The Proud and the Free (25 page)

As I came into the firelight, they looked up at me, their mouths full of toasted corn bread that crumbed over their beards; it is not pleasant, when your belly is full, to watch starving men eat.

Have ye no rum, Sergeant? one of them said.

These are Jersey men, Jamie, said Prukish, who was in command of the post.

Jersey men – said someone else – and the look of them! But they have had it bitter, coming all the way down from Pompton, where the Jersey Line rose up against its officers.

The Jersey Line rose! I cried.

Aye – one of them mumbled – aye, Sergeant, that is the truth of it. The Jersey Line rose, God help us.… A little rum would be a pleasant thing – he said, looking from face to face, stuffing his mouth again with the corn bread – ye have none? No. Well, that's the way it goes …

I shook his shoulder. What's this about the Line? I demanded. You hear me?

He nodded, and the tears from his bloodshot eyes ran down over his dirty cheeks.

He's a sick man, Sergeant, said the other.

That's right. I be a sick man now.

Talk up! I shouted at the other.

You got no business shouting at me, Sergeant. I came a long way, a powerful lot of walking with the cold weather on. I seen some bad things too. So I say to myself, with them Pennsylvania lads, I'll just rest easy and sweet.

Did the Jersey Line rise up? I asked softly.

Sure, Sergeant. They rose up and they was put down. They brought down the Yankee men, and the Yankee men shot us. They just stood there, them Yankee men, with the tears rolling down their faces, and when the order was given, they shot our lads. So that was that with the Jersey Line, Sergeant, and we two of us, we think, We'll off and tell the Pennsylvania lads, which is necessary anyway. You wouldn't never shoot us and we wouldn't never shoot you, but who would have thought the Yankee men would have done it? Not the Yankee men themselves, if you ask me, because they stood and cried like children when our leaders was brought out to be shot down. But they done it anyhow.

His partner, meanwhile, had rolled over close to the fire and gone to sleep. So close he lay that I could see the hairs of his beard begin to curl and crackle, so I kicked him awake and pushed him away.

Come both of you with me to the Committee, I said.

We done enough walking tonight, Sergeant.

Come now, come now, I answered gently, and there you'll find a warm place, and maybe a glass of hot toddy too. A blazing fire ye will find, and tallow candles stuck in sticks, while here in the open you can never be warm. So come along now, lads.

Thus they came with me, forcing each step that took them to Nassau Hall, and while they walked they told me. There was not much to tell, for it was essentially our own tale with all gone wrong with them that had gone right with us. There were many differences, of which I will tell you; for the Jersey Line, while it was a Midland body with many foreign folk in it, was not like our Pennsylvania army, just as no force on all the continent was like ours. There were only two regiments in the Jersey Line, the 1st New Jersey, with two hundred and thirty-nine on its rolls, and the 2nd New Jersey, with just a little less than that – but it was not only in numbers they differed. They had nothing like our Committee and they could not make theirs into something like it, for there were not in the Jersey regiments men who had fought through every engagement from Boston to today, like the grim and knowing veterans of the 1st Pennsylvania, who had been made into sergeants and corporals for our whole Line. Also, while the men of the Jersey Line had dwindled, they were overburdened with officers – one for every four men – and their condition of sickness and starvation was even worse than ours. For all of that, they had driven the gentry from their ranks and were on their own under their sergeants when the Yankee men came down, and that broke their hearts. The leading folk of their Committee were taken out and the Yankee men formed firing squads and shot them down – with the tears streaming, they shot them down; and these two had come on to tell us.

So I took them to Nassau Hall to talk with Bowzar and Maloney and Williams and the rest. There I took them, but I did not go in myself.

I knew what the outcome would be. Regardless of how they talked or how much, we of Pennsylvania were alone – alone we were, at the end of the road. Now we would talk to Reed and make terms with him, and the dreams we had dreamed would be no more than fanciful desires.

It might take days or weeks from now on; but to all real purposes, the rising was finished.

PART NINE

Being an account of the leave-taking of the foreign brigades, how each went his separate way, and of what befell Jack Maloney and myself.

T
HUS IT CAME about that in time we made our peace with the officers, through Joseph Reed, the President of the Commonwealth; for we were alone now, and no place to go and no future of our making that we could comprehend. But it was no such peace as the Jersey Line made; even at the end, they took no liberties with the foreign brigades, but kept their word – all men who had served more than three years were free to leave if they chose to leave. The terms were our terms, but they were terms for departure not for remaining. Our terms for remaining were that we should choose our own officers, and that we should be clothed like human beings and fed and paid; this they would not or could not accept, but our Committee had an obligation to the men and the men were sick to their hearts with service under the gentry for the gentry's way of fighting a war.

So, still holding the Line intact and under arms, we paraded once again and formed up foursquare on the meadow at Princeton, on a cold winter afternoon with the snow clouds building up in the east. In a way, that was the end, although there is more to tell that must be told; for there at Princeton was the last time the regiments, the riflemen and the artillery company of the Pennsylvania Line stood together at dress formation to listen to the drums beating and see the old regimental flags flying and hear the order of the day read out. There were tears in many an eye before that afternoon was over, for the foreign brigades were something and they had made something, and now they would be no more. And many a lad was there like myself who knew little else but the camp and the march, and had no home to go to and neither kith nor kin. With the cold east wind blowing, we stood to attention, and then at our ease with our captured muskets grounded, listening to Billy Bowzar. He had climbed up on top of a caisson, and there he stood, legs spread, hands on hips in that manner we knew so well, his curly red hair blowing in the wind, his square face reassuring and becalming; for you listened to Bowzar and heeded him, in battle or out of battle; he was a calm man and a knowledgeable one.

My comrades, he said, when you chose myself and the others to be the Committee of Sergeants, you had the power to keep us or replace us, as you saw fit. You kept us every one, and for this we are glad. On our part, we tried to serve you in what ways we knew, and we served you as best we could. There were adventurous things we might have done, and if we had done them you might have followed us, but we reasoned that a man's life is not something to adventure with unless the cause is worth while. Therefore, we sought for a way in which the Line could serve your cause and the cause of our country and its folk – and yet remain as we were, with discipline but without the officer gentry. How many hours we sat together seeking such a way, I need not tell you, for that you know. We found no way. When we heard that the Jersey Line would rise up, we thought perhaps the whole of the land would join us; but that is over, and there is no way left without shedding the blood of our own people. That would be sorry business, to turn brother against brother, and that we rejected. We were right in rejecting it – but we did not do so out of our weakness, but out of our strength!

Then there was a roar, and we stamped our muskets on the frozen ground, so that the
thud, thud, thud
of two and a half thousand guns echoed through the village and across the valley. Jack Maloney stood beside me, and he put his arm about me, tight as a steel vise, and he bent his head to hide the tears as they flowed, and he whispered to me:

Ah, Jesus Christ, Jamie, we have been given a moment of opportunity and a sight of glory, and we failed them.

I saw the Jew Levy weeping, the strange little man of his own council and his own peace whom I had hated two years for his being a heathen Jew, and then loved for three years for his being a patient man who never raised his voice or lost his temper or had anything but a gentle word for a man in pain – but knew him not ever, not in two or five years; and the big black man Holt wept, and old Lawrence Scottsboro wept, since his moment was past and finished. So I knew then that what Jack Maloney said was right and true, that we had been given a moment of opportunity and a glimpse of glory, and we had failed because we knew no better way of things than the gentry could offer.

We still have our strength, said Billy Bowzar, when the stamping of the muskets had finished, and we must use it well and wisely. We cannot remain as an army and have our own officers out of our own ranks, and we will not remain under the officers we cast out. Therefore, they have agreed to discharge every man with more than three years' service, which means the greater part of the Line. The rest will be formed into new regiments, perhaps in this Line, perhaps in another – and this they must do. I would to God that there was a way to hold the Line together, but there is no way. A thousand men have sworn that they will never serve their officers again, and we know of no way they can serve this Committee other than to peacefully go their ways. So that is it; yet we have proved something. We have proved that we, by ourselves, can make ourselves into a better army than whips and canes ever made of us. Someday, other men will remember that. For my own, I will stay with what is left of the Line, for that is the way I feel. I don't put this as a matter for anyone else's conscience, only for mine. Therefore, we will break camp in the morning and we will march to Trenton, where we will disband.

That was it, or something like that; for I cannot recall all of this exactly, and it was a long time ago, and I have no journals but only the pictures that were engraved on my mind. I have many pictures, but the clearest are of winter afternoons when the foreign brigades stood to square parade with the sere, cold sky overhead, with the old banners blowing in the wind, and with the drummer boys beating a roll, their little hands wrapped in pieces of wool, their fingers blue with the cold. And rather than the important it is the unimportant that lingers; so that in the moment when Billy Bowzar finished talking, I saw one of the drummer lads whose name was Harold McClintock bawling like a child – which he was, for he was only thirteen years old and no larger than a boy of ten would be these days – with his blue lips and his blue fingers and his skinny, sunken chest; and I wondered what would become of him and all of those lads who had been picked up here and there along the way in the miles we marched, and taught to beat a drum or blow a fife. Those things I wondered about – and what would become of the blowzy or worn women who had followed us here and there and everywhere; and where would the big Bantu black men go, who spoke hardly any English at all but were runaway slaves from the tobacco fields in the Southland; and what of old Lawrence Scottsboro who knew nothing but soldiering? What of the Poles whom we picked up in York city in '76 when the Polish brigade was shot to shreds, and what of all of us, of all of us?

But it may be that those are partly thoughts of the years afterwards and not of the moment. At the moment, I was one of them – the only difference being that I had some place to go to – and I made up my mind that I would go back to York village in Pennsylvania and to the manse of Jacob Bracken.

So after some time it was sounded to break ranks, and the sergeants blew their whistles, and the men crowded around Billy Bowzar whom they loved. But I got out of it, and walked away by myself; I was not in a mood for farewells and I did not know, then, that we would come together again soon enough.

We marched to Trenton, where we were mustered out. I could tell of that, yet it was without particular incident, and we were not what we were once, the Pennsylvania Line of old. We were nothing at all now, except men of many tongues and ways of speech, ragged and aimless. We stood by the riverbank and watched our cannon loaded onto barges which carried them away to Philadelphia. We saw the Line dissolve like sand washed away, and it was done. Each went his own way, and to some of them we said good-by and farewell forever; and there was many a man there I never laid eyes on again. But there were others I saw soon enough, for it was not easy to break the bond and the habit of what we had been for so long; and of that I will tell in due time.

But now we said our good-bys, and Jack Maloney and myself together walked off down the road to Philadelphia. He had no place in particular to go; and for my part, the road to York ran through Philadelphia. We turned once to look at Trenton and the shrunken encampment that remained there, and then we went on. We were no more soldiers; we were discharged; we were free; but the taste wasn't sweet. We had no money and no future in any particular, and what we owned in the world we carried on our backs – our old knapsacks, our knives, our flint boxes. We had a piece of bacon, a pound of corn meal and a pinch of salt. These were the rations we had drawn, with an oath to go with them, from the plump, healthy commissary sent up by the Congress. We each of us had been given a threadbare blanket, and we had odds and ends of rags that we had held onto; in my knapsack was the banner of the 11th Regiment, which I had folded up and taken for myself, partly for sentimental reasons and partly because I considered its usefulness as a scarf in the cold weather. So we were off on our own, I myself a tall, skinny, rawboned lad, Maloney a foot shorter – Handsome Jack Maloney, as we had called him once.