Washington and Caesar (47 page)

“That was well said in there,” from Jeremy, who put a hand on his shoulder, so that they were all linked for a moment. “I wish they would consult me on tactics and politics. I’m jealous, Julius Caesar. But well said.”

“I try to speak the way you do, Jeremy.”

“That’s just it, Julius. You do.”

Jim, almost a foot taller than when they met him, hurtled through the big kitchen, chasing a maid, who shrieked, and then they were gone into the snow out the back. Sally smiled into her beer, and Virgil looked at her. She met his eyes kindly, at least for her.

“No, Virgil. It won’t do.”

Caesar wondered what he had missed, but the silence told him it wasn’t good.

Virgil rubbed his nose for a moment, as if someone had punched it. He rose from his bench and started for the door. Then he looked back at Caesar, happy for a moment because he’d thought of something to break the tension.

“I foun’ us a drummah, Caesar.”

Caesar nodded. “I can put him in a coat tomorrow. Where’d you fin’ him?”

“Queen’s Rangers brought him in. Got him off some Germans.”

“He big enough to take the shilling?”

Virgil smiled a thin, strained smile not at all like his usual easy grin. “He hates the rebels worse ’an us, Cese. They killed his family.”

Sally winced. Caesar just nodded. He pulled open his day book.

“Got a name?”

“Sam. Sam Carter, I think.”

Caesar wrote the name in his book. “Get him a coat. An’ give him a shilling.”

McKonkey’s Ferry, December 26, 1776

“What are we doing now?” asked one of the new men.

George Lake made no reply. The remnants of the Third Virginia had been awake the whole night, moving to the ferry and then filing on to narrow, evil-looking boats that were slowly picking their way across to the Jersey bank of the Delaware. The trip looked dangerous, and the men were already cold. They all feared that they would be soaked to the skin by the time they reached the far bank. George walked along the ranks and made sure that men tied their hats to their heads, and those with tinder kits or tobacco put those items in their hats first. He looked at their cartridge boxes and made sure that their muskets were empty. A wet gun could be dried, but a gun with a soaked load of wet black powder in the barrel would take an hour to clear and dry.

Bludner stood apart, speaking quietly to Captain Lawrence. George knew that he and Bludner were in a state of quiet hostility, and that Bludner would attack him to Lawrence at any chance. George wasn’t used to this kind of warfare, and he felt that he was slipping behind. Captain Lawrence no longer sought his opinion on anything, no longer sent for him to lead special patrols. In fact, Bludner had been sent across the river last night, and had already seen the town they were supposed to attack. He had apparently done well. George tried not to resent Bludner’s success.

They had the company up to thirty men, and they had a drummer again. George Lake had been to Philadelphia twice, looking for their recruits from Virginia, and quietly soliciting local men where they could be got. Other regiments had begun to recruit free blacks. George didn’t think that he was ready to put Bludner in the way of that kind of temptation.

He decided to light his pipe, and he pulled up the collar of his greatcoat. His eye caught Bludner and Lawrence, who were both watching him. His stomach flipped a little, and then he turned his back and started trying to get a patch of char to catch a spark. In a moment he had a little coal going, to the envy of his company, and after a deep inhalation, he handed the pipe to Corporal Bent, who took it gratefully.

“Sergeant, where are we going?” asked another recruit. “Is the war lost, Sergeant?”

“Silence, Rogers,” George said, his voice low. Most of the men thought they might be going to surrender. It was a sad comment on the army. George had figured out where they were going by inference, but he wasn’t saying until they were across the river. Once across, no one would desert.

In the handsome stone house by the ferry, George Washington sat at a plain cherry table and took the
messages that members of the Philadelphia Light Horse brought without enthusiasm, hiding his feelings. Colonel Reed sent that Israel Putnam could not be moved to commit his command across the river to support any sort of attack. Horatio Gates had left the army to go to Congress. It seemed possible that he had left to avoid being present when the army was destroyed. He had Mercer and Lord Stirling, of the older men who had been his best resources since he took command at Boston. Putnam, the hero of Bunker Hill and the commander of the Philadelphia district, would not commit to the plan and Washington would not order him to. Charles Lee had gotten himself captured, a sharp blow even if Lee was waging a subtle campaign against Washington himself. Washington smiled bitterly at that recollection, because this reckless gamble had its roots in that damnable letter and those comments about his indecision. He was not so small-minded as to be driven to excess by the opinions of others, but the sting of those unjust words was still with him. And now, in this one attack, his generals were choosing their paths. Some were staying clear. Others were eager to take part. So be it. The ones that wanted to play a role had been briefed in detail about the attack, in stark contrast to his earlier style.

“Boats are starting to cross, sir,” said an aide.

He had a little fewer than twenty-five hundred men to challenge the British Army. He couldn’t possibly defend twenty-five miles of riverbank if the current cold snap lasted and the river froze to any depth. His men would be spread at the rate of a hundred per mile, and Cornwallis, or Clinton, or Howe would sweep across, encircle those not immediately destroyed, pin them against the river, and end the war.

He rose to his not inconsiderable height, pulled on his greatcoat and gloves, and settled his hat. Billy had tied his hair very tight against the wind, at his request. It pulled at the corners of his eyes, a comfortable sort of pain. Billy
put up with a great deal. George Washington was not a dramatic man. If he had been in his youth, then a middle age of farming and married life had driven such notions from him. But as he walked to the ferry followed by his staff and his horse, he thought about the great Roman, Julius Caesar, leading his army to the bank of the Rubicon River. Perhaps just such a night as this, with snow and wind. Caesar had said something like “the die is cast”, meaning that he was taking a great risk. Washington toyed with saying some such as he sat in the boat, looking at the enemy shore and trying to guess whether he should prepare the army to form to the right or the left once they encountered the Germans. He tried to imagine where their posts would be today, or whether they would patrol with Christmas still ringing in their ears. He tried to imagine whether the British dragoons would be out on the roads, ready to report his column as it moved up the road. In the end, he said nothing, except to ask an aide for the map as soon as they got off the water.

By the time they had the army across, they were two hours late. Any chance of dawn surprise was lost. Washington considered briefly the consequences of loading the men back in the boats and recrossing, and he could not imagine what would happen to the army if the British caught it here against the river, or how demoralized his men would be if the whole of their Christmas had been given up for nothing.

He looked around in the early dawn light, nodding to Greene and Sullivan and Mercer and Stirling. He didn’t call a council; every one of them looked at him with a happy resolution that made his heart rise, as if the warm sun had broken through the snow. He didn’t think of Caesar and his wars in Gaul and Italy, but of Henry V on the field of Agincourt, and again he was almost moved to say something to his captains about “we happy few”, but the drama wasn’t in him. Yet they were with him in a
way that Putnam and Lee never had been, and he gave them all a rare smile.

“Gentlemen, I think you know the plan.” They bowed from the saddle to him, somber yet somehow elated.
They were attacking.
It was a heady thing. He felt that they wanted him to say something to mark the occasion, but he couldn’t find the words, and instead he simply pointed east.

“Gentlemen,” he said, looking from man to man. “Let’s be about it.”

The crossing was damp and cold, indeed, but not so bad as he had feared. George Lake got himself free of the boat on the far side and watched the muskets handed up to willing hands. The men scrambled out on the low ferry pier and began to form. The darkness was full of men. He hoped they had sentries out somewhere.

“Sergeant, where are we going?” The same voice, or perhaps a different one. He didn’t know all the new men yet.

“You call that a line?” he said, but quietly. They would know soon enough, and in the meantime he wanted them focused on the details of soldiering. “Mr. Clarke, do you have your worm? Get some tow and start wiping the locks and the barrels. Every man is to pick his touch hole and see that Mr. Clarke has his weapon dry.”

Men grumbled, because most of the weapons were already dry, but George Lake intended only that they be busy. He knew that the army was late, and he knew the sun was not far off. If they were going to be caught on this open shore by the ever-vigilant British, he thought that his men should be unaware of the possibility until it was upon them.

The snow came in gusts, and the flat countryside of Pennsylvania began to be clearer as the light grew. But soon enough, almost too soon for the busy Private Clarke, the columns began to form and move. Some troops went
up the main road to Pennington, and others went with General Sullivan on the more direct route to Assunpink Bridge. Once the column stepped off, they moved briskly, and it warmed their feet and gradually made all their various discomforts into one dull ache. At least they were moving. The snow began to fall a little harder, and George noted that Bludner’s hat was developing a little triangle of the stuff, like the top of a grenadier’s hat.

They halted for a spell, and the men began to be cold again. Bludner stayed with Captain Lawrence and seemed to have little interest in the company, so George sent out two files to watch the ground beyond the road and tried to cudgel his mind for other ways of keeping the men busy on the march. As he began to consider having them collect wood, the column formed up quickly, and he had to race to recall his pickets before they moved off.

In another mile, they turned a corner. It was almost full light, and they could just see the village of Trenton laid out before them in the middle distance. Then another gust of snow hid the little town of stone houses.

In Washington’s experience, war consisted mostly of waiting to see how well other men had understood their orders. The waiting was interspersed with brief flashes of danger and action, usually caused by his attempts to repair his own defects, or those that others had added to his plans through inattention or neglect. He was not confident in this plan, a complex series of three converging columns that depended on luck and timing and the quality of his generals. It was dictated by the shape of the village.

He wanted a complete victory. His idea of victory required that he take or kill the Hessian garrison of Trenton, the dreaded German regulars that his men feared. Their outposts routinely injured his own, and their Jaegers were the scourge of his lines. He was not attempting an easy target, but a very difficult one, and his chosen enemy
was not much less in men and guns than his own small army.

Where was Sullivan? He waited as the light grew for discovery, or news. He no longer expected General Ewing’s column to show at all. They had been intended for a different ferry, and as he had not directed their operation in person, he had little confidence in them. At this point, in the growing light and the snow, he had little confidence in the whole plan. He began to dread what would lie around each turn of the road. The feeling was unaccustomed. He tried to shrug it off.

His horse was warm, because he kept moving along the column. The men were silent.

A dark, wet man was brought to him near the head of the column, a messenger from Sullivan. He sighed with inward relief. Sullivan was moving well, but concerned about his wet muskets. Washington had watched some Virginians using tow to wipe their muskets dry at the ferry and wondered that the whole army hadn’t performed this simple operation.

He nodded his thanks to the messenger and turned to young General Greene, who was waiting on him.

“Let us go as rapidly as we may, General Greene,” he said, and pushed his horse ahead. Close by him, a company commander caught the order and raised his voice.

“March-march!” he called. The men began to shuffle along at something like a trot.

George Lake’s company was in the center of General Greene’s column, and it began to move faster and to expand, as columns do when they change speed. As each company and each platoon heard the order to trot, they went off, increasing the distance to the next. George left his place on the front right of his company and began to run down the column, coaching the corporals and sergeants to close up and keep their intervals. The Third Virginia
began to form again. He ran back up the column, passing Bludner, who looked at him dully.

“In a hurry to get beat?” asked Bludner as he ran by. George didn’t spare him a reply. He raced for the front of their battalion and passed the word up to the last sergeant in the Fifth Virginia, a man who knew a little, and that man headed off to close his men.

It was the sort of detail that officers generally overlooked, even when they were veterans. The newer ones wouldn’t even know how vital a few moments could be in bringing your column up to a line and beginning to fire, had no idea how hard simple maneuvers would be in the blowing snow.

He was sweating now, and his feet were warm. If he had a particular friend left, he would have shared the irony with him, but they were all gone now, and so he kept it to himself, and they trotted on.

There was a flutter of firing ahead.

Washington watched the Hessian outpost form rapidly, fire a volley, and vanish in the growing storm of snow. It was well done, as the men fulfilled their duty to provide an alarm and then ran for the town. Washington was quietly impressed by their quality. But his own men moved past the post, a cooper’s shop a little outside the town, and began to trot forward again. None of them had been hit.