From Sea to Shining Sea

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  He thought of Jefferson now, and George Mason, and Patrick Henry, and Washington; he knew how they coveted these lands for Virginia. And suddenly, in thinking their names, he began to see a means toward such an audacious end:

  Of course he could not launch an offensive with his own Kentuck County militia—a mere hundred men already clinging to survival by their fingernails—but if he could gain support among the leaders of his mother state, those leaders who were, after all, family friends, as well, then surely he could get enough men and supplies—and authority—to go and strike at the heart of General Hamilton’s whole murderous web!

  George never got to sleep that night. Dawn found him still up, drawing maps and making notes, sipping rum, frowning and smiling at once, walking around staring at the ceiling and pounding his fist into his palm.

  It was undoubtedly the grandest single piece of thinking that had ever been done in Kentuck. And when he opened his door at daybreak and looked out, he could scarcely believe that he was still in this cramped and filthy fort, with two hundred wretched people and fifty starving animals, because in his mind he had just soared like an eagle over half a continent.

  IT WAS HARD FOR GEORGE TO CONTAIN THE EXCITEMENT OF his plan, but he had to. He could not share it with anyone here in Kentuck; they would think he had gone stockade-crazy. Besides, it was the sort of thing that would depend on secrecy for its success, and so, for the time being, it had to remain his personal secret. Thus he kept it inside his own head and on his own note papers, day after day, and nurtured it and added to it as an oyster does its pearl. Sometimes he seemed moody and distracted to Harrod and the others, but that was easy to explain; the whole population of the fort was going around now with thousand-yard stares from the long confinement and the discomfort and the repulsive rations and the sickness and the constant danger.

  He needed more specific information. He called in two shrewd young scouts. They were Benjamin Linn and Sam Moore. They were free spirits, and game for anything that would get them out of this squalid fort.

  He showed them on a map where the towns of Kaskaskia and Cahokia were on the Mississippi, not far up from the mouth of the Ohio.

  “Go there by way o’ St. Louis, which is here, across from Cahokia,” he said. “Pretend you’re free-lance hunters just down from the Missouri, with no allegiance to the Rebel cause. Hire out to the commandant, if ye can, or at least get close to him some way. His name is Philip de Rocheblave. He’s French, but close attached to the British, I’ve heard. Find out how deep he is in the business of sending Indians down on us. Get to know merchants, too; they always understand the underside of a place better than anybody. I need to know about the fort there, about cannon, about troops, about horses, population, food, farming, boats, everything that makes a place a place. I need to know what folks there think of our Revolution, how ready the local militia is, whether there are any British Regulars garrisoned there. I need to know all about factions and sympathies, who owes what to whom: I mean, boys, I want y’ to come back with everything you can soak up, both facts and gossip. If ye have to get into somebody’s bed to learn a thing, well, get in. Don’t write anything down, and don’t be too transparent with your curiosity.

  “Now, aside from the fact that y’ll probably be shot if you’re found out, it ought to be mainly a heap o’ fun. Get back here by summer if ye can, but not lest ye feel you know the place inside out by then. All right? And don’t ask me why I want to know all this. I’m just a curious sort, about things in general. Very well, then, boys. Any questions? Guard y’r arses jealously, and God be with’ee.”

  And when these two spies had vanished—he could only hope they would someday return—he turned back to the defense of Kentuck. Black Fish had returned with the mild weather of spring, with more warriors and more murderous energy than ever.

  9

  BRANDYWINE CREEK

  September 10, 1777

  IT WAS ALL SO BEAUTIFUL, SO IDYLLIC, BUT YET SO CLOSE TO the very border of life and death, that Johnny Clark felt driven to commit poetry.

  He stooped into the luminous half-shade of his white tent, and opened the lid of his field trunk, upon which was carved:

  John Clark IV Lt. 8th Va. Regt.

  He lifted his cherrywood letter-box out of the trunk, shut the lid, ducked out of the tent, and walked down through the camp in the lush meadow to his favorite place under a willow at the edge of Brandywine Creek. He sat on the moss with his back against the willow’s trunk, opened the letter-box, uncorked the ink bottle, and then sat for a minute with the goose-quill pen between his thumb and forefinger, trying to recapture the mood he had been feeling. His sword hilt was pressing into his side, so he unbuckled his belt and laid the sword on the moss beside his thigh. He looked at it there, and the sight of it, brass and deadly steel and black scabbard lying on the cool, delicate, innocent green moss, stirred the sentiment he had been suffering. Or had he been enjoying the sentiment? Ah, both suffering and enjoying. The joy of sadness.

  Nothing but his love of womanly beauty had ever made Johnny Clark want to write poetry before; he had written quite a lot of it under that influence, later destroying it bit by bit as, with the clear vision of cooled passions, he had seen how bad it was. What he felt now, with no woman in sight and not even any particular one in mind, was so similar somehow—so bittersweet, so tinged with that tragic sense of short-lived beauty—that it made his heart ache and sing at once, as only woman ever had done before.

  He twiddled the goose-quill and looked about for inspiration. Beyond the drooping, silhouetted fringe of the willow branches, up the meadow to his right, the neat rows of little white officers’ tents blazed against the dark green grass. Further to his right, stacked muskets stood in rows like sheaves in the field. At his left, under the very roots of his willow, flowed the clear, lazy green water of the Brandywine, whose name was poetry to him. He remembered his mother’s old story about Grandpapa and Grandmama Rogers, and their willow tree by another river, and the whippoorwill calls. Oh, yes! he thought. And now they’re dead.

  Upstream near Chadd’s Ford he could see the fieldstone walls and mossy roof of the house where the elegant Marquis de Lafayette, Washington’s newly imported French major-general, made his headquarters. The Marquis was a romantic and graceful figure, whose soulful and idealistic eyes—Johnny had looked into them briefly once while the Marquis was inspecting the Regiment—gave him, too, that same tragical air: the vulnerability of a flower; green moss with a sword on it, Johnny thought now. From a few yards downstream came the murmurs, laughter, and splashings of dozens of soldiers bathing their whitenesses in the green creek.

  Like a ritual cleansing as they prepare themselves to die, he thought, suddenly flooded again with that chivalric sense of pity and pride. Now again he almost touched the quill to paper … but paused again. Somewhere out of sight, caissons were trundling along a road; somewhere a horse whinnied; somewhere the round, deep voice of a sergeant was chanting drill commands; elsewhere axes rang with the building of fortifications. The grass and woods sloping up from the opposite shore of the Brandywine were hazed by the sunny smoke of cookfires.

  Tomorrow it may be the smoke of gunpowder, he thought. Sir William Howe had landed a reported 16,000 British troops at Chesapeake Bay for a march against Philadelphia, the seat of Congress, and now, here, on the eastern bank of the Brandywine, the Continentals were digging in to lie in wait for him.

  Washington’s army was in high morale again, confident, its ranks swelled by thousands of enlistments since his desperate and brilliant invasion of New Jersey last Christmas, a triumph when he had been thought vanquished.

  Johnny had come with Brother Jonathan and Bill Croghan after their convalescent leave, and had received his lieutenant’s commission in March. They had been in Maryland and Pennsylvania ever since. Johnny had seen no action yet, and he had suffered severely from the eternal lack of privacy and the absence of women. But the spring and summer bivouacs had been pleasant enou
gh; there was something undeniably grand and heartening about the brotherhood of officers and soldiers in an army that felt it had God on its side of the question. This was enough to overbalance the boredom and the miseries of army life: the lice, the fleas, the flies, the rats, the mosquitoes, the irregular and sometimes repugnant rations, the sweaty marches, the long, unexplained waits for news or orders, the frightful rumors, the politicking of staff officers fighting each other for advantages like crayfish in a bucket.

  No: the comradeship of brave men, the heartening but slightly scary novelty of being a people suddenly without a king, the thrilling sight of a brand-new thirteen-starred flag, that occasional glimpse of the bold, durable, solid, somber Virginian who was their beloved commander-in-chief—in all these sights and feelings was a poignant sense of unity, that same holy Crusader sense he had enjoyed two years ago on the road to Williamsburg as an eighteen-year-old militiaman in a hunting shirt. But now the sense of it was a hundred times more grand and holy, probably because death or defeat were so much more likely than they had been then.

  Sixteen thousand enemy! And sure to be here tomorrow!

  His heart was slamming. He looked down into the limpid, slow water of the creek and wondered if he would be as ready to die tomorrow as he was today. Then he put the quill-point in the ink bottle and wrote the line that was in his head:

  “O green and peaceful Brandywine, within thy verdant banks”

  What he wanted to speak of now was the blood that surely would color it tomorrow. But the only words he could think of to rhyme with “banks” were “thanks” and “ranks.” And, with a sudden sense of embarrassment, he scratched out his opening line, crosshatching over it until it was definitely unreadable, and started anew an inch farther down:

  Dear Fathr:

  We’re laying in a nice valley eight leagues from Phila where Gens Washington and Nathanl Green are in hopes of Blocking Gen Howe who comes with a large army

  I am well as were Jonathan and Bill when last I saw them, yesterday, and expect we will do ourselves credit when the Brit, come, Prhaps tomoro’ …

  The thought came to him that he might never write another line of verse.

  The thought came to him that he might never see another girl.

  It started out so grand and clean and orderly and glorious the next morning, everything Johnny had expected of it, the stuff of epic poetry.

  THE FIRST GLIMPSE OF THE ENEMY’S NEAT BLOOD-RED AND snow-white ranks moving over lush green morning-fresh grass on a far ridge beyond the Brandywine, glint of sunlight on brass, the buzzing, hushing, hivelike sound of tens of thousands of men preparing to meet in battle. The distant chatter of drums, rumbling of caisson wheels, faraway pulsebeats of marching feet, road dust drifting among trees, one’s own heartbeat. And just below and before him, waiting: the dark blue long-tailed coats crisscrossed with the white shoulder straps of gun bag and bayonet scabbard, the Continentals, his Virginians, in black three-cornered hats, little regimental flags hanging limp in the sultry morning air, waiting behind the raw earth and stacked logs of breastworks, thousands of soldiers all alike, waiting, unspeaking, only their faces different: here a prominent nose in profile, there a snub nose; here a bronzed face lined with wrinkles and shaded with dark whisker stubble, there a smooth pink one, rosy cheeks soft with unshaven blond down; here a hard thin mouth with clenching jaw muscles, there a wet-lipped red mouth hanging open; blue eyes and brown eyes all watching that far hill on the other side of the Brandywine, watching still another line of red come over the green height, listening to the throbbing sibilance growing louder, hearing now and then a fragment of human voice, the eerie, wheezy whine of a bagpipe; then rattles, clankings, hoofbeats, shouted commands among the trees.

  Then the long wait: sun on the back, sweat inside the wool coat, the mist being burned out of the valley, a glance now and then down the line toward the pinkish-orange regimental flag, a glimpse of Jonathan a hundred yards away walking down-slope from a cluster of officers. Above and beyond, a column of American cavalry was cantering northward, behind it, in its dust, a bristle of bayonets, as if half the army were going away on the road among the trees toward the forks of the Brandywine. The very air was dense, as if compressed between the two armies. And the beautiful, sad inevitability of it! Johnny Clark felt as if the moment were itself a great wordless poem, the tension before the stroke, so grand and clean and orderly and glorious it was, more than he had dreamed, even.

  But then when the British artillery erupted across the creek, blossoms of blue-white smoke, deafening waves of concussion, the ground shaking and bucking, the air full of clods and sod and splinters, then there was no more glory or order, and it was all very local and dirty and confused. His mouth was full of dirt. Someone’s hand bounced on the ground and lay there, wristbones sticking out of the red flesh. A three-cornered hat fell from the sky, now a blazing-white sky raining bits of wood and dirt and metal and cloth and pieces of men.

  Bleeding from the nose and spitting out dirt then, Johnny found himself moving among his men in the shambles behind the breastworks, thinking most of them were dead because they were curled up, face down, and then he saw that they were not dead but cringing, trembling, some with their breeches all beshit from fear, while the ground and the breastworks jerked and the gun-thunder pounded on and on. Then in a red-misted dream of shame and fury he found himself grabbing men by their collars and their pigtails and making them stand up and take their weapons, cursing them for snivelers and tuck-tail hounds, whacking some across their backs with the flat of his saber blade. One trembling, curled-up man just would not get up, and when Johnny yanked him up by sheer force the man stood staring with pain and hatred, his chin blown away, shattered teeth-roots and smashed jawbone jutting white through the blood-ooze of his mouth, and Johnny wanted to cry an apology, but did not.

  They were all on their feet eventually, not cringing anymore, but standing and waiting for the attack, one and another now and then being decapitated by a ball or blinded by splinters or grapeshot, men dead and ruined who might have been all right yet, had it not been Lieutenant Johnny Clark’s duty as an officer to make them stand ready.

  And Johnny stood and clenched his teeth and wept tears of disillusionment, because that imagined epic poetry of battle did not exist after all. Now it seemed not a glorious and knightly art, but simply a sickening science of shredding flesh and blasting bone to smithereens, all in the name of some abstract notion Patrick Henry yelled about in Assembly and Thomas Paine wrote about in pamphlets.

  One hundred yards up the line, Major Jonathan Clark was smoking his clay pipe, watching the bombardment, and thinking he should trot down the front to see how young Brother Johnny was doing with his first day of war, when word came down the line to all the company commanders that General Greene would cross the Brandywine at Chadd’s Ford and attack the British flank there. Light knapsacks and fixed bayonets. Orders for each regiment would be down momentarily.

  Well, then. There’d be no time to visit Johnny. Jonathan dipped his head at the sound of a whistling shell, tapped the dottle out of his pipe while dirt and gravel rained on his hat, then moved down the line at a crouch getting his men ready to march. After Charles Town, he felt familiar with artillery; it had lost some of its terrors for him. Of course, one still had to respect it. A man would have to be a fool not to.

  But there was a new and dreadful unknown right before him now; it was said to be the supreme test of any soldier’s mettle:

  A bayonet charge.

  As he went down the line he looked at bayonets and thought. He looked at the long, grooved spikes of steel and thought what they were for. None of his men had ever used a bayonet for its intended purpose, as it had not been that kind of a war so far. It had instead been a marching, waiting war and now and then a shooting and sniping war. Most of the men had used their bayonets only as spits on which to cook meat over campfires—on those rare occasions when there had been meat.

  But the Briti
sh, he was thinking now as he looked at these lethal steel spikes. They’re said to be the very masters of the bayonet. It was said that the British generals had such faith in cold steel that they often ordered their Redcoats to attack with unloaded muskets. Cold steel only. Generals who ordered such attacks were praised for their boldness of spirit—although the generals themselves did not do any charging with bayonets.

  God have mercy on us all, Jonathan thought. Especially watch over dear Brother Johnny and my friend Bill.

  IT WAS MIDDAY NOW AND A WHOLE DIVISION OF VIRGINIANS was running northward along a dusty road, gasping in the heat, stumbling. Johnny Clark was almost strangling in dust and his lungs were afire.

  An hour before, they had been formed up on the east bank of the Brandywine, ready to cross at Chadd’s Ford and go against the British with bayonets. But then a courier had arrived from General Washington, and the whole thing had changed.

  A huge force of Redcoats and Hessians, under Lord Cornwallis’s banner, had suddenly appeared on the Continentals’ right flank, near the forks of the Brandywine four miles to the north; they had hit General Sullivan’s troops and were rolling them backward.

  And so now Greene’s Virginians, instead of attacking across the river, were running up the zigzagging roads to reinforce Sullivan. And it was a run of four miles.

  Gasping with exhaustion, sweat-soaked, they were at last led off the road and formed hastily into a long rank on a forested hilltop. Beyond the trees and below the hill, musketfire sputtered and cannon thundered. Off to the right, as the troops mopped their brows and regained their wind, Johnny could see General Greene holding a hasty council with the field officers. It all seemed so frantic, so desperate. Johnny felt a sense of doom.