by Howard Fast
We had reached the space between the huts of the 1st and 2nd Regiments when the baggage train appeared, led by an ox-drawn freight wagon, with the Gary brothers riding astride the lead oxen. The freight wagon was filled with the youngest children, and women and older children were perched all over the baggage carts. I recall that moment well, for it was then that the magazine was broken into. I heard the flurry of musketry and wondered whether we were already engaged in a fratricidal combat with troops who held back, but the shooting stopped as suddenly as it began, and I learned later that we had taken the magazine easily enough and that only one young lieutenant had been hurt with a bayonet wound in the thigh. But the children in the big wagon began to weep in fright, and Arnold Gary had to shout at the top of his lungs to make himself heard, as he called:
Well, here we are, Jamie, and where in hell do you want us to put these brats and sluts?
Olive Lutz climbed down from the wagon and ran up to him, crying, You big oaf, sitting there so one cannot tell which is ox and which is man – there’s children behind you and keep your tongue decent. We’re not in this to take from you what we take from the gentry!
She’s right and this is no rig, said Angus. So shut your dirty mouth, Arnold Gary.
Where the baggage train was to go I had not been told by the Committee, but it seemed obvious that the best place for them would be somewhere in the middle of the column; and acting on that, Angus and I led them along between the huts and the parading men. The men cheered as the women rode by, and the older children watched everything open-mouthed, this being such excitement as they had not experienced before.
Now, for the first time, I ran into Billy Bowzar and Jack Maloney, and they seized me and pulled me outside the line of men.
How is it, Jamie? asked Bowzar.
There are still men in the huts, but each one needs a great argument and persuasion, and I would say, To hell with them.
I am with Jamie, agreed Maloney. We want to march.
While we spoke, other committeemen ran up and down the files, trimming them into order and dressing them up. Never before in the history of the Continentals had a permanent camp been broken thus swiftly and with such dispatch, and there was a new air about the men, a smartness in the way they addressed their lines and ordered their arms.
By now, the musicians had arranged themselves into one compact group, and the two dozen or so little drummer lads were stiff and proud as peacocks, not wholly understanding what had come about, but knowing well enough that they would no longer be sport for any officer who wanted to exercise his cane. Chester Rosenbank started the music, leading the men so that they would all play together, and the first song they struck up was that sweet Pennsylvania air, Oh lovely hills of Fincastle, for thee my sad heart yearns. Afterwards I asked Chester why he had chosen that air instead of marching music, and he answered that marching songs were only partly ours, but this song of the buckskin men something all ours and calculated to take the hot bitterness out of the men, yet leave them their resolution. The fifes played sweetly if somewhat raggedly, and the drummer boys tapped their sticks lightly.
The shouting had lessened and now with the music it halted entirely. At least fifteen hundred men were on parade now, and Sean O’Toole had finally arranged his cannon to flank the column head. Angus was laying out the baggage carts alongside the center of the line; and there, but outside the men and facing the expanse of the parade, I stood with Bowzar and Maloney. We were joined by the Jew Levy and Danny Connell and the Nayger Holt; and it was then that we saw a body of mounted men sweep up the road from Morristown and drum across the parade toward us.
So here are our officers, said Danny Connell.
We stood side by side, waiting, and the Line dressed like grenadiers. The music finished, and there was no other sound than the drumming of hoofs as the officers rode down upon us and drew up their horses a few yards away. I counted them; there were seventeen of them, many of them regimental officers, with Anthony Wayne, brigadier general of the Line, among them and voice for them. He, with Colonel Butler, stepped his horse forward and demanded:
What in hell’s name is the meaning of all this?
As if he didn’t know – and that was to be the way it was, at first, as if none of them knew. Billy Bowzar glanced sidewise at us, and his look said, Keep your mouths shut. Let me talk. If more than one talks, we’ll be talking against one another. … So Billy crossed his arms and looked at the general a lot more coolly than I felt; but I stepped back and waved at Angus, and when he ran over I told him to dress up ten lads of the Citizen-soldier Guard directly behind and alongside of me, and for them to prime their muskets. While this went on, Butler reared his horse, a trick our gentry knew better than the leading of men, and roared out at the top of his lungs at the Line:
Undress! Stand at your ease!
I think of all the moments we faced, that was the hardest, for it was in us and in the marrow of our spine and our bones to obey a command hurled at us that way; so that while my mind said, Keep cool and stand still, Jamie Stuart, the muscles in my legs twitched of their own volition. I looked at the Line, and a good half of them had dropped their muskets to butt the ground and were falling out of parade position. But their sergeants and corporals were snapping, Dress it, dress it, ye dirty white scuts! And once again the Line pulled itself into tension.
Who gave these men the order to parade? Wayne demanded.
The Committee, answered Billy Bowzar quietly, yet loud enough for much of the Line to hear. He was square and small and rocklike, and to this day I recall the pride I felt as I watched him that night. There was a solemn, unruffled truth about him that few of us matched. He had been a ropewalker before the war, in the Philadelphia cordage house, and, as with the ropewalkers in Boston, he and the men who worked with him had formed a Committee of Public Safety and armed themselves, and when the question of independence hung in doubt, the whole shop laid down tools and paraded a show of strength before Carpenters’ Hall.
What Committee? Wayne wanted to know, his tone high and disdainful. Many of the other officers, I could see, were afraid, but there was no fear about Wayne, only a wild anger he could hardly keep from dominating him. The man had courage and little else; and courage was not enough to make us love him; for along with the courage went a cold streak of contempt and disdain and unmitigated cruelty that had earned the undying hatred of all too many in our ranks. A general they loved or a general they didn’t know might have won over many of them right there, for what we had done was yet unresolved, and the light of fear had begun to burn in us – and we had no certainty, even now, that an army could remain an army without officers; but we did not love Anthony Wayne, and we knew him all too well, and what we had done for him in the past, to give him such glory, we did because his gut was the gut of a reaver. His gut won no respect for him here.
The Committee of Sergeants, answered Billy Bowzar, still in the same tone.
The Committee of Sergeants, said Wayne. The Committee of Sergeants!
And he raised his voice, hurling it into the cold and rising night wind:
Disband, I tell you!
But it was too late, and we stood on our ranks, and we stood silent except for the wail of a little child that lifted over and above the men and mingled with the winter winds.
Butler said: I know you, Billy Bowzar, and I know you, Jack Maloney, and I know that dirty Jew Levy and that black Nayger Holt, and you too, Jamie Stuart, and well indeed do I know that slaister Connell who was swept up with the dung from the streets of Dublin – and I have a long memory!
We are not hiding our faces, answered Billy Bowzar.
Then well you should, cried Wayne, for this is the dirtiest picture of a mutiny I have ever seen, and I’ll go down to my grave if them that fixed it don’t swing for it!
We are not mutineers, spoke Bowzar firmly, but loyal and good soldiers, as you should know as well as the next man, General Wayne, and it is not for the sake of any mutiny that w
e stand here in the winter cold.
And what are you loyal to?
To the name of freedom and to the deep hopes of Pennsylvania folk.
Enough of this sanctimonious gibberish! cried Butler. Either disband or prepare to take the consequences!
We are well prepared, for this is not anything that we did lightly, and we are no strangers to your consequences –
What kind of damn fools are you? cried Wayne. How long will this rabble last when we bring the brigades up against them?
What brigades? said Billy Bowzar softly.
I tell you, cried Wayne, loud enough for the whole Line to hear him, that if you go back to your hutments now and lay away your arms, and go to sleep as honest men should, then no more will be made of this, except the punishment of the rascals who lead you! I tell you this now!
There was a mighty urge in me to turn my head and see how the men of the Line took this, but Bowzar and Maloney and Levy and Holt and Connell stood as still as though they had become a part of the frozen ground they occupied, and, for all the cold that seeped now from my skin into the marrow of my bones, I would not do otherwise. But when I heard not even the crunch of a lifted boot, I was filled with a heady pride, as if I had suddenly become drunk, and my earlier dreams of a great movement and rising returned. Now Butler sided his horse to Wayne, and moments went by while they whispered to each other. Then Wayne dismounted and walked over to us, so that he, in his elegant, booted, spurred, cloaked height, his thin, handsome, clean-shaven face thrust forward, stood almost up against the square and ragged rock of Billy Bowzar, yet a whole head higher – like some chief facing a bearded, work-hardened crofter. It was later that they came to call him “Mad Anthony,” but even now there was a touch of madness about him, and fame and glory had touched him, so that he would never forget what it was to wed either. He was imperious, but without the humility that could have made him a great leader whom men would love as well as fear; and when years later I watched Junius Brutus Booth play out Shakespeare’s tale of Richard III, I thought immediately of this young, wild, arrogant general officer who crunched toward us through the snow so fearlessly; but again it was only years later that I could place myself inside him and understand that much of the courage came from hopeless desperation; and that, for all of his proud and violent talks, there that night his world crumbled about him, and all the vainglory of his belted boots, his fine doeskin trousers, his powder-blue coat and his deep blue cloak surrounded a crushed man. No better picture of the relationship of this officer gentry to us can be shown than through their surprise at our rising; not only did they not anticipate it, but, now it was here, their only means of treating it was as another cause for caning or whipping. But you do not cane or whip a line of the best and hardest troops in the New World, standing motionless to arms in the bitter cold of night.
Yet Wayne carried it through in the only way he knew, and he walked up to Billy Bowzar and faced him boldly and asked more quietly:
What do you intend to do?
We intend to march away to our own encampment.
Where is your encampment?
That is in our own orders, General Wayne, and not for the knowledge of you or any other officer.
Are you the leader of this mutiny?
This is no mutiny, and it doesn’t profit you to call it that; but I am spokesman for the Committee of Sergeants.
And what does your Committee propose to do?
To reconstitute the army of the Revolution.
That is talk, said Wayne, and you know that as well as I do. Tell me what you want, and it may be that I spoke hastily before. But if you will state your demands and I can satisfy your demands, I am willing to forget that tonight ever happened and no measures will be taken against any man – including your Committee – and you can go back to the hutments and sleep out the night. Things will look better in the morning.
We can never forget that tonight happened, said Bowzar seriously and reflectively. If I did as you say, I would be hanging from a tree in the morning …
You have my word!
… But it is not the hanging that stops me. I am not so almighty fond of life that I can’t look at a rope, even the way my good comrade Jimmy Coleman looked at a rope last year when you hanged him until he was dead; but tonight is something you can’t blow away like a handful of snow. Look at them –
He turned and flung a hand at the Line.
When have you seen the men stand to parade that way – with the cold so bitter that it freezes the juice in the bones? They would not heed your command, and I have little doubt that they would less heed mine if I ordered them back to the hutments.
What are your demands? insisted Wayne stolidly, but biting his underlip until the blood smeared through, his fists clenched, his cheek twitching. I have given you my word as an officer and a gentleman. What are your demands?
We have no demands of you, General Wayne. There is nothing you can do for us. Our demands are to the people, and the Congress.
If I can right them –
And can you right them, my general? asked Billy Bowzar, grinning bitterly at the handsome young man before him, taking a fold of his cloak between his fingers. Will you cover all our rags with this? Will you feed us with the slop from your New Year’s dinner? Will you pay us, who have not been paid these six months past? Will you bring back our children, who died of disease and hunger? Will you put shoes under our bleeding feet?
His voice raised; he still held the fold of Wayne’s cloak, and Wayne stood rigid as steel while Bowzar spoke, ever more and more loudly and bitterly, with a passion I never knew the man to own.
Or will you scrape together our bloody tracks over five thousand miles of road for five years? Will you give us back our honor, we who have been beaten and lashed as foreign scum – or will you take one man out of the ranks, one man who talks the English a little less finely than you do, one man without property and wealth, and raise him up to be an officer over us? Will you honor us with even one of our own to lead us? Will you stop the ache of hunger in our bellies, so that while you fatten yourselves in the houses of the God-damned patroons and the cursed British gentlemen, we must watch our little drummer lads die for want of a shred of meat? Will you march us against the British enemy, instead of leaving us to rot in these cursed encampments – because you have not the guts to risk a fight that might bring a frown from that rotten, betraying Congress? Will you bring all the Lines together, so that they will stop plotting against each other and go against the enemy? Will you make the Declaration of Independence the law of this army? Will you give us equal bounty and equal pay? Will you hang every officer who kills one of us in his anger, who cheats us, who sells our food, who gambles away our pay, who speculates in the Philadelphia market with our clothing, who insults our women, who kicks our children? Will you do that, General Wayne? Will you declare that the Jersey and Pennsylvania farmers who hold their land in tenancy from the patroons and the lords now have it in freehold forever? Will you tell them that if they give us food, we will fight to the death for their freehold? Will you guarantee a hundred acres of land for every man in this army? You can do that, General Wayne – for there is land without end or limit in Pennsylvania, and no one owns it but the lords in London. Will you take it from them, and give it to us? Will you give us a stake in this? Will you now?… Come now?… The Line is standing to arms in the bitter cold, and you would not have them stand in the cold the whole night through! You would not have that – for then they would think that this is another evidence of the ways of the gentry and the disregard they have for what a simple man feels. So speak out, General Wayne!
In a fury, Billy Bowzar finished, and he flung away the general’s cloak as if it were dirt. But Wayne didn’t move, and there came a sigh out of the paraded men; and then Wayne said softly:
These are not demands I can satisfy, as well you know.
Then you can satisfy one other demand of ours, said Billy Bowzar. Get on your horse and ride ou
t of our sight, and take your damned staff with you. The lot of you are like an abomination!
Now Wayne was rage incarnate, his face flour-white and every muscle along his cheeks trembling and quivering, and like a man made out of clockwork, tight springs and bent metal rods, he mounted his horse, hesitated just one moment, and then walked his horse toward us – with the other officers following him – spitting out words that were like molten spots of metal.
I command this Line! Do you hear me? All of you! This is an order: Break your ranks!
It was just before and during this that Angus MacGrath returned and whispered to me. For Christ’s sake, Jamie, there is hell to pay in the old huts – and breaking into the Scottish – an’ a deil gaed o’er Jock Webster, and the situation is dour, I tell ye, with the 5th and the 9th standing to arms, all cosh with the officers; and will ye tell the Committee to get us to hell out o’ here before we shed our blood and die in this damned place?
