From Sea to Shining Sea (33 page)

“My gentlemen,” he began, “due to a great cleverness today on the part of General Howe, we’re in an unfortunate situation. Cornwallis made a feint this morning that caused us to divide our forces in the face of a superior force. Due to that, our army is now in a general retreat, in the direction of Chester Town. We have the honor, sirs, of guarding the rear.” He paused a moment and looked at their faces. “This is an honor fraught with hazard, certainly. But it’s our opportunity to prevent defeat from becoming disaster. A very great honor, it is.

“Your boys have had quite a day already, I know well. But if
they keep Cornwallis delayed here for a while longer, they’ll have allowed the army to withdraw in an orderly way, not in a rout, and will have done perhaps the best service of the day. Here, sirs, are the specifics, and here’s what we’ll be required to do.”

D
ELAY A WHILE LONGER
, J
ONATHAN THOUGHT AS HE RETURNED
to the 8th Virginia. Retreat. Philadelphia’s lost after today. He felt exhausted, heavy-hearted.

Cannonades were still crashing along this front, and miles to the southwest, where this hellish day had begun, an eternity ago, it seemed, artillery still rumbled like a thunderstorm.

He found Brother Johnny still alive, though limping and ragged. Johnny had no visible wound, but somehow had strained his thigh during the hand-to-hand fighting; he could not really remember where or how. Jonathan told Johnny what had come of the council in the farmhouse, and they parted once again. English cannonballs were whickering through the trees now, bringing down showers of splinters and bark, and the drums of the British brigades were coming closer and closer. The Virginians braced themselves to try once again to slow down Cornwall’s inexorable advance.

A
ND THUS THE SUN WENT DOWN OVER THE BEAUTIFUL
Brandywine Valley, a sun dimmed to brick-red by the haze of powdersmoke and dust. At dark the shooting ceased, and General Greene at last led his rear guard down the road toward Chester Town, their ears ringing in the silence.

T
HE ROAD OF RETREAT WAS CLOGGED WITH EXHAUSTED INFANTRYMEN
, with cannon, with pack horses, with wagons and litters carrying wounded men. The troops slogged and limped along the Chester Road, dark shapes on the starlit roadway. Their bandages, the belted Xs across their backs, were ghostly pale in the dark. Shouts for a clear road would come from behind; soldiers would curse and groan and edge into the roadside weeds. Troops of cavalry or dragoons would trot past, leather creaking, spurs and weapons clinking and rattling, horses blowing, leaving the smell of horse sweat in the air and dung on the road. More shouts, more hoofbeats, and the jingle of harness and rumble of wooden carriages and iron-rimmed wheels, and artillery caissons would rumble by up the road, their drivers calling ahead for clear highway. And after all this had passed, the Virginians came along. Behind them the road was empty.

The refugee army crossed Chester Bridge long after nightfall in the flickering light of torches. The young Marquis de Lafayette was in command of the contingent guarding the bridge. His face was specter-pale in the torchlight as he sat on his warhorse and looked down at the passing troops. Johnny’s gaze slid down from the aristocratic face and saw linen bandages from Lafayette’s hip to calf, sopping crimson from a wound. It was no wonder he was pale. Johnny tipped his hat as he limped by, and the Marquis, his big feminine-looking eyes glinting, returned the gesture. It had been his first battle, too.

Beyond the Chester Bridge the defeated army halted to make a tentless camp under the stars, and Johnny sat with a group of officers by a small fire on a meadow slope. Bill Croghan had lain back on the ground with a coat over him and fallen into a profound sleep. One of the officers was a New Jersey man, a major who had fought at White Plains in the disastrous autumn of ’76, and he was complaining about the commander-in-chief.

“A farmer, that’s all he is. A damned Virginia farmer who thinks as slow as the seasons turn!”

“We’re farmers, too,” Jonathan said softly. “Virginia farmers, like him.”

The major was quiet for a while, appraising Jonathan’s tone. Then he resumed. “His Excellency has fine days now and then. Like at Trenton and the like. But then he makes blunders. Like today.”

“Anyone makes blunders,” Jonathan said.

“Perhaps so. But today our farmer-in-chief was monumentally stupid. He divides us, caught by a trick, so Cornwallis comes around on our rear with his six thousand or so. That’s what undone us today. You saw it.”

It seemed that what the major was saying was true. Johnny could remember seeing the cavalry and infantry going up the river that morning.

“And so, what’s he cost us, our brilliant farmer-in-chief?” the major went on in his rankling tone. “We seem to muster up this evening about a thousand short, I hear, and it looks like to me that half the rest of us are leakin’ blood. And Philadelphia’s lost for certain, I’d say. Well, sirs, it’s my feeling, the way to lose a war is, put a Virginia farmer in charge.”

“Aye, well.” Jonathan tapped out his pipe on his bootheel, and seemed to enlarge in the dim fireglow. “You’re quite entitled to squawk about Virginia farmers, sir. But in Virginia we farmers have a sport with squawkers. First, we hang them up by their heels. Then we grease them up and yank their heads off.”

The major from New Jersey, after a moment of silence, rose, excused himself, and went away muttering, and several officers of the 8th Virginia laughed him away.

“It’s some’at true, though, isn’t it?” Johnny asked confidentially when he was at last alone with Jonathan, “that there do be brighter generals?”

Jonathan’s strong arm snaked across and settled on his shoulders. “I’ll ask’ee to recollect somethin’ Ma always would say. Remember,” he went on in that deep, calming voice of his, “how she’d say, ‘I’ll vow I’ve never had a day I didn’t make at least one mistake in bringin’ you all up—but ye haven’t thrown me out yet, so I must be doing fair in general.’ Remember her saying that?”

Johnny grinned. He could remember how she’d sound when she said it: with a little upturned snap of pride at the end.

“Anyway,” Jonathan said, “General Washington’s made some mistakes. But I doubt there’s another soul on this continent could keep this army together.”

“No, I guess not,” Johnny said after a while. “Less they’d make Ma commander-in-chief.”

And they pounded each other on the back, these Clark boys, raising a sound that was most rare in the beaten American army that night:

Laughter.

“H
OLY
G
ODLY, WHAT FUN THAT SPYIN’ BE
!” B
ENJAMIN
L
INN
slapped his thigh and set down the rum cup, nodding to it for a refill, and George poured, with a grin.

“Didn’t I say it would be?”

“Aye, Mister Clark, ye did, and right y’were as usual. Heh!”

“That Sewer de Roachblob,” brayed Sam Moore. That had become their contemptuous pronunciation of the name of Sieur de Rocheblave, commandant at Kaskaskia. “What a gull he was! He just swallered whole that bag o’ malarkey we give ’im. He’s not a half as shrewd as he says he is.” Moore sipped from his cup and brushed some burrs from his leggings, then looked grinning up at George, who had opened a pocket-sized notebook on the table to a blank page and now was trimming a fresh nib on the quill he had taken from his old hat. Outside the open door, the curious of Harrod’s Town were loitering, excited about the mysterious return of the long-gone pair. It was rare for people to be gone from Harrod’s Town that long and come back alive.

“Just start from the beginning,” George said, “and talk, and then I’ll throw ye questions I’ve got. Ben?”

“Well, sir, we snuck up to St. Louis first, like ye said do, then we got on board a bateau headed down to Kaskasky, so that when we got off there they’d believe our story that we’d been up th’ Missouri trappin’. We acted s’prised there was a rebellion goin’ on. Perty soon we got in t’ see Roachblob, got in by sayin’ we didn’t believe it and wanted to hear it from a ’thority. We got in, hired on as meat-hunters for th’ town.”

“What’s he like?” George asked.

“Blowed up like a bullfrog with ’imself. A haughty man, eh, Sam? He’s Frenchy, but got King George stamped all over ’im. No slouch, I’ll say that. He runs a right elegant militia.”

“But more for love o’ parade than fear of attack,” interrupted Moore.

“Aye. Medoubt they could fight their way ’crost a boo-dwahr, but they’re pretty dressed and jolly,” Linn said; then he gave George a description of their fort and quarters, their numbers and their armaments and the cannon at the fort, the times and customs of the guard. “Likable rascals,” Linn went on. “They’re perty lukewarm on Britain, spite of Roachblob’s haranguin’. So’s most of the population. They’re a lazy-loosy sort o’ folk. They find British reg’lations perty stiff. But Roachblob’s got a grip on ’em. Tells ’em us rebels is anything from cannibals on down to baby-rapers, an’ tells ’em only King George can perteck ’em from us. He, he!”

“Do they believe ’im?”

“About half-believe, I think. They’re a somewhat fraidy people, right, Sam? And we make ’em a right handy bogey, as they’ve never saw many of us Virginians to know how genteel and harmless we be.”

George laughed, then he touched the quill to paper and asked, “British in the garrison?”

“Usually been a company of ’em at Kaskasky, but’s all been called back to Canady.”

“For how long?”

The men shrugged. “Till who knows?”

George nodded, and made some marks on the notebook page. “I know you’re trail-weary, boys, so forgive me for keepin’ you overlong, but I’ve been waiting quite a spell with a thousand questions about that place.”

“Ask away, Major Clark,” said Sam Moore, gurgling some more rum into his cup and settling forward with his elbows on the table. “It’s a rare day when we’uns know more’n you do about anything, and we’re enj’yin’ it whilst we can!”

By midnight George had pumped their memories dry, getting
information from them that they’d hardly realized they had, and in his notebook was a clear enough picture of the Illinois Country outposts to convince him that he could surprise and occupy that territory with as few as five hundred men.

Now, he thought. All I need do is go to Governor Henry and persuade him to let me do it. I guess I can stop up this bedamned Indian war right at its source!

He thought of General Henry Hamilton at Detroit, on the far side of the chessboard, and he thought:

My move, Mister Scalp-Buyer.

J
OHNNY
C
LARK STOOD IN THE WOODS WITH COLD
O
CTOBER
fog on his face and tried to see a road, a landmark of any kind, but trees ten yards away were invisible. I might as well be a fish in a milkpail, he thought.

We’re lost. Just lost.

Near him in the murk he could see three or four of his soldiers with their guns and bayonets, and just beyond them the red clothes and white underwear of the British prisoners they guarded. Elsewhere nearby he could hear the invisible presences of other companies: the knock of a scabbard or canteen against a gunstock, a throat-clearing, a
sniffle, hawk, spit
, a murmured complaint, a query. But they were invisible. Off in the distance, in a direction he presumed was southward, though it did not feel southward, there was a muffled sputtering of gunfire, and cannon were booming.

How can they even see what they’re shooting at? he wondered.

It had all sounded so clever in the orders; it had all looked so neat on the maps, a plan so intricate and well conceived and daring that no one would have dared call Washington a dumb Virginia farmer again: four divisions marching all night southward down Skippack Road, parallel with the Schuylkill River, toward Germantown. Dividing before daylight into four columns.
Bits of white paper pinned to their black hats so they could identify their compatriots in the dark. Attack through and around Germantown with bayonets fixed and catch Howe’s whole army in its blankets before reveille. Oh, it would have been diabolically clever, it would have been brilliant. But then the day had dawned like this: in a milky fog.

The 8th Virginia had practically walked over this unit of British Guards, had rousted them up half-dressed and herded them along like cattle, but to where? With no road to follow, creeping along over wet grass and among red-leafed autumn maples, over fences, around cribs, with no idea where the other columns were, unable even to find the town, General Greene’s division was astray in a muffled blankness and now there was gunfire, which meant the surprise was lost.

After Brandywine, the British had occupied Philadelphia; Congress had fled to Lancaster. Washington had hoped, by surprising Howe here, to recover Philadelphia. And it might have worked, Johnny thought bitterly, but for this damnable unexpectable fog.

It might yet, though, he thought. The gunfire in the distance was increasing to a steady, crackling roar. Maybe, he thought, maybe this fog isn’t everywhere, maybe the other columns found Howe’s camp and surprised him enough.

A major materialized out of the fog. “This way,” he said. “I’ve found a road.”

“Come on, lads,” Johnny said. “Herd those lobsterbacks along.”

They moved off now, following the major, who picked his way along so hesitantly, stopping and veering and thinking, that he inspired more rueful headshakes than confidence.

They got onto the road within five minutes, and were walking it seemed from nowhere to nowhere on ten yards of packed dirt roadway with grass and brown weeds and fallen leaves at each side and then that confounding circumference of fog. As they moved along, the din of shouting and gunfire grew louder and louder before them. Off to the left front, a crash and a flare of yellow in the fog showed where a cannon was being fired. They could smell gunpowder smoke now; it seemed to diffuse everywhere in the fog; it stank in the nostrils and stung in the eyes.

“Wait,” the major said, and strode off toward the cannon.