wintry twilight. The mud in the road was firming, and spidery veins of ice were forming in the puddles and on the ponds near the road as the coach moved on, creaking and complaining.
Inside, Benjamin Franklin bit off a groan and shifted his weight to relieve the pressure on his back and legs. He glanced across the gap between the facing seats at his two grandsons, William Temple Franklin, nearly seventeen, seated opposite him, and seven-year-old Benjamin Franklin Bache, next to William. Both stoically bore the biting cold and the lurching jolts in determined silence.
Forty-four days earlier, on October 27, 1776, the three of them had boarded the light, sixteen-gun American sloop Reprisal at Marcus Hook in Pennsylvania, commanded by Captain Lambert Wickes. The ship was loaded with indigo, to be sold in Europe at as high a price as possible. Two days later, October 29, they cleared Cape May and set a course north and east into the teeth of the deadly winter storms of the North Atlantic, and it was then Captain Wickes opened and read his sealed orders from Congress. His jaw dropped as he realized for the first time that perhaps his cargo, and his mission, were other than indigo and the markets in Europe.
“The Honourable Doctor Franklin being appointed by Congress one of their Commissioners for negotiating some publick business at the court of France, you are to receive him and his suite on board the Reprisal, as passengers, whom it is your duty and we dare say it will be your inclination, to treat with the greatest respect and attention, and your best endeavours will not be wanting to make their time on board the ship perfectly agreeable.”
The balance of his orders were firm and blunt. If he were pursued by any ships, he was to escape if at all possible. Fight only if it were absolutely unavoidable.
What Captain Wickes had not been told was that the appointment under which Congress was sending Franklin to France was not as a simple commissioner conducting some unnamed public business with the French. The truth was that one year earlier a terrified Congress had suddenly faced the monstrous absurdity of the notion the American colonies could meet and beat the most powerful nation on the face of the earth in an all-out war, without help. The few American foundries and factories could never build the cannon or manufacture the gunpowder sufficient to wage such a war, and without them their cause was lost absolutely. In desperation Congress had flailed about for some way to get the help they must have to survive.
France! The French were still seething inwardly from their humiliating defeat in 1763 by England in the Seven Years’ War. Would the deep need for revenge and redemption drive France to hurt the British by helping the Americans? And if they could be persuaded to help the Americans, how was it to be done? Open for the world to see, or clandestine, hidden? And who had the stature and the skills to go to France and make such arrangements.
&nbs
p; Quickly Congress formed the Secret Committee of Congress and appointed Thomas Willing as chairman, with Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Lynch of South Carolina, and Benjamin Harrison of Virginia as members. Then, in short order, Congress formed a second committee, the Committee of Secret Correspondence, to which committee they appointed Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Johnson, John Dickinson, John Hay, and Benjamin Harrison. No one save a few members of Congress, and the men appointed to the committees knew of the committee’s existence, or their mission, which was to make whatever deals were required, on whatever terms they could, to get the munitions and supplies upon which the American Revolution, so bravely begun and now so desperately in need, depended.
The Secret Committee contacted Arthur Lee, an American businessman of longtime standing in London and requested he make it his business to learn secretly the attitude of the British towards the French. At the same time they sent Congressman Silas Deane of Connecticut to France to gauge covertly the possibility of making undercover deals to get the war supplies from the French.
By early October of 1776, with General George Washington and the Continental army reeling from the catastrophic beatings they had sustained at the hands of General Howe’s forces in and around New York, Congress understood one thing. Help had to come soon or the Revolution was doomed. In their darkest hour they turned to the single man in the entire American population whose years of experience among the hierarchy in England had established him as a worldrecognized figure, blessed with native intelligence and uncanny wisdom that uniquely qualified him to meet as an equal the political manipulators and career assassins of the courts of the kings in Europe.