by Avi
He was alive and wished that he was dead, but not being dead, he was scared that he might die.
3:38
Jonathan rubbed away his tears with the dirty heel of his hand. He blew his nose. He tried to move, to stand. When his weakened legs buckled, he reached for a tree. Fighting dizziness, he pulled himself up. He saw only bright, white points and flashes. He closed his eyes. Then, standing steadily at last, he opened them.
All around was woods. It was dark and seemed to be growing darker. He wondered what time it was, how many hours had passed.
As he turned around, his foot came up against his gun. He bent down and picked it up. For a moment he held it in his hands and just looked at it. Slowly, he released the flintlock. With an empty click it closed.
He relieved himself. Then he turned and tried to think of which way to go. What he wanted to do was run away, to go as far as possible and not return. But standing there, he heard a sound. Quickly he turned and saw a Hessian soldier standing not far off.
3:47
The grenadier was no more than thirty feet from Jonathan. Standing rigid, partially hidden by low branches, he was turning his head this way and that, as if he was searching for something.
Jonathan watched intently from behind a bush, certain the soldier was looking for him. He stared, trying to grasp the reality of what was happening. He could not. He knew that he had to do something, but he remained where he was, his gaze riveted by the Hessian’s height, his bright uniform, the pale face beneath the high, golden cap. He seemed so powerful, holding his musket and bayonet in two large hands across his chest. He seemed enormous.
Why, Jonathan kept asking himself, is he looking for me? What have I done? Were all the others caught and am I, alone, still free? Why did the rest run? Did they run? Am I the only one alive?
The tall soldier, moving silently, took several steps in Jonathan’s direction. Again he stopped and stared about. Then he turned his back on Jonathan, only to turn again.
Jonathan heard a crackling snap twenty feet in another direction. Startled, he shifted his gaze. A second soldier was there. He was not quite as tall as the first, but fierce, with a sweeping mustache. He seemed older, too.
“Siehst du was?” the tall soldier called to the second.
The words astonished Jonathan. They had come so easily, so simply, yet he could not understand them at all.
Again, Jonathan told himself that he had to try and escape. Slowly, trying to make no noise, he squatted low and placed his gun on the ground. Pivoting on his heels, he looked behind him, hoping to find a way to go.
To his horror he discovered a third Hessian. He was completely surrounded.
3:50
“Er erschiesst uns, wenn wir nicht vorsichtig sind,” the new soldier said, speaking softly. He was much younger than the others, with a thin, blond wisp of mustache.
“Weg von hier,” said the older one. “Es ist blöd und gefährlich. Wir finden ihn nie.”
Jonathan closed his eyes and tried desperately to make some sense of the words.
“Noch ein Paar Minuten,” said the tall soldier.
“Ich hab’s satt,” said the older.
Jonathan crouched low to the ground, certain the Hessians knew exactly where he was and that they were only deciding what to do with him.
The young soldier spoke again, but Jonathan could understand him no better than before. He watched their faces intently. Suddenly, he was sure he understood: They were going to kill him.
He jumped up. “Don’t shoot!” he cried.
“Mein Gott!” the tall soldier cried. “Vor unseren Augen!”
“Es ist nur ein Junge,” said the young one.
Jonathan held his hands high over his head, “Don’t kill me,” he cried. “Please!”
The soldiers leveled their guns at him. The older one spoke, and they looked about as if in search of others. Apparently satisfied no one else was there, they scrutinized Jonathan. He couldn’t bear their stares. Hanging his head, he began to cry, slowly sinking to his knees, as the sobs deepened. He felt numb and utterly helpless.
“Komm hierher!” the old soldier shouted at him.
Trying to stifle his cries, Jonathan looked up. He knew he was being told to do something. And he wanted more than anything to do it, but he didn’t understand what it was.
“Idiot!” cried the soldier. “Die verstehen nie. Komm hierher, Junge.”
Jonathan pushed himself to his feet, then took a tentative step toward the one who had been speaking to him.
The soldier nodded. “Das ist besser,” he said.
Encouraged by the man’s tone, Jonathan took another cautious step. Again the soldier nodded. With increasing relief that he was doing the right thing, Jonathan continued to move. But the soldier suddenly shouted at him and hastily lifted his gun. “Halt!”
Jonathan stopped at once. From either side the other two soldiers moved closer. The tall one stepped on the gun Jonathan had left. With a cry, he snatched it up and held it triumphantly aloft. The soldiers talked to one another.
Not moving, afraid to look about, aware only that they were talking about him, Jonathan said, “I don’t know what you want me to do.”
The youngest of the soldiers looked at him curiously. “Wir sprechen kein Englisch,” he said. “Warum sprichst du kein Deutsch?”
The other soldiers laughed.
Baffled, Jonathan kept studying their faces, trying to find some clue to their words. The tall one had a scar by his cheek. The old one kept touching his mustache, while the youngest had bright, rosy cheeks. Now and again as they talked, they looked at Jonathan. Then one of them laughed and the others joined in. Feeling shame, certain they were making fun of him, Jonathan hung his head.
“Dreh dich um!” the older soldier barked.
Startled, Jonathan looked up.
“Dreh dich um!” the Hessian repeated, clearly exasperated. Reaching out, he shoved Jonathan. Taken by surprise, Jonathan tripped and fell, instantly covering his head with his arms to ward off the blow he sensed was to follow.
“Los,” said the older one, “er macht vor Angst in die Hosen.”
The young one gave him an answer.
Jonathan, sure they were about to do something to him, shut his eyes tightly. But when nothing happened, he opened them again. They were only studying him, the muzzles of their guns pointing toward the ground.
“Steh auf!” the older one snapped. “Es tut dir keinerwas.” Reaching down, he pulled at Jonathan’s arm and hauled him to his feet. Then he shoved him—this time not so hard—in the direction he wanted the boy to move. Jonathan began to walk shakily. Behind, the three soldiers followed.
4:01
“Warte!” said the older soldier, putting a hand to Jonathan’s shoulder. The trees had begun to thin. The old soldier swung a pack from his back onto the ground, opened it, and pulled out a rope. He slapped Jonathan’s arms up and tied the rope around his waist, then handed the free end to the youngest Hessian. Leaving Jonathan with the young soldier, the two others went forward.
Jonathan looked down at the rope, then at the soldier, who was holding it and watching him. The soldier gave a shrug and looked about.
“Es ist ein schönes Land,” he said after a moment. Though Jonathan didn’t know what he meant, it sounded kindly.
Jonathan looked more closely at him. He wondered just how old he was. It occurred to him that he might be the same age as his older brother. He tried to picture the young Hessian’s home. It was impossible. All he could see was his own home.
Noting Jonathan’s gaze, the soldier smiled. It made his cheeks even brighter. “Soldat,” he said, pointing first to himself, then to Jonathan.
“Soldat,” Jonathan repeated, nodding to show he understood. “Soldier,” he said more slowly in reply, suddenly hearing it as an echo of what he had wanted to be. “Soldier,” he said softly, realizing that indeed, that was what he now was. “Soldat . . .” he whispered, feeling his intense humiliati
on.
The Hessian only grinned at the repetition of words.
Jonathan peered up into his face. The smile seemed to mock him. He suddenly felt hatred. He wanted to cry again.
A call came from the two who had gone ahead. The soldier’s smile vanished. “Los, geh!” he said sharply, and shook the rope.
Jonathan felt a sharp pain in the area of his heart.
4:10
Within moments they had stepped out onto the road.
Jonathan realized that it was the same ground where the fighting had occurred. It was completely deserted now. The only evidence of what had happened there was bits of cartridge paper caught in the grass by the edge of the road.
Then Jonathan noticed a dark stain in the middle of the road. He wondered if it might be blood. Was it where his father’s friend had fallen? The Frenchman? The Hessian? Where had the bodies gone? Who had taken them? He felt abandoned, totally alone. With a shock, he realized that he had expected to see the other Hessians. But they too were gone. Where?
The three Hessians were standing together, deep in conversation, the younger one still holding the rope.
Jonathan tried to rekindle his hatred, but all he could muster was the desire to stand close to them, to be taken care of. He didn’t want to be left out. But they were paying no attention to him. Instead, they were looking up and down the road, the tall one pointing in various directions.
Thunder rumbled and rain began falling on Jonathan’s face. With a jerk the older soldier grabbed the rope away from the younger one and marched Jonathan along the road with them. They moved in the direction the Hessians had originally come from, toward Pennington. As they went, they tried to keep under branches, away from the rain.
A stroke of lightning flashed, followed by heavy thunder. Rain poured down in gray sheets. They moved closer to the trees, but still didn’t escape getting drenched. The soldiers wrapped pieces of cloth around their flintlocks but didn’t bother with Jonathan’s gun.
It was the young soldier who discovered the great pine tree, its lowest branches four feet off the ground. Beneath was an open space blanketed with a mass of brown pine needles. The soldier took off his cap and crawled in, pulling his gun after him. The other two soldiers, roughly pushing Jonathan ahead, followed.
The four of them, not speaking, sat and waited, listening. The rain fell steadily, broken occasionally by thunder and lightning. The old soldier took out a pipe, but having no light, merely sucked on the stem.
The sound of the beating rain filled Jonathan with sorrow. The wash of water seemed to obliterate him. Though he tried not to, he began to think of what the Hessians might yet do to him. He wished he knew.
4:30
Though the torrential rains slackened off and the darkness lightened, a steady drizzle continued. From time to time the soldiers spoke to one another. Jonathan tried to listen, hoping to hear words that would make some sense, but finding very few.
Carefully, furtively, he studied their faces, trying to guess their thoughts and moods. The older one worried him most. His mustache made him appear very angry; his manner was tense. The tall one looked menacing because of his giant size and his scar. The young one, however, seemed safer. He wondered how much he should trust him.
Jonathan wished he could talk to them, do something so they would not hurt him. Though for the moment they weren’t acting as if they were going to harm him, Jonathan recalled stories he had heard about what happened to prisoners. Hessians had a reputation for being vicious. Some prisoners, his father had told him, were hanged as rebels. Some were placed in jails or in the dreadful hulks of prison ships. Jonathan had a memory too that some prisoners were sold into slavery, or sent to distant places, never allowed to come home. He wished he had paid attention to such tales. He knew so little, so very little!
He began to wonder about what truly had happened when they had fought. He knew they had been beaten. It had been so confused, so wrongly done, it was a wonder that they had even stood and fought at all. It seemed so stupid now.
Perhaps others had been taken prisoner too. He hoped they had. It would make him feel better, knowing that he was not the only one.
He would have liked to be able to ask the Hessians what had happened. But they were ignoring him completely, silently watching the rain as it continued to taper off. And watching their stony faces, still trying to read their thoughts, Jonathan grew sleepy.
5:00
“Steh auf!”
Roughly shaken, Jonathan opened his eyes. The tall Hessian was leaning over him. With a rush Jonathan remembered where he was and what had happened.
Again the soldier called to him, gesturing.
One by one they crawled from beneath the pine boughs and stood up.
The grass underfoot, the branches, the bark, the leaves, all held a soaking sheen. A gray-green mist filled the wooded air with a soft half-light, making the surrounding trees rise up like vaulting shadows. There was no edge to things. It was impossible to see far. They might have been at the very center of the world, or near the end. From somewhere hidden, but nearby, a woodpecker worked with a rat-ta-tat.
They moved from the woods back onto the muddy road. Jonathan, still held at the end of the slack rope by the older soldier, felt the water that had soaked through his shoes making his feet cold. He was very hungry.
On the road the soldiers hesitated. Quietly, uneasily, they talked amongst themselves. The tall one spoke least of all.
They began to walk down the middle of the road, keeping Jonathan in their midst. They talked very little now, but it was clear to Jonathan from their cautious looking around that they were wary, and not at all sure of where they were going, or what they might meet. Now and again they paused to look and listen. There was little to hear, less to see. The world had grown very small.
Every time they paused, Jonathan paused. When they moved, he moved. At one point, when the young soldier stopped to look at something by the road, Jonathan did the same. But when the older soldier did not stop, the suddenly taut rope made Jonathan slip and fall into the mud.
As he pulled himself up and wiped his face, the Hessians laughed. Jonathan started to laugh too, but then his terrible shame returned. In an instant, the weight of his failures dropped over him again like an eyeless hood. The Hessians, unaware, moved on.
Jonathan began to feel that he was walking into a nightmare, that he had entered a world other than the one he knew. Then, with a shock he realized he had not been thinking of trying to escape. He looked up sharply. The old soldier, rope in hand, was paying scant attention. A sudden break and he could free himself. That he had not been thinking of getting away embarassed him. Escape . . . wouldn’t a true soldier be thinking of that? Why, he kept asking himself, hadn’t he?
But even as he asked, he understood. If he escaped, where would he go? To his father, who had not wanted him to leave? To his mother, to whom he had not listened? To the tavern keeper, who had warned him, and to whom he’d given his word he’d return the gun? To the Americans, who would mock him? To the Corporal? He had failed them all! As he pictured each face, it broke apart, until there seemed nothing left of his past.
Jonathan looked at the soldiers. And they, he asked himself, were they his only friends?
5:15
“Wir haben uns verirrt,” said the young soldier. They had all come to a halt and were looking about.
Jonathan gazed up at the one who had spoken. He could see that he was puzzled, worried. The others acted just as perplexed.
“Vielleicht sind wir geschlagen. Vielleicht sind wir die einzigen am Leben!”
“Gott helf uns!”
Jonathan, wondering what they said, saw only worry on their faces. The young one kept fingering his thin mustache. The tall one rubbed the scar. It seemed to bother him. Perhaps, thought Jonathan, it was the dampness. Like his father’s leg.
The Hessians talked amongst themselves again, keeping their voices low as if they might be overheard. As they gazed
now one way, now another, Jonathan watched intently. He decided they did not know which way to go.
5:20
They continued to walk slowly and close together. Jonathan, chilled and damp, made no resistance to the chafing rope. The fog, sometimes thin, sometimes dense, floated before them, around them, over them, like some living thing.
“O Gott!” cried the tall soldier, flinging up an arm to stop them.
Instantly, the two other soldiers brought their guns about and stared where the tall one pointed. Jonathan, as frightened as they, looked too. What he saw was there and then not there, moving so quickly in and out of sight as to make him uncertain he had seen anything at all. He thought it had been a man, and even in that briefest second believed it had been the Corporal. But the figure had vanished so quickly in the fog that it was impossible for Jonathan to be sure.
“Es ist nichts,” said the young soldier. He laughed with nervous relief.
“Doch, da war was!” said the tall one with indignation.
His heart beating rapidly, Jonathan turned about, wondering if there were other Americans near. He saw not the slightest clue. Nor did he know how he felt, glad or sorry. Before he could consider some action, he felt the rope about his waist jerk as the old soldier hauled him in closer.
The soldiers, standing still, seemed to be growing more nervous. They talked quietly but with great urgency one to the other.
Jonathan, his head hurting from being unable to decide what to do, closed his eyes. When he opened them, he saw that the soldiers were standing absolutely still, straining to listen.
Nothing.
The fog settled deeper.
The older soldier finally said something. To Jonathan, it sounded like a curse. Whatever it was, the other two agreed. They all began to move again.
Jonathan looked back. Glad or sorry? His head seemed to throb with it. Glad or sorry? He did not know.
5:30
From somewhere they could hear the lowing call of a cow. At once they stopped. It was a plaintive sound, like a signal of distress. They faced the direction from which it came.
The sound repeated, low and just as mournful.
