The Proud and the Free

by Howard Fast

  Where are they? I asked him.

  Parading over yonder, behind the Connecticut huts.

  But then Wayne was riding his horse down on us, and his officers less confident, less brave, but with him at the moment, and as the Committee was pressed back, it was touch and go; so I did what I felt should be done; I addressed the citizen soldiers and told them to let a volley into the air. The muskets roared over the horses and a harsh shout went up from our men, and the horses broke and bolted, the riders not fighting them but letting them bolt across the parade and into the darkness in ten directions, riding with relief to be away from that long file of grim and bitter men. But the truth must be told that Wayne alone fought his horse as it reared and beat it back onto the ground, his face contorted, tears running down his cheeks; and then he ripped open coat and vest and shirt, ripping the clothes and buttons, tearing at his undershirt to bare his breast and revealing it with the red marks of his nails across it. And he screamed at us:

  Then kill me! Here is a mark, if you want a mark, you dirty, mutinous bastards! Then kill me here and now, and have it over with! God curse your souls, kill me!

  There was a trumpeter standing by, and Bowzar ran to him and had him play the advance. We left Wayne screaming and weeping, alone on his horse, while we ran down the Line to its head, where the drummer boys had picked up the beat, and Rosenbank was already marching and keeping time for the shrilling fifes. As we ran, I told Bowzar and Maloney of the news Angus had brought, and they questioned Angus as we ranged ourselves across the head of the Line. Somehow, we had failed with these two regiments: the officers had got there first, and now five hundred men were standing to arms and ready to bar our path – yet the way they had remained behind the Connecticut hutments, out of sight and sound and a good half mile away, it was plain that they would avoid a struggle and leave us to march out of camp if we wished to.

  And they got six cannon, said Angus, by grace of Emil Horst who sold us, the dirty smaik …

  “We will go up against them, nodded Billy Bowzar wearily, for this is either all of us or no part of us, and it’s better to die here than to split the Line. If we split the Line, then it will be civil war and not war against the enemy, and I would rather hang now than have it that way.”

  Then it’s war now, muttered Danny Connell.

  Is it? If our brothers will cut us down, we are damned wrong, and we should know it.

  And Billy Bowzar waved his arm and swung to the left— and the whole long Line of the Pennsylvania regiments moved across the moonlit parade toward the Connecticut huts. We marched slowly, four abreast, a long, dark ribbon across the entire parade, and the shrill of our fifes and the beat of our drums woke the countryside for miles around.

  It was a wonderful moment, that in which we crossed the snow-swept expanse of parade, for the beat of the drums was matched by the beat in our hearts; and when I ran down the Line and back, I saw in the faces of the men, cold and reddened and wrapped in rags, an indication of the fierce exultation of our strength – our power, inevitably – for nowhere on the whole Western continent was a force that could come up against us; we were the heart of the Revolution, and now we had suddenly translated the Revolution into ourselves and our hopes and our angers. Many, many times before, I had seen the Line go out, sometimes on parade, sometimes on one of those interminable marches up and down the Jersey pine barrens, sometimes against the enemy, sometimes in the lonely, broken way of retreat; but I never saw the Line as it was then, like a fierce old eagle whose clipped pinions had suddenly discovered once again the power of flight. The men could not keep still, and they picked up the march, so that their voices rang out with:

  In freedom we’re born, and like sons of the brave, will never surrender, but swear to defend her, and scorn to survive if unable to save. …

  One deep, rich voice picked up the verse – joined then voice by voice, while the fifes lifted it and shrilled like a wild and savage Highland fling. It was then that the two regiments came forth, marching in an opposite direction to ours, so that the two files crossed and faced each other, while a thousand throats roared their defiance in a song we had not sung these many months past – and were heard in every house and hamlet for miles around, and heard by the men of the two regiments as we chanted:

  The tree which proud Haman for Mordecai reared,

  Stands recorded that virtue endangered is spared;

  The rogues, whom no bounds and no laws can restrain,

  Must be stripped of their honors and humbled again!

  The 5th and the 9th moved to cut us off, their officers riding behind them and shouting at them above the wild chant we maintained; but as we continued, the two regiments halted, and then a field gun was pressed through from behind, officers straining at the big, iron-bound wheels that men would not move, and Emil Horst holding a lighted match. Billy Bowzar and Jack Maloney and the Jew Levy ran toward them, Bowzar waving both his hands for silence, and Angus and I ran after them, and the lighted match waved back and forth like a torch. The singing died away, and the sudden silence was cut by a shrill voice screaming:

  Fire on them! Fire on them!

  We halted before their ranks, but MacGrath ran on, his musket clubbed, and as Horst dropped the match, he struck him on the side of the head and felled him like an ox.

  Fire on them! Fire on them! The voice shrieked.

  Now what in hell’s name are you doing there, Bowzar cried at them, when the whole Line is marching?

  This was heard, and a roar went up from our ranks, and our men called them out by name, and suddenly a thousand voices were calling:

  The Line is marching! The Line is marching!

  The two regiments broke; they went mad and wild, and when their officers cursed them, they pulled the officers from their saddles, beat them; and some they bayoneted; and the rest ran away, whipping their horses through the night. Two officers were slain there, and many more wounded, whereas in our own rising there had been no bloodshed at all. But it lasted only a few minutes; then it was over, and Bowzar’s great voice was heard, crying:

  Make room for the 5th! Make room for the 9th!

  The Line parted to allow the regiments to form in their places, soldiers embracing soldiers, laughing, crying, shouting – and presently the drums picked up the march again.

  I saw fleetingly Emil Horst staggering along, his hands bound, his face covered with blood. I saw Bowzar running toward the head of the Line, the tears streaming down his face as he ran. I saw Captain Oliver Husk lying face down in the snow, in a pool of blood.

  And then I joined the Line, which was marching off to its own strange destiny.

  PART FIVE

  Being an account of our first march, and of the fate of Emil Horst.

  WE MARCHED only four or five miles that first night, to a place nearby where two Virginia brigades had encamped the winter before. What huts they had built were made slovenly, in the way of some Southern folk, and they were rotted and of no real use, but there was cleared space and a stream for drinking and plenty of firewood; and the only tactic we had worked out for that first night was to get away from the Morristown encampment. Once we did that, we felt that sleep was the first item on the agenda; although all in all it was little enough sleep that we of the Committee got ourselves, then or later.

  In this march, there was only one incident of any importance, and that happened when we came to the first fork of the road; but already Billy Bowzar and the Jew Levy and Jack Maloney and Danny Connell had dropped out of sheer exhaustion, and they lay on a baggage cart, sleeping the sleep of the just, for all the rocking and lurching of the cart. A platoon of the 1st Regiment had intercepted a herd of cattle, a gift or a bribe or a sale from a wealthy patroon of Amboy to the officers; we left six beasts for the officers, and the rest, almost a hundred, we drove with us, and though they milled around the cart where Bowzar and the others slept, all their mooing disturbed them not at all. In the same way the women and children slept, but the little d
rummer lads stumbled along, keeping their rhythm going, and the men swung out their legs and sang as I had never known them to sing before.

  * * *

  Abner Williams and I led the column, and directly behind us marched Angus MacGrath and the Citizen-soldier Guard, which now numbered about one hundred men, and which was finally stabilized at exactly one hundred, in ten platoons of ten each with a platoon leader who bore the title of citizen-protector. Many of these names might appear pompous today, for it is a different time and a different era I write this in, but they were neither strange nor pompous to us; and we were filled with a mythology and a folklore of freedom, in which such names loomed like giant symbols. Each member of the Citizen-soldier Guard had a white rag of some kind knotted around his left arm; and later these became white arm bands, six inches wide, sewn into the sleeve above the elbow – and to this day I have the band, sewn onto my old, ragged coat, yellowed with age, but not the least, I think, of the few honors I retain from that ancient Revolution. Also, the members of the guard carried primed muskets, held at advance position with bayonets fixed.

  Behind them, Chester Rosenbank led the musicians of the Line, the fifers and drummers and trumpeters, and now two Scotsmen from the 5th Regiment, who had unearthed from somewhere kilts and pipes and who marched along, one on each side of the drummers, making the night awful with their wild Highland music – nor would they desist or keep time with us, for all of Rosenbank’s pleading.

  It is a night for the pipes, they said, and if you want harmony, tell yer damned drummers and fifers to hauld off!

  Behind them, came the regiments, flanked by the guns and interspersed with at least two hundred carts and wagons, and at the very end, a dozen of the citizen-soldiers to whip the stragglers into position.

  I do not know of any other occasion during the entire war when a camp was broken like this, during the middle of the night, with no prior preparation; yet for all of that, we marched well and the discipline was good. We had cast out all of our officers, but the sergeants knew their jobs; and the long and short of it was that we were, almost without exception, tough and hardened soldiers who did not have to think twice about doing a thing.

  When we came to the first fork in the road, the only incident of the march happened. There was a clearing in the woods with the moonlight flooding through, and on the branch of the road that led to the coast and toward the British, Wayne and a handful of the officers had stationed themselves, mounted, their haggard white faces set in desolate determination. We had planned to take the other fork anyway, but when I saw them, I halted the column, and Abner Williams went forward to speak with them. In the course of this, they asked him his name and rank, and that was how it came to be that in so many reports of the rising, Williams was mentioned as the leader. But in all truth, the whole Committee led the rebellion, and if credit should be given, Bowzar and Maloney and the Jew Levy deserve more than either Williams or myself.

  My rank is sergeant, answered Williams, and we are in no mood to stand here in the night chatting with you.

  Can ye stop that cursed skirling? Colonel Butler demanded.

  We have little to warm ourselves with, other than the music, said Williams, and if you would talk, talk over it.

  We have come to hold this road! shouted Wayne. Here we are, and you will have to shoot us down before you march here!

  Why should we march there?

  To join the British!

  A roar of anger went up from the men who were listening. Now the drummers and the fifers stopped, leaving only the skirling pipes; and MacGrath, all in a rage, advanced toward Wayne, crying:

  A plague on yer foul dreams! Ye would bespatter all with yer own dung!

  Grasping his arm, I pulled him away, telling him, Easy, easy, Angus – we have no truck with them and we have no words with them, and they will go their way and we will go ours.

  And I waved my hand for the march; the musicians picked it up, and the column went down the road toward Vealtown – and we marched without another halt until we came to the old Virginia encampment. There we made a quick, rough camp, letting the women and children sleep on in the carts, building a few fires for warmth – for the cold broke that night, and it was almost balmy outside – and raising tents only for the sick and wounded. I divided the Citizen-soldier Guard in half, and placed them on two-and-two sentry duty, and then, like most of the Line, I scraped the snow from a bit of ground, wrapped a cloak about me, and fell asleep so quickly that I have no clear memory of the process.

  I have a better memory, though, of being awakened in the sad, wet fog of the early dawn, with the feeling that I had only slept a moment, and with the feeling too of a day lost somewhere; for here it was but the morning of the second day of January in the New Year, yet in twenty-four hours I had lived lifetimes; and the old Jamie Stuart, the lad from the Western hill country, the cobbler’s apprentice, the gawking, freckled lad who had dared to love the Parson Bracken’s daughter – all of them were gone, and I was something else who was awakened by Billy Bowzar and told, as he shook me:

  Now come awake, Jamie – come now, Jamie! Would you be sleeping the whole blessed day away?

  Just an hour of it, I pleaded.

  You have had five good hours, Jamie. Come, lad, there is much to be done. We have a tiger by the tail, and it will be dancing and prancing all over us – and maybe a little bit of clawing too, and we on the Committee have become such theoreticians and such great ones for planning and scheming that it will do my heart good to know there’s a soldier standing by to do a soldier’s work, if it need be done.

  So spoke Billy Bowzar, who was a better soldier than I ever could be, and a better man too, as he showed in the end. But that was his way, and he could make you love him as I loved him that morning, standing up with every muscle in my body aching and throbbing. Yet the cold had broken, and the morning breeze was soft and mild, and from far off across the meadows came the screech of roosters and the doleful caw, caw, caw of the crows. The mist lay low in the valley where we had bivouacked; its smoky tendrils shifted over the men where they slept, and on every side, as far as one could see in that gray morning, the men of the Line lay haphazardly, a clump here, a single man there. The few tents raised the night before floated like strange boats on the sea of mist, and the cattle wandered among the men, nosing in the snow for grass. Far off, the sentries moved like ghosts, and somewhere a baby whimpered with that plaintive insistent sound that seems to have more of the crux of life in it than any other.

  Now come along, Jamie, said Billy Bowzar again; and I followed him, picking our way among the sleeping men to a large brigade tent which had been staked directly in the center of the encampment. The Stars and Stripes had been raised over it, for it seemed more fitting to the Committee that we should use this new banner, which had only come to us during the November of the past year, than any of the old ones, marked as they were with memories of whippings and hangings and the shame of our eternal retreats from the enemy; the two striped flags we had were never flown before, and, unless my memory fails me, this was the first occasion that Pennsylvania troops ever flew the flag of the United States.

  As we entered the tent, we were saluted by two members of the Citizen-soldier Guard, who were stationed on either side the doorway. I had a moment of shame, for while I slept much had been done; yet I realized that there was still enough for the doing. In the tent, three camp tables had been set up in a row, and a crow’s nest of candles ringed the tent pole. Around the table sat Jim Holt, Abner Williams, Leon Levy, Danny Connell and Jack Maloney. This time, it was Williams who was writing a long document, and as I entered, he laid down his quill and smiled wanly.

  Greetings, Jamie, he said, in his mild and cultured voice.

  He was a slim, soft-voiced man, college-educated, the son of a Protestant minister, strangely out of place among us, yet strangely liked and respected by the men. About thirty years old, he was a thoughtful person, holding matters inside himself, not easy to k
now, but coming out occasionally with strange statements indeed. He was a nonbeliever, not passively as so many were in those times, but militantly, as if God were a personal antagonist of his. At a later time we had a long talk, which I will put down in its place. Now he went on to say:

  Here are the orders of the day, Jamie, which we have decided upon. It will be up to you and the Guard to see that they are carried out.

  Read it aloud, said Jack Maloney.

  Billy Bowzar dropped into a chair to listen, and Jim Holt stuffed a corncob pipe with a mixture of grass and dried sheep dung, with a little tobacco to flavor it. Levy seemed to be dozing, and Danny Connell sat with his eyes closed, his legs sprawled, rubbing and scratching at his beard. I remained standing as Abner Williams read:

  The first General Orders of the Pennsylvania Line, issued by the Committee of Sergeants on this date of January 2nd, in the year 1781, in their names and also in the names of the citizen-soldiers of the Line …

  So it began, and when it was all finished, as you will see, Abner gave me a copy which I have preserved. Not the paper I took then, which fell apart from usage, but a copy which Abner gave to Billy Bowzar, who held it until we were together in York village and which I left with my sweet Molly Bracken and which I have before me today. Thus I am able to copy the words exactly rather than from memory, yet they are the same as Abner read in the tent that morning. There were twelve Orders, as follows:

  1. The expulsion of Officers shall be maintained, and all authority is vested in the Committee of Sergeants, until a representative Congress of the regiments shall decide otherwise. However, any regiment shall have the right to recall its representative sergeant and appoint another in his place. No member of the Line is to hold any converse with an Officer, and such converse shall be regarded as grounds for expulsion from the Line.

  2. The Committee of Sergeants shall have the power of court-martial in all offenses against the security of the Line or the People of the United Colonies.