Prelude to Glory, Vol. 2

by Ron Carter

  The talk subsided and Turlock continued. “Most cannon are the same, so if you can handle one, you can handle any of them. This one is mounted on a field carriage, which means that men, not horses, move it, by hand.”

  He paused to wipe sweat from his eyes.

  “Now, listen close. I’ll explain loading and firing from start to end, ten steps, one step at a time. When I finish, you will do it. You miss something, you could kill yourself or someone else.”

  He waited until no one was moving and all eyes were watching, and then began pointing.

  “This is the muzzle, where everything goes in and everything comes out.

  “First step. This is a budge barrel.” He pointed to a barrel beside the cannon wheel, inside which was an open cloth sack with drawstrings to close it. “Inside the sack is gunpowder.

  “Second. This is a powder ladle.” He held up a heavy oak stick eight feet long with a large, open-faced scoop attached to one end. “You measure it level full of powder from the budge barrel and shove it down the cannon muzzle, like this. When you feel it hit bottom you back it up about three inches, then rotate the ladle to dump the load, back it up a little more, and shake it to be sure it’s empty.

  “Third. This is dried grass.” He pointed to a stack of brittle dried sea grass. “Sometimes we use hay or straw, but dried grass will do. So will tow, just like the hemp or flax tow your women use to spin thread.

  “Fourth. This is a rammer.” He held up a second oak stick eight feet long, on the end of which was a heavy round block of wood. “You run the rammer down the muzzle and jam it against the powder to make sure it’s packed tight, like this.

  “Fifth. You take some of this dried grass, and you shove it in the muzzle, and then you push it on down with the rammer, against the powder, and pack it tight to be sure the powder stays in place.

  “Sixth. This is a solid-shot six-pound cannonball. You put a little grass or straw or tow around it to make it fit snug, and you shove it in the muzzle and ram it down with the rammer.

  “Seventh. This is the touchhole, and this is the priming flask. The priming flask is just like your powder horn. The touchhole leads to the powder you shoved down the muzzle, so you shake a little powder from the priming flask into the touchhole and leave some on top. You can do the same thing with your powder horn.

  “Eighth.” He held up a three-foot stick of wood with a small iron arm attached to the top. A cord was wound around the handle and held on the iron cross arm by a setscrew. “This is a linstock. The cord is cotton, soaked with saltpeter and lead acetate and lye to make it burn slow, maybe five inches an hour. It’s burning right now.”

  He paused and took a deep breath. “This cannon is ready to be fired, and I’m going to fire it into the face of the breastwork over there. Get behind the muzzle, because the powder blast goes sideways as well as out. And cover your ears.”

  He waited until the company was behind the muzzle, blew on the smouldering end of the cord attached to the linstock until it was glowing red, then lowered it to the touchhole. A tiny white cloud erupted as the powder caught, and an instant later the cannon bucked and roared. White smoke leaped two feet out the touchhole and fifteen feet out the muzzle and formed a huge cloud, while dirt flew on the mound forty feet away.

  Turlock waited until the shock had settled, then spoke once more.

  “Ninth. This is a wormer.” He held up another eight-foot heavy oak pole with a large corkscrew on the end. “After the shot, you drive this down the gun barrel to clean out all the grass and tow and anything else that’s still inside.

  “Tenth. And you better listen to this one.” He held up another eight-foot heavy oak pole with a large sponge attached to one end. “This is a sponge. That bucket beneath the cannon is full of water and a little vinegar. You soak the sponge in the bucket and you ram it wet all the way down the barrel, and you twist it. This kills any smouldering powder grains still inside the barrel.” He soaked the sponge and rammed it down the barrel, twisted it, withdrew it.

  He paused for a moment and stared his men down until he had full attention, and he held the sponge high. “If you don’t use the wet sponge, any powder that is left burning in the barrel will set off the powder in the ladle when you shove it in for the next shot, and that usually means we got one of two things. A one-armed cannoneer or a dead one.”

  He waited until he saw understanding grow in the eyes of his company before he lowered the sponge and leaned it against the cannon with the other equipment, and picked up a long, thin, tapered brass nail.

  “This is a spike. If you have to abandon a cannon and the enemy is going to get it, you drive this in the touchhole with a musket butt, or a rock, or anything you can pound with. It goes clear through the chamber inside, hits the far wall, and bends back and makes a hook. That way it can’t be pried out. It has to be cut out, and that usually can’t be done in a hurry. That’s what we mean when we say ‘spike a cannon.’ If you haven’t got a spike, you can shove a cannonball down the barrel and a couple of wood wedges to lock it in, and they usually have to burn the wood wedges out to unplug the cannon. Or you can jam a couple of bayonets down the sides of a cannonball and lock it in. There are lots of ways to spike a cannon.”

  He held up the last eight-foot oak pole, which had four metal prongs on the end, spread, pointed. “This is a searcher. If something gets plugged in the barrel, you can feel around with this and try to work it out.”

  He set it down and picked up an L-shaped piece of brass with calibrations on both legs of it. “This is a sighting quadrant. You put the long leg of it inside the cannon barrel, short leg outside pointed down, and set the elevation according to marks on the curved piece that connects the two legs. If the cannon’s level, it will tell you the angle to set the barrel to shoot measured distances. But over five hundred yards, you’re pretty much left to guess, and that’s called ‘random shooting.’ ”

  He paused to gather his thoughts. “We used a solid-shot cannonball just now, but there’re all kinds. Chain shot, cannister, grape, bar, jointed-bar, incendiary, bomb. If you run out of shot, load ’er up with rocks or glass, nails, knives, forks, spoons—just about anything you can get down the barrel—and let ’er go.”

  He once again wiped at the sweat on his forehead, and the men moved and murmured for a moment before they all settled down.

  “Sometimes you’ll have cloth or paper pouches of measured gunpowder. If you do, ram them down the barrel, and then use a spike through the touchhole to punch through the paper or cloth so the spark can get to the power inside.”

  He stopped to gather his thoughts. “All right,” he said. “When I point, you call out the name.”

  He pointed.

  “Rammer,” came the call.

  He pointed.

  “Wormer.”

  He continued, one item at a time, again and again, until the company went through it without error.

  “All right, now two of you are going to load and fire, and you’re going to count all ten steps, in order. If you make a mistake the company is going to tell you about it.” He turned to Billy. “Corporal, you first. Pick a man and do it.”

  Billy nodded to Eli and they stepped to the cannon together and, calling out each numbered step, methodically loaded and fired, then rammed the wormer down the barrel, followed by the wet sponge, and moved back into the company. No one had called out a mistake.

  Turlock nodded stern approval and pointed at the next two men. Slowly he worked through the entire company, two at a time, with men calling out the errors as they went. Four teams forgot to use the sponge, and Turlock was blasphemous in his instant correction. With the sun casting long shadows eastward, he stepped back to the cannon and raised his voice. “Now go dig all the cannonballs out of the dirt and stack them back here. We do it all again tomorrow afternoon, and then General Washington has ordered us to spend some time with muskets and rifles. We’re through for the day. Dismissed for supper.”

  Company Nine
turned, and to a man, each looked into the haze southwest towards Staten Island before they walked north to their blankets, each working pensively with his own thoughts. Five days ago, another 130 British ships arrived, and they all unloaded troops and guns and supplies on Staten Island. Not a shot fired—welcomed like heroes—now over two hundred British ships down there—how many men, how many guns can two hundred ships bring? Who’s in command? And each man hesitantly asked himself the two questions that rode them heavy every minute, every second, of the day and night. When do they attack? Where?

  Eli fell into step beside Billy and glanced east and west. As far as the eye could see in both directions, massive breastworks of timber and rock and earth had been formed on the high ground and trenches dug in front of them. Their orders had been terse, ominous. Build these lines to withstand heavy British attack. They must not fail.

  They worked their way north, past the breastworks, to the campground where the Boston regimental flag hung limp in the dead air, bright in the setting sun, and sat down on their blankets to wait for supper call. Billy gestured west towards the camp hospital, hastily built of logs with mud and grass chinking. Inside, men sick with dysentery and fever lay everywhere a man could be bedded, and they spilled out into five great tents pegged down close to the hospital.

  “Company Nine has five men over there,” Billy said. “I’ll have to go check on them later.”

  “Ague and dysentery.” Eli shook his head. “Bad.”

  Billy’s eyes dropped. “Buried twenty-six more yesterday. Doctors don’t know how to stop it.”

  Eli pulled a long stem of grass and worked on the white root with his teeth. “Inside the hospital, you can smell it. Death.” He shuddered.

  They dug their plates and utensils from their knapsacks and settled back to wait.

  Billy looked south. “I wonder how many more British ships will come before they start the battle.”

  Eli shrugged. “How many troops are down there now? How many cannon?”

  There was no answer.

  Then Billy said, “I’ve been asking around about your sister. A man came to me yesterday. Asked if there was a reward. I told him maybe, if he could describe her. He said she had dark eyes and dark hair. I sent him away.”

  Eli dropped his eyes for a moment, and Billy saw the wistful, needful look cross his face. “I’ve had that happen before,” was all he said.

  “Come get it.” The call from the company cook brought them to their feet, and they walked to the cook fires and the iron tripods and the black, smoking kettles and stood in line for their share of stringy boiled pork from a dry sow that had been bartered from a nearby farmer that morning, a boiled potato smothered with lumpy gravy made from pork drippings and ground corn flour, coffee reheated from the noon meal, and hardtack from which they had to flick off the small worms. The gravy was salted heavily to replace the salt sweated out of their bodies since morning.

  At the end of the line two men stood at two woven baskets and put a fresh peach on each plate and watched the eyes of the troops widen in amazed question as to how someone had bartered or stolen fresh peaches. The fruit had the pink blush that comes before full ripeness, mixed with green and yellow, and they had not yet begun to soften into full sugar. But they were peaches, and each man took his gratefully and thrust it into his pocket to be saved and eaten slowly after the meal was finished, the utensils had been washed, and late dusk had settled, and he had time to savor the small reminder of home and gentler times.

  Billy and Eli ate in silence, drank long from their canteens against the thirst from the salty gravy, then walked back to the two great kettles filled with steaming water, one with strong lye soap, the other for rinse. They dipped their utensils, swabbed them with a two-foot wooden stick with burlap tied around one end, dipped again in the rinse water, and walked back to their blankets, fingering their hot plates until they cooled and dried. They buried them in their packs and settled back onto their blankets.

  With shadows lengthening in the golden afterglow of a sun already set, Billy scraped together twigs and cut shavings and struck tinder to steel. He nursed the tiny spark and blew gently until it smouldered and then burst into a pinpoint of flame, and he worked it until a small campfire glowed in the early dusk. He dug to the bottom of his knapsack where he kept the brown packet, and slipped the worn letter from within. With a sense of tenderness he unfolded it and once more read the lines that he could now recite from memory.

  Dear friend Billy:

  I take pen in hand to tell you of strange occurrences . . .

  He was reaching to touch the delicate handwriting when the high voice of Sergeant Turlock came calling in the dark. “Weems! Corporal Weems.”

  Billy and Eli both raised their heads, and Billy answered, “Here!”

  A moment later Turlock hunkered down beside Billy, firelight making shadows on his small, craggy face. Eli silently sat on his blanket, listening.

  “Weems, we got special orders from General Greene tonight. The regiment’s to be on the parade ground at nine o’clock in the morning. Spread the word.”

  “What’s happening?”

  “Don’t know. Says they want to read something to us.”

  “I’ll spread the word.”

  “Is Stroud around?”

  “Right behind you.”

  Turlock turned, surprised. “Stroud, Colonel Thompson sends this to you.” He handed him a sealed paper.

  Eli’s eyes opened wide in the firelight. “What is it?”

  Turlock shrugged. “He didn’t say. I was told to deliver it.”

  Eli took it and waited.

  Turlock stood and turned back to Billy. “That’s all for now. Spread the word about tomorrow morning.” He bobbed his head once and turned and was gone, working his way back through the small campfires.

  Eli broke the seal on the paper, opened it, turned it towards the firelight, and silently read.

  July 8th, A.D. 1776.

  Pvt. Eli Stroud.

  I need to know immediately if Indians have been, or are, scouting Long Island south of us, and if so, to what extent. Go there tonight to make that determination if possible. I leave the means and the details to you. Tell no one. Go alone. Avoid detection. Report to me directly upon your return, regardless of time. Present these orders to Captain Reynolds, and he will give you entrance to my quarters.

  I am, &c.

  Col. Israel Thompson

  Eli rounded his lips and blew air.

  Billy studied him for a moment, silently waiting.

  “Looks like I’ll be gone for a while,” Eli said quietly.

  “Now? Tonight?”

  Eli nodded.

  “Scout?”

  Eli handed Billy the letter and Billy read it.

  “It says you were supposed to share this with no one.”

  Eli shrugged. “You’re no one.”

  Billy grinned in the darkness.

  Eli said, “Watch the rifle.”

  “Be careful.”

  “Of which side? ours or theirs? I’m more likely to get shot by one of our nervous pickets than one of their scouts.”

  Eli tucked the small tin box holding his flint, steel, and tinder inside his shirt and stood. Billy folded the written orders and handed them up to him, and Eli folded them once more and slipped the paper inside the shirt with the tinderbox. He took a drink from his canteen, shoved the wooden stopper back in with the palm of his hand, and dropped the canteen on his blanket beside his rifle. He casually walked away, through the dwindling campfires, south towards the latrines on the downhill side of camp. Twenty minutes later he was five hundred yards south of the latrines, studying the distant campfires of the British patrols. No picket or patrol or scout had seen him or challenged.

  He turned due west towards the East River, silently, rapidly working his way through the brush and growth. A waxing quarter moon rose above the New Jersey shore before he reached the rocky, sandy strip of shoreline of the river and turned d
ue south once again, working through the sea grass and weeds that bordered the shoreline to avoid leaving a telltale moccasin print that would tell sharp Indian eyes he had passed. He paused every hundred yards and dropped to his haunches to watch and listen for any sound, any movement that was not natural to the night. The only sounds were the incessant song of the frogs and the murmur of the incoming tide against the rocks on the riverbank, mingled with the grating chirp of crickets and the hum of night insects, while night birds wheeled and darted in the faint moonlight.

  He worked steadily southwest along the shoreline, and the campfires on the two ridges behind grew dim while those across the bay, on Staten Island, grew brighter. He paused at the Narrows, where the channel between the two islands was smallest, and for long minutes studied the lights on the ships and the campfires beyond, and his eyes narrowed in disbelief.

  As far as he could see in both directions the lights on ships showed dozens of squadrons in order at anchor, while on shore it seemed there was no end to the campfires, laid out in straight rows, square upon square, regiment by regiment.

  He continued south past Gravesend Bay, where the shoreline turned due east, and then angled slightly northward past Flatbush and Flatlands, and Bedford further inland. The moon was high when he stopped in his tracks. He closed his eyes and gently tested the incoming ocean breeze, and it was there—the unmistakable hint of tobacco smoke.

  He dropped to his haunches, faced the Atlantic, and waited and watched, but there was nothing. No faint glow of a pipe, no murmur of human voice, no sound of oars in oarlocks.

  They’ve put a scouting party ashore and they’re waiting out there in a boat.

  He slipped his tomahawk from his belt and moved silently backwards into the undergrowth and sat down.

  I came in from the west and they weren’t there. That leaves north or east. I wait.

  Minutes became half an hour, then an hour, and Eli moved his legs to relieve cramped muscles, then settled again to listen to the sounds of the night. The moon reached its apex and began its journey back to the New Jersey coast, and still Eli waited, and then the sound came, a single whisper of brush on buckskin. Eli opened his mouth to breathe silently, and lowered his face to prevent the moonlight from reflecting off the flat planes of his forehead and cheeks. The sound came again, and Eli remained invis-ible and silent and waited while it passed in front of him and continued for the span of five breaths, then stopped, and the muted call of an owl came floating.