From Sea to Shining Sea (59 page)

He remembered the day he had met him, at St. John’s Church in Richmond, and thought how far they all had come since that day, how much of their naiveté had been lost on so many bloody fields, yet how little had been achieved. General Washington’s eyes were tired and marked with so many more little lines of worry and concentration. But there was still that massive, solid serenity in his whole demeanor. A clock ticked in a corner as Washington digested it all with that thoroughgoing caution of his, and for a long while it looked as if he were not going to approve of it. It was, after all, a rash plan, depending a lot on chance, and many a complex plan of His Excellency’s had been wrecked by chance. The fog at Germantown, for instance. But at last Washington brought his blue eyes directly to bear on Jonathan’s face, and his voice was warm as he said:

“One might imagine you’d been studying your brother.”

Jonathan swallowed that with a smile. He knew it was meant well, and, too, he had grown used to hearing it. Jonathan knew that Washington had been very impressed and heartened by George’s successes in the West. The victory at Vincennes had in fact been one of the few bright gleams in the war thus far this year, and Washington spoke often of it in the dinner parties he held for his officers. But damn it, Jonathan thought behind his smile, George isn’t the only Clark in this world.

Washington turned to Lee now, and said: “It’s really rather admirable, isn’t it? I see no fault with it. I should say, yes, do it, but with one caution:

“As we have no general offensive just now that this would serve, lives shouldn’t be wasted on it. If it functions as the complete surprise it would seem to, take Paulus Hook and I’ll see that we arrange to hold it. But sirs, if you meet resistance or the plan somehow goes awry, and your men are in great danger, then please be satisfied just to disable their cannon and break off the engagement. We won’t expend our good people except for great, great advantages.”

O
N
A
UGUST
19, J
ONATHAN
C
LARK AND
C
OLONEL
L
EE
stood among reeds in the swamp beside the road to Paulus Hook, and watched the evening light change. Half a mile up the road lay the fort; Jonathan could see the British colors hanging limp in the sultry air above the ramparts. He could still distinguish the red in the flag.

It was still too light. Only by deep dusk could one troop of men become indistinguishable from another.

“Patience,” Colonel Lee said softly. “Another fifteen or twenty minutes.”

Jonathan listened hard for hoofbeats or the tread of marching behind him down the road. If the British foragers should come up the road now, or in the next hour, returning to the fort, the whole plan would have to be abandoned. If they did return early, the Virginians were simply to melt into the swamp until they had passed, then regroup to march back and cross the Hackensack to their base, under cover of darkness, and nothing would have been lost.

Jonathan looked at the tense faces of the nearest men. There were three hundred of them back there among the reeds along the road levee.

This waiting was the worst part, waiting for something so slow and unhurriable as the fading of evening light. The march down
had been something of a game. The Virginians had had to cross a lot of ground in the distant view of the fort. It was impossible to get close to Paulus Hook without being seen, and so the Virginians had had to give the impression of being an American foraging party. They had zigzagged with a seeming aimlessness from farm to farm along the dirt roads all day, gradually working their way down into the swamps a few miles from the fort. And here they had made themselves invisible to come the rest of the way. If the British in the fort had seen them, they apparently had fallen for the deception, or simply had paid them no heed, for the drawbridge was still down and the portcullis was still open, open for the routine arrival of the British foragers. So far so good.

Jonathan watched the light change and listened to a catbird in the reeds and saw a gull pass overhead, gray now in the dimming light. He saw a light of some kind, a torch or lantern, pass beyond the iron gates within the fort. “If they’re lighting up in there,” he said, “it must be about right now.” He turned to look again at his troops. Their coats were dark, purple-looking now instead of blue, and he knew that red coats now would also look purple. Lee nodded, and squeezed Jonathan’s elbow.

“All right, lieutenant,” Jonathan said, his heart beating wildly, “pass the word to get up on the road.” And he climbed up the bank of the causeway and stood in the middle of the road, Lee beside him. With rustlings and hushings the troops were climbing up onto the road behind him now and forming four files. He kept his eye squinted and his ear cupped, but there was no sign or sound that the British were closing the gate. He heard a plaintive bugle call inside the fort, and saw the Union Jack slide down.

He held up his right hand now, and then waved it forward and began striding up the road toward the gate, and he could hear his troops coming behind him. He had not advised them to be stealthy. He wanted them to clank and clunk and step heavy, and sound for all the world like a British foraging party returning tiredly up the familiar road to their own fort. That was the key to his whole plan: the Americans had to be mistaken for the returning British party. If they were not, they might expect either or both of two things to happen in this next half mile: either there would be shouts and the clanking of iron gates and drawbridge chains, or there would be muzzleblasts of the fort’s gate cannon and a thousand pieces of grapeshot whistling down the road. Jonathan walked on, thinking of these things, hearing the following tread of his men.

It became the strangest, longest half-mile he had ever walked. In the cooling evening air, in the deepening dusk, under the full gaze of the British sentries high on their gate stations, he was trudging straight up an open road toward the yawning gate of an enemy castle, or so it seemed, with every intention of walking right in. He swallowed as the ramparts grew taller and taller; he swallowed though his dry mouth gave him nothing to swallow. And it occurred to him now that he was actually doing this that it was far more implausible even than it had seemed when he had started telling Harry Lee about it. It was more like a George thing than a Jonathan thing, as Washington had suggested; it was more like the bizarre hijinks of some reckless frontiersman than the careful plan of a scholarly, gentlemanly Clerk of County, engaged to be married to the very proper Miss Sarah Hite. He could hear Colonel Lee laughing voicelessly between his teeth.

Now the gate was a mere sixty yards away, fifty, forty.… Jonathan caught a whiff of cooking, an oniony, glutinous smell like fat stew, coming from the fort, and he could see the sentries’ heads and shoulders and tall hats atop the walls, silhouetted against the lilac-gray sky. One of the sentries now raised his right hand. Jonathan felt a chill; he expected that sentry to yell out an alarm. Jonathan raised his own right arm now, and took a deep breath, ready to yell for his men to rush the gate before it could be shut. Twenty yards … fifteen … ten.… And then the sentry simply lowered his hand and called down:

“Good hunting, Sir?”

It was incredible! Hilariously incredible! The guard had only been waving a hello to the oncoming troop! He had no suspicion! Jonathan called back up, sounding as English as he could:

“Quoit! Quoit good!” And he heard Colonel Lee’s whispery laugh again.

And then the great oaken planks of the drawbridge were resounding under his heels, and then the thick, dark gates were beside him and the
George Rex
escutcheon was above his head, then behind him, and he was inside the fort, in the compound, and there were British soldiers walking around in lamplight not thirty feet from him, going to and from their evening meal.

“Now, boys,” Jonathan said to the special squad just behind him, and they darted out, six of them to either side, sprinted up the wooden steps to the sentries’ posts and, before they could cry out, clubbed them unconscious. Jonathan now drew his saber and signaled frantically to right and left, and suddenly his men were rushing forward around him on both sides, fixing bayonets. Colonel Lee led a company onto the artillery parapets. A British
officer in short red jacket and powdered wig had been coming toward Jonathan as if to greet him, and stopped, bewildered. As he opened his mouth to cry out, Jonathan grabbed him by the front of his jacket, held his sword point under his chin, and said, “Sir, you’re my prisoner or you’re a dead man. Which?”

The Englishman nodded. “Yes,” was all he could say. His eyes were wild as he watched the hundreds of blue-coated strangers streaming into the torchlit compound. Unarmed British soldiers, some in work coveralls, were stopping stockstill and putting their hands up, or turning to run, some beginning to yell for help. A few pistol shots flared near a stone house in the center of the compound, and several muskets discharged on the firing platforms around the walls. On the parade ground now, the Americans with fixed bayonets were pressing knots of terrified unarmed Redcoats backward into corners and against walls. A confused babble of voices was rising. Jonathan jerked the officer toward the mess hall. “I want you to step to the door there,” he said, “and advise them all to stay where they are and offer no resistance. Understand?” He jabbed the officer’s neck slightly with the sword blade. When they stepped into the door of the mess hall, they found about fifty soldiers, some milling around, others still seated, in the steamy, dim room.

“Attention, attention!” the officer cried, and it was fortunate that he had a loud, clear voice. The noise subsided, and he yelled, “Be calm! Be calm! I’m afraid we’re overrun! We’re prisoners! Please don’t risk yourselves!”

“Very good,” Jonathan said. Then he held the officer in the doorway and summoned one of his own lieutenants to place a squad on guard around the building. Fifty prisoners at once, he thought, very pleased with himself. His troops, well controlled by their lieutenants, were rounding up the little groups of prisoners and herding them into the center of the parade ground. With those in the mess hall and these, it looked as if they had nearly a hundred captive already. It was thrilling how well it was working! Up on the ramparts all around now, silhouetted against the twilight sky, figures were moving fast, and he could hear deep shouts and steel clashing, now and then a cry of pain. It sounded as if Lee’s company were nearly all the way around the high walls now.

“Come,” Jonathan said to his captive officer, “let’s go to the powder magazine, shall we? COME, HIGGINS! BRING YOUR BOMBER BOYS!” A captain ran up, followed by a squad of heavy-footed soldiers clanking with metal. The British officer led toward a low, stone structure with one massive door and pointed
to it. “Is it locked?” Jonathan asked. The officer nodded. “Do you have a key?”

“No, sir. I’m dragoons.”

“Break it in, boys,” Jonathan said. And the squad set to work with the prybars and stone hammers they had lugged all over the countryside for this eventuality.

Chank, chank
, went the tools, and Jonathan kept his head swiveling, watching every corner to see that his plan was going flawlessly. It seemed to be. He looked at the Redcoat officer. “What d’ye make of our little surprise?”

“Rahtheh duddie play,” he replied.

“Oh! Is it! He says it’s duddie play, Higgins.”

Higgins laughed.
Chank, chunk, screech
, went the tools. If the plan continued to succeed, the powder magazine would be open and ready. If something went wrong, Jonathan intended to blow it up as he left. And Lee’s men up on the parapets carried hammers and steel spikes to plug the cannon vents in case the fort could not be held. But so far it looked as if the fort would be held. Jonathan was just making this happy appraisal when he heard a heavy fusillade of gunfire in the deepest corner of the fort. Musketballs whistled and ricocheted through the compound; two whanged off the stone wall of the magazine, just missing the wreckers. The balls kept coming. They were kicking up gravel from the parade ground and thudding into the flesh of British prisoners and American guards alike. “Down, DOWN!” Jonathan cried to his men, and peered around the corner of the magazine, toward the source of the gunfire.

It was a large stone house, officers’ quarters, he guessed. Apparently a large body of the enemy had dashed inside at the first alarm and now were firing from the windows, peppering the whole compound. Their shooting was haphazard, but there was so much of it, and so much was ricocheting, that it was hitting a lot of men. Many were falling, sagging to their knees, staggering.

Jonathan’s first instinct was to get a company together to storm the house. One houseful of Redcoats should not be able to stop a clever coup like this. Jonathan left the magazine and sprinted to the center of the parade ground. He was about to call officers to get an attack company formed up when an ensign, Lee’s aide, came running across the grounds calling for Major Clark. “Here!” he answered.

The ensign ran to him. “Colonel Lee’s orders, sir. We’re to withdraw!” He flinched as a musketball sang past.

No
! Jonathan thought. No, we’re almost done! We can silence that house in five—But the ensign went on:

“He said I should remind you of the general’s cautions, sir. And assure you that he’s destroying the cannon as he goes.” Jonathan, clenching his teeth in frustration, looked around. Under the sounds of the shooting he could indeed hear the
tink, tink, tink
of hammers on spikes.

So he gave a long sigh and resigned himself to it. This was no time to be disobeying orders, even if those orders brought him up short. He said:

“Tell the colonel I’m complying. That I wish to take our prisoners back with us. And that I shall blow the magazine as a parting gesture.”

C
OLONEL
L
EE
LED
THE
V
IRGINIANS
AND
THEIR
WOUNDED
and their 125 British prisoners a quarter of a mile down the dark road. Then he stepped out to the side to let them file past, and stood looking back at the dark fort.