Washington and Caesar (37 page)

For all the training the Ethiopians had done, it wasn’t for this kind of fight, and he had to run along, crouched behind the wall, and tell every man what he wanted. It took time, and energy, and he couldn’t just raise his fist and start them firing. In a few minutes, though, the first shots rapped out, and the column began to flinch away from the wall.

Virgil was breathing like a bellows, and he took so long aiming his shot that Caesar thought he was hurt. Finally he fired, and Caesar pushed his own musket across the wall. He took careful aim and pulled the trigger. In the press of enemies, he couldn’t tell if his shot hit or not.

“I’m dry, Caesar,” said Virgil. “You have any mo’ powduh?”

Caesar nodded and reached into his pouch. He ran his hand across the bottom and realized that he was out as well, although he continued to feel around for a moment. He didn’t carry a proper cartridge box, with the paper cartridges lined up in a wooden block. There was always the possibility of one more, but not this time.

Further along the wall, Jim stared down his musket with feral concentration and it barked. Once, Jim would have flinched his head just a moment before the snap of the lock, but that habit had gone. Caesar saw his hand go back to the box on his hip and come back empty.

Men who had missed fire, or simply loaded more slowly, fired a few more rounds, but then they were out, and the column was moving by them, either unaware of their presence or uncaring. Many of the fleeing men were unarmed.

Caesar saw Jeremy riding up behind the little woodlot and waved both arms. Jeremy rode up to him directly.

“Can you ride back and tell Mr. Stewart we’re out of cartridges?”

Jeremy stood in his stirrups to look at the road and then back down at Caesar.

“I’ll tell him, Julius, but I think you’d be as well to gather your boys up and bring them back. I think we’re about dry on powder ourselves.”

Caesar wasn’t clear on Jeremy’s role. Sometimes he seemed more like an officer, at others like Stewart’s slave. It was too complicated to discuss right there, but the advice sounded good.

“Where is Mr. Stewart, then?”

“Just the other side of this wood, pressing their rearguard. But as I say, they won’t be pressing very hard.” Jeremy smiled. “I must say, Julius Caesar, I am jealous of that exploit with Mr. Washington. Please do send me a card the next time you plan something like that.” He tipped his hat.

Jeremy always called Caesar “Julius” and he liked it. He slapped the rump of Jeremy’s horse.

“I’ll be most pleased to invite you, suh.
Sir.”

Jeremy leaned down and spoke quietly. “Get back with us soon. I think we’re going into the city. We might be the
first.”

Caesar nodded, ran back from the wall, and yelled.

“Fall in!”

The army ran to McGowan’s Pass. Harlem Heights was barely held, the best position on the island. They didn’t stand on the road and they wouldn’t hold the line of
trenches north of the road. He would have cried, if he dared.

New York was lost. His army had run without firing a shot. For a moment, when the black tried to run him down, he had thought the same dark thoughts that he had had all those years ago in the Pennsylvania country, when Braddock had lost an army, and he had lost his first military career. He was beaten. His army would not stand again for months after a panic like this, and he could not find anyone to blame except himself.

But this was a different war. He was no longer a young colonel with a life before him. In a way, he was now Braddock, and he owed it to his men, and to his nation, such as it was, to try and keep the army together. He would not cry, or shout, or vent his rage on the fools who had run. He would have to wait, retreat, and rebuild, and he watched the faces of the men around him on his staff to see if they still trusted him. As for himself, he no longer trusted his army. He rode back to the rear, sullen, angry, and outwardly his usual icy calm.

Despite his worst fears from midday, the camp had not been lost, nor the magazines. There were solid battalions in front of the camp, formed and ready to meet an enemy. He rode along their ranks, the wind cutting through his coat. He missed his greatcoat.

No one cheered, but no one jeered him, either. He ordered his staff to rally any troops who came near the camp and went to his marquee, set on a rise with a view of the parade and the fields over which the enemy would come if this was the end. He didn’t think so. He didn’t think that the British were ready for the magnitude of today’s victory, and would settle for the occupation of New York. He had several thoughts for limited counterattacks, more to hold the army together and raise its prestige than for any strategic reason. Manhattan Island, and with it, New York, was lost.

“You want something warm, sir?” asked Billy.

Washington realized that he was standing in front of the map on his camp desk, unmoving, his limbs chilled to the bone.

Billy held out a mug, steam whirling up from the top. “I have some hot flip, sir.”

The mug was porcelain, from his traveling service, hot to the touch, and Washington cradled it like the touch of life, warming his hands for the first time since before dawn. He thought,
I am not a young man.

“We lost today. Badly.” Washington sat, still pressing the mug to his breast, inhaling the steam. Billy nodded, more like an accepting parent than a slave. Washington sighed and went on. “I have lost New York. I could blame others, but what use? I am in command, and I have failed. Should I resign?”

Billy busied himself at the back of the tent, putting wood on the fire in the small earthen fireplace that had replaced the tent’s back door.

“They wouldn’t stand, Billy. These men are fighting for their homes and property, their own liberty—and they ran. No one stood his ground. Are we a nation of cowards? Billy, men ran without a shot fired at them. It is one thing when a company breaks because they have seen too many of their comrades shot away. It’s another when they run before they see the enemy.”

He took a deep drink. “Perhaps they don’t trust me. Don’t trust the army. Or the Congress, God save us.” He gazed into the distance, while Billy loooked for another chore to keep him close to his master. He missed a comment about the loss of the city while he seized on Washington’s hat and began to brush it. Then he stopped.

“Where’s your greatcoat, sir?”

“I lost it in the field.” Washington reflected for a moment, and thought,
I ran too.
He smiled grimly. “One more defeat like this and we might lose the ability to fight. Men will
simply walk home and there will be no army.” He shook his head. “I wonder if this job is beyond me. I think I expected it to be more like farming: a set of tasks to perform, men to obey me and a drive to complete the work. A steady pull in harness. Now I wonder if Charles Lee could do better.”

Billy looked up from brushing the hat. “I doubt it, sir,” he said firmly, and Washington looked at him, startled. Billy flushed and put his head down, but Washington laughed, a laugh of pure mirth, his first in twelve hours. “You, too? I thought everyone loved him but me.”

“Not for me to say,” said Billy, trying to hide his own laugh.

Washington slapped him on the shoulder. “Lend me your greatcoat, Billy. I’m going to check the posts.”

Harlem Heights, September 17, 1776

Once New York fell, Caesar realized that he had expected the war to end in the aftermath. The truth was harsher. His men had been among the first into the city, and as Murray had predicted, there had been benefits. But within hours the city was under British martial law, and within days his men were marching north again, following the wreckage of Washington’s army. The generals seemed hesitant to finish Mr. Washington, or so it seemed to Caesar from his very recent knowledge of war. So where the Continentals ran, they marched slowly behind, feeling their way cautiously as if they feared a sudden reversal of fortune. And Caesar knew that the war was not over.

The blacks were not yet an official military organization. They had remained with Mr. Murray through the taking of New York, and then, as the army began to move up Manhattan Island, they attached themselves to Captain Stewart’s company, because they were familiar and welcoming.

Caesar was tired all the time. He felt grimy, and his eyes
felt like they were full of sand. His mouth was so dry he might have spent the night drinking. He had been in the field too long.

He moved cautiously through the low brush at the base of a tall ridge. Captain Stewart and all the men in the Second Battalion of light infantry were extending their lines to the right, hoping to move their posts forward as inconspicuously as possible and “render Mr. Washington’s posts even more untenable,” as Mr. Stewart had said. Jim had already been around the hill, alone, making a map on the back of an old tax record. He couldn’t read, and his markings on paper were like no map any white officer had ever seen, but Jim had gained a little fame in the last three days for the accuracy of his scouting. Mr. Washington’s army was here, in the flat ground on the other side of the ridge. Mr. Washington’s army had post on the ridge, and they were finally going to contest them.

He looked back at Jim, just behind him. The rest of his company was moving in two long files, one to each flank. The brush was too dense to move in line. He raised his foot to place it on an old stone wall, long abandoned in this tangle of undergrowth, and he wondered who would go to the trouble of clearing a field and moving the stones only to abandon it. Something caught his attention and he froze.

There was a man right in front of him, just a long throw away through the brush. He was wearing a smock or a shirt. There was another one, next to him.

Caesar raised his musket to his shoulder in one smooth motion and fired. All along the brush line to his front, smoke blossomed in return. He threw himself down behind the jumble of rocks that had been a wall and started to load, already looking for possibilities. There were a great many men out there. He could hear them shouting orders.

Caesar thought that if he wasn’t lucky, he might die right here. It didn’t bother him much.

“Get to the wall!” Caesar yelled. “Get behind the wall and skirmish!”

He grabbed Jim by the rough material of his trousers and pulled him down.

“Go tell Captain Stewart it’s a whole parcel of men. More’n I can count. Maybe a hundred.”

Jim nodded.

“I’ll jus’ leave you ma’ piece,” he said, and handed Caesar his musket. Then he pushed himself up and ran. There were shots, and he stumbled, but he didn’t fall, and then Caesar had other concerns.

Washington watched the messenger run the last fifty yards. He could hear the firing, and he ached with the effort not to knee his horse down the hill to meet the panting man halfway.

“Knowlton’s…” he panted as he closed. “Colonel Knowlton’s rangers. In that wood, right there, fighting redcoats. Their light infantry, I think.” Washington thought the man might fall at his feet like the runner from Marathon, but instead, the man bent over and then straightened, color flooding his face.

“Colonel asks for support, and says there is three hundred all told, an’ with help he can take the lot. Nothin’ on their right.”

Suddenly they heard bugles from the woods, the contemptuous call of the kill, as if the redcoats were hunters who had taken their fox. Joseph Reed, the adjutant general, rode up, furious.

“Damn it, we had them.” He seemed to feel personally disgraced by the calls. “Damn it!”

Knowlton’s men could be seen running from the wood now, a few redcoats at their heels. Washington looked around, suddenly decisive.

“We may yet. Get me…” He looked back to the troops who had formed in front of their tents at the first shots,
and saw Weedon’s Virginians. “Colonel Reed, if you will have the kindness to take Colonel Weedon’s companies that are already formed? Right up Vanderwater Heights, and into their flank. Take this man as a guide.” Washington rode over to the Virginians, who cheered him. There was a different feeling in the air, even if the redcoats were still sounding their calls. He rode directly to Colonel Weedon.

“I need your best, sir. Your very best effort.”

George Lake was less than a musket’s length away. Washington was right in front of him, his face severe but unworried, his seat on the horse a picture of control. Washington whipped his hat off and pointed it down the hill toward another ridge and said something further as Major Lietch and Captain Lawrence came up to join the little knot. Lake cheered. Washington turned his horse away and it curveted a little and he rose, his hat still off, and looked back along their line. His eyes seemed to rest directly on George Lake for an instant. That frozen image of the general with his hat off, his horse’s front hooves raised like an equestrian statue in Williamsburg, would stay with George Lake forever.

George cheered—they all did, it was everywhere, a wall of sound—and Major Lietch was shouting for them to go forward, and the general was gone.

Caesar fired again, ran his hand along the bottom of his pouch and realized that he was again out of cartridges. His mouth burned from all the powder he had eaten biting the bottom off his cartridges, and no water for hours. Jim was back, long since, lying in a little hollow to his right and firing slowly. The brush and the smoke made choosing a target almost impossible, but every time he reached back for his canteen, the rebels tried another rush.

Suddenly, there was a horse above him, and Jeremy looking down, and legs with wool breeches and sharp black gaiters like little boots moving past him in the brush. The
rebels fired, and a man went down right in front of him, and then there was a roar from the redcoats all around him like a savage beast let loose, and the bugles called a “view”, as if a fox was in sight. He was fluent in this hunting language, and though the soldiers weren’t from Stewart’s company, Jeremy’s presence told him they weren’t far, and he rose to his feet.

“Ethiopians! Forward!” and then he was pressing into the smoke, tripping over the heavy brush, and a twig of thorns tore at his leg, another lashing his hand, and then he was through the smoke and a musket fired just over his head as he fell over another wall. He rolled, his equipment tangling for a moment on his back, and rose as smoothly as he could, the butt of his musket catching a man cleanly in the side of the head and knocking him down and out, his body falling with the boneless limpness that Caesar now knew to indicate total unconsciousness, or instant death. Fowver fired at something further on and then stopped to fit his bayonet. He was yipping like a mad dog, a sound that some of the other Yoruba men made when at war.