by David Potter
“We’ll tire the horses,” Bev says. “It should only be one rider at time. We can take turns.”
Daniel concurs, and so does Brandon.
I don’t. Seeing as how I don’t know how to ride a horse, what it would mean for me is all walk, no ride.
I get outvoted. Three to one, with one abstention—Elizabeth. She says she’ll walk, and won’t ride alone. I think she can. I don’t think she wants to. Maybe she doesn’t think it proper for a twelve-year-old girl to ride a horse alone, but Bev, of course, doesn’t care what anyone thinks—she’s riding.
So the next four and a half hours are only the worst time of my entire life. What makes it doubly worse is that Elizabeth walks besides me the entire time and doesn’t complain at all.
Bev and Brandon and Daniel work out a rotation system, so two ride while one walks. When they walk with us they’re way more cheerful than me, which doesn’t help either.
At least I have sneakers. And socks. I think of that soldier I saw in MacDougall’s New York Regiment who had nothing but rags wrapped twice around, with his black toes sticking out.
We can’t just hunker down and endure the cold, the sleet, the snow, and the gale-force winds as best we can—no, we have to be on one hundred percent full alert. Which means keeping our heads up, our eyes wide, and our ears open.
Kramm could be anywhere. In a tree. Behind a bush or a shed. He would just need to step out, line up Washington, and fire.
But we see no sign of him, and the farther we go, the more I think: not here. Not on this road. It will happen someplace else.
Do you know how long four and a half hours is? Along a crummy road in the dead of night in the middle of winter during a raging storm?
I bet you do not. And let me ask you this: when’s the last time anyone you know walked from Pennington, New Jersey, to Trenton, New Jersey? It’s nine miles.
No one walks that far any more, just to get from point A to point B. No one.
And these guys—our fellow winter patriots—have walked all the way from New York.
Washington rides, all the officers ride, but the men?
The men walk.
One lousy foot in front of the other.
With or without shoes.
And after the first or the second or the third hour I feel myself beginning to falter. I don’t know how much longer I can hold up before I drop to the ground and let the entire Continental Army walk right over me.
But I don’t. Elizabeth keeps me going, and so does Bev when it’s her turn to walk. They don’t give me encouragement, exactly—but the thought of pitching face-first into the snow in front of either one of them is just enough motivation to keep me going.
At some point it goes from being pitch-black to being not pitch-black to being somewhat not dark to being somewhat not too dark at all. If my brain were working properly, I’d recognize it as the dawn of a new day.
I can see stuff like trees, the road we’re on, the soldiers, the sky.
The wind is still blowing, but a little less crazily, and the snow has stopped falling.
Then our parade is halted.
“My brave fellows,” I hear someone say, and recognize the voice: General George Washington, commander in chief of the Continental Army of these United States.
“My brave fellows,” General Washington says. And then he points his ungloved hand at a small sentry house down below.
Captain Hamilton and another officer ride stealthily down the hill, silently dismount from their horses, and draw their swords.
What happens next is a blur, a blur of blurs. We hear shouts and a scattering of chairs and tables. Then from the back of the house Hessians start running out, screaming at the top their lungs: “Der Fiend! Der Fiend! Heraus! Heraus!” Which means, “The enemy! The enemy! Out! Out!”
General Washington has heard enough. “Forward, men!” he yells. “Attack!”
SEVENTY-TWO
AND THUS THE BATTLE OF TRENTON, whether or not I personally happen to be ready for it—which I’m not—begins.
Below us is the village of Trenton—not much more than a bunch of small wood houses—and at the beginning we don’t see any Hessians. General Greene gets the men lined up, and General Knox, who commands the artillery, gets the cannons in place. General Washington sits atop his white steed, and if he’s happy about how things are working out, he doesn’t show it.
It’s about eight o’clock in the morning. The Hessians are inside; whether they’re sleeping one off or eating ham and eggs, it doesn’t matter—they are not outside. They are not armed, ready, and deployed.
Rejoining us from River Road are General Sullivan’s men. They line up on the high ground they’re holding, though it’s not as high as ours. You might not notice General Sullivan’s men—if you’re a Hessian, that is. You might stumble out, look up, and see, dead ahead, men and cannons. You’d be worried about that, all right, but at least you could see where the danger was.
And while you were looking straight ahead, you might just get cut to pieces by Sullivan’s men to your left.
Which is exactly how it plays out.
General Washington nods, General Knox yells fire, and the cannons blow. Clouds of smoke pour from the cannons after each shot.
The noise alerts the Hessians, who come running into the street, armed, half-dressed, screaming, and mad.
We shoot at them from up top, and as they make their way forward, General Sullivan’s men mow ’em down from the side.
It’s a deadly crossfire. Smoke from the cannons and the muskets and rifles starts to obscure the battlefield, but we can see Hessians getting killed right in front of us, blood spattering. The Hessians aren’t panicking, exactly, but they aren’t counterattacking either. Their officers are yelling at them, trying to set up formations, but we’ve brought too much to bear. And General Knox keeps the cannons firing away.
Brandon and Daniel have joined in. Somehow they found a musket, and since Daniel knows how to load and fire the thing, they take turns. At this point, no one’s shooting back.
Elizabeth and Bev have attached themselves to Captain Hamilton’s cannon brigade and are passing cannonballs up the line.
I attach myself to a regiment of Virginians, and one of the soldiers thrusts a musket at me. “This one’s too wet to fire,” he says. “But the blade be true, boy, the blade be true!”
Then General Washington starts shouting above the din, “To the orchard, boys! To the orchard!” He jerks his head to the left. “I need men to follow me to the orchard!”
Every man in the Virginia regiment turns at once and starts running to the left.
Then we hear our general yell: “Charge, boys, charge with everything you’ve got!”
SEVENTY-THREE
SOME OF THE HESSIANS are now firing back. And in the orchard, which is about fifty yards to our left, they’re even trying to set up cannons of their own. Three officers on horseback are shouting at the men in German. “Macht schnell, macht schnell!” I hear, which means “Hurry it up!”
But General Washington isn’t going to give them a second. He rides over to the orchard, where we still have the high ground, and orders us to charge.
Not fire.
Charge.
Meaning, with our bayonets. With a great roar, we charge. Of course, I’m in the very last row. I’m not saying I’m afraid or anything. I just think the real soldiers ought to go first, you know?
There’s maybe two hundred, three hundred of us, and we swarm down the high ground and into the Hessians. We charge, screaming like banshees, our muskets thrusting before us, and then something very remarkable happens.
Half the Hessians break ranks and run.
One of their officers, the one who seems to be in command, starts screaming at them, but then he gets shot in the stomach himself, probably by one of our sharpshooting riflemen, who love to pick off officers. The guy lets out a great ooooof and slumps on his horse. Two of his comrades rush to help him, but all the ot
hers keep running away.
The Virginians track down the fleeing Hessians, and use the bayonets as they were designed. It isn’t pretty. The Hessians scream as cold steel is rammed through them.
Then General Washington, who is wading into the fray himself, has his horse, his great white steed, shot out from under him. He hardly skips a beat, though—his horse goes down, but he barely touches ground before he finds another horse and gets right on it. General Washington shouts orders, there is massive confusion, fireworks, cannon booms, musket shots, screams, Hessian officers yelling and Hessian soldiers running, and I am about one-half absolutely terrified and one-half desperate to find a Hessian myself. I think a cannonball from one of General Knox’s artillery pieces whizzes by a few inches above our heads—something does, that’s for sure—and then I see, out of the corner of my eye, something truly awful: a severed left arm. With a sword still in its fingers.
And then, nearly as fast as it started, it comes to an end.
The Hessian officer who had been shot in the stomach turns out to be their leader, a Colonel Johann Rall. Who is going to die, I know, in about two hours. I know this because I’ve read the history books; everyone else knows it from the looks of the man’s pale, bloodless face. He’s helped off his horse by two of his comrades and carried away.
The remaining Hessians wave white flags, General Washington holds up his hand, and just like that, all fighting ceases.
Smoke from the cannons and muskets drifts away, and the streets of Trenton are strewn now with rubble and bodies.
Brandon can’t quite process this development. “Is that it?” Brandon asks. “It’s over already?” His eyes are bulging, buggy. He’s got the musket in his hands, bayonet attached—I think he was getting ready to charge himself.
“It’s over, Brandon,” I say. “We won.”
“We won?”
“Of course we won. The Battle of Trenton, the Revolutionary War? Yes, Brandon. We wind up winning.”
“I know that, dude. But, it only took like what—a half hour? Forty-five minutes?”
“Sometimes that’s all it does take.”
Brandon sighs and closes his eyes. “Man,” he says. “I thought for sure I was going to be shot right in the head. It was really scary. I kept thinking, Am I going to get it now? Or now? Or now?”
I nod at his bayonet, which only has snow on it. “So I guess you didn’t have to use it,” I say.
“No,” he says. “But I was ready to.”
“For a cause,” I say. “Freedom.”
“If you say so,” says Brandon. He glances over the battlefield, where the injured Hessians are being helped by their brethren. “What was their cause?”
“I don’t think they have one,” I say. “They’re professional soldiers, and go where they’re sent. Look where it got ’em.”
Brandon nods. “I just thought I’d be a little—you know—happier. Now that it’s over.”
“I’m happy,” Daniel says, who’s come to join us. “They’re invaders. They don’t belong in our country. I’ll be even happier when we rid ourselves of all of them, Hessians and British.”
Brandon puts his hand on Daniel’s shoulder. “That’s your fight, bro. All power to you. But us? Can we get out of here now, Mel? Can we go back to school?”
“How we going to do that, Brandon? There’s that loose end, remember?”
“Oh, man. I forgot about that.”
But I haven’t. As a matter of fact, I’m starting to get a very weird feeling.
That something else is going to happen.
I just didn’t think it was going to happen at the exact moment of Washington’s greatest victory.
SEVENTY-FOUR
I TURN AROUND. AT THE top of the meadow, General George Washington is surveying the battlefield. He sits on his new horse. This must be a proud, and profound, moment for him. The Continental Army has not lost a single man. The Hessians have surrendered themselves and their position. If Washington survives, he’ll lead this ragged army all the way to the defeat of the British Army, which is merely the world’s most fearsome fighting force.
Notice I use the word if.
Because fifteen yards away from Washington is Butt-Ugly Kramm. Who has been waiting all this time for just this opportunity. When everyone’s guard is down.
Brandon, Daniel, and I are maybe fifty yards away. I don’t know where Bev is, or Elizabeth, or Captain Hamilton, or anyone else who can help.
And I can plainly see that no one, not for at least the next thirty seconds, will be able to get close enough to Washington to make a difference. Though it doesn’t stop us from trying.
Or running.
Or shouting at the top of our lungs.
“General Washington! Watch it! On your left!”
Washington turns to his left, and so does Kramm. Which means Kramm’s facing Brandon and me. He brings his right arm up, and fires.
Bam, bam, bam. Three shots. From the Luger he’s been carrying around.
Two miss. One doesn’t.
I know, because I hear a sickening thud and a gurgle of blood about two inches from my right ear.
Kramm crouches, turns back to Washington, raises his Luger, and is just about ready to squeeze off the rest of his rounds and change the course of history forever when his head is blasted to kingdom come.
It explodes like a watermelon. As I may have said before, I don’t have to tell you what that looks like, do I?
Kramm had miscalculated: General Washington’s men—his troops, his soldiers, his brothers—had him covered the whole time. They weren’t ever going to allow their commander in chief to be cut down on the battlefield. One of the sharpshooting riflemen took out Kramm with a perfect shot.
The gurgling sound behind me? Kramm’s shot missed me and hit an already wounded Hessian soldier who had just managed to get to his feet. He’s keeled over, grabbing his shoulder. I don’t think it will provide him much comfort to know that a German bullet did the damage.
Atop the hill, about thirty men come running over, and in a second Washington is surrounded by a protective phalanx.
So you could say a couple of things are going on here. It’s one of those moments of total confusion and chaos when everyone knows something huge just happened, but no one’s quite sure exactly what.
But I have to make sure I get to Kramm—or what’s left of Kramm—before anyone else. First thing I do is grab his Luger, and stick it in the back of my pants.
Next to him is the leather satchel, with the initials T.G.W., INC. I take it.
Last thing I do is start walking away—at a very brisk pace—from General Washington, his men, and Kramm. I act like I’m going to be sick, because it’s all too much for me.
After all, I’m just a kid, right?
SEVENTY-FIVE
THIRTY YARDS AWAY, WITH no one near me, I open up the leather satchel. Inside there’s a bunch of stuff: papers, a pouch, three magazines for the Luger, a map, two Hershey bars, a compass, and a plastic first aid kit.
These are not items Daniel and Elizabeth are ever going to find at Ye Olde General Store.
I open up the pouch, and inside are maybe twenty or thirty coins.
I know what they are. Pure gold. You don’t even have to be an expert. And they’re also shiny and new, like they’ve just come from a store. On the front is a picture of an old dude with a beard. Around the edge it says SUID–AFRIKA * SOUTH AFRICA.
On the other side it says KRUGERRAND 2002 and there’s a picture of a deer. Or maybe it’s an antelope.
I open up a packet of papers. The first thing I see is a printed note. Two pages. Not handwritten, and most certainly not on parchment. On regular 8 ½-by-11-inch paper.
Kramm,
As promised, here is your first payment—twenty-five gold coins. These are pure gold. Pay no mind to the markings on the coins—they will fetch you what you want. Go to Philadelphia or New York City—find a bank, or if not a bank, a counting house—they will excha
nge these coins for currency, I promise you. When your job is done you will receive the rest of the payment—another 75 coins. You will be a very wealthy man, Kramm. Take care you spend your fortune wisely.
You will notice a weapon in this bag. It is called a Luger, and never you mind how it was manufactured or how I came to possess it. I give it to you, and, like the gold coins, you must use it wisely. I’m sure you will be able to handle this, but I have included a diagram of this weapon and some brief operating instructions. Its virtue is that it need not be loaded each time you wish to fire. It has what is called a magazine, or a cartridge, of nine bullets, which you insert in the butt end of the pistol. I have included three extra magazines. This should be more than enough to accomplish your mission.
You will find Washington across the river with his troops. I have included a map which gives you his precise location, plus additional maps which detail the route he intends to take to Trenton. Your first objective is to eliminate Washington prior to his crossing the Delaware, which is his plan. If that fails, your secondary objective is to eliminate Washington at some other point in the proceedings, but UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES MUST WASHINGTON BE ALLOWED TO DECLARE VICTORY AND RETURN TO PENNSYLVANIA. I will leave the exact method of this elimination up to you, but bear in mind that Washington is not exactly the most intelligent general who’s ever lived. He has a weakness for horses—maybe you could find some to sell him and lure him to his demise. But the method doesn’t matter as much as the result.
Finally, you will notice a compass, which I’m sure you know how to use, and also a special treat, which you may have ONLY after you complete the job. I’ve included two. They are called Hershey bars. Soldiers around the world have come to love them. When you have succeeded in your mission, open up and take a bite—I guarantee you will love it.
One last thing, Kramm: don’t fail.
If you fail, I will track you down, and make sure you regret it for the rest of your life. Which will not be for long.