by Howard Fast
The Committee, he said – his solemn, German face owlish and regretful, his little blue eyes watering behind his spectacles – the Committee has asked me to report on the state of our supplies; I humbly submit the report.
Speak up, Chester! said Dwight Carpenter, and the schoolmaster looked at him reproachfully as he removed his glasses and wiped them with a rag of cloth. He had for his report some scraps of paper, and now he assembled these in front of him, squinted through his spectacles, cleared his throat and began to speak. He was not quite like anyone else in the brigades, but then, I may ask myself who was? From one or another of the states, they might have been cut from a whole cloth, but we were a union of difference, of distances, of extremes; and this German schoolmaster, who could sit for hours, dreaming over his flute and Johann Sebastian Bach, and would spend hours more teaching our fifers counterpoints and harmonies, was a very good soldier indeed and one of those who had enlisted in the first Pennsylvania regiment organized in Philadelphia in March of 1775. But soldiering had not made him other than he was before, and he spoke to us as he would to a classroom, explaining a painful and unhappy problem.
Considering first the question of ammunition, he said, I can be most explicit. We have at present in the whole encampment two thousand, seven hundred and twenty-two men – that is today. Our previous counts – well, they have not been wholly accurate. In this, I include the drummer boys and the riflemen, but not the forty-three men who are in the hospital; because when I discussed that with Andrew MacPherson, he insists they must be left here if we move. Now we have, all told, fourteen thousand and thirty musket balls, less than five rounds to a man even if you exclude the riflemen and the gunners. With rifle shot, we are better off, with almost seventy pellets to each rifle, and we have gunpowder to the amount of twenty-one hundred pounds. This does not include the contents of the individual powder boxes, since I have no way of determining that. But that is not good either, for until New Year’s Day, no regular inspection was made of the powder boxes, and a good deal was used for flinting and for purging sick stomachs too. This, however, we have put a stop to. It is my estimation, nevertheless, that we have not enough powder in the boxes for the balls, unless they are undershot. We have, for the six guns, forty iron balls and twelve stone balls. We also have fifty-two rounds of grapeshot, which makes exactly one hundred and four cannon rounds, and for that, you see, there is plenty of powder for undershotting but not for dueling. But since we have so few balls, we cannot go dueling anyway. The grape can be recast for musketry, but that would leave us open, and the men would not like it. We have neither bar shot nor chain shot. That is the way it is with the ammunition.
This finished the first part of his report. We should have known, but we didn’t know, and I saw many a face go pale as we listened.
But I myself, said Levy, counted eight hundred bars of lead. In the hospital alone, there were three hundred bars.
We never finished rendering those – and the rest we left. Just as we left the four dismounted cannon at the redoubt at Mt. Kemble, and two hundred cannon balls and fifty bags of grape with them.
If they are still at Morristown – began O’Toole.
No, no, said Jack Maloney. The Yankee soldiers are already there. If we should raid the place …
His voice trailed away, and no one else spoke. Once again, Rosenbank cleared his throat.
As for food – he said – we are no better. We have meat and flour for two days and corn meal for a third day. That’s all – and what we have is only because the farmers brought it to us and gave it to us. We have no money to buy, and the farming men here in the neighborhood – no matter what they feel, they cannot support three thousand men. If they give us all their food, what will they do then with no money in exchange? We have eleven tents that are any use; the rest we had to cut up for shoes and overalls, but they were no good anyway. All the men are shod, but not for marching. For perimeter duty all right, but not for marching. We have some cows, but if we eat them we can’t milk them. But we have no fodder, so I thought I would trade with the farm folk for corn meal. That will give us enough meal for two days more, but then we will have a lot of sickness if we eat only corn meal. We have twenty-three oxen and forty-seven horses, and if we leave the wounded here, we can begin to kill the oxen; then we can burn the carts for firewood, but that is like eating our fingers to feed our bellies, like eating the horses, which would be like eating our feet to feed our bellies … Our feet, our fingers … I’ve thought all I can about it, I don’t know what to do. There is food on the farms, I guess, but if we should take one grain of it, well, that would be the end – yes? It would be the end?
It would be the end, Levy answered. One chicken, one ear of corn – it would be the end.
Anyway, it’s the same, someone said.
All right, Bowzar nodded, smiling. Thank you, Mr. Rosenbank – giving him that term because he was a scholarly man and deserving it – we are very grateful. Will you stretch the food as far as you can? Don’t let the men go hungry, but don’t waste food.
Food I would not waste, Sergeant Bowzar.
No. That’s true. Well, we thank you. We are grateful to you. Maybe someday, if we ever have medals, we will be able to give you a medal.
A medal would be nice, said the schoolmaster thoughtfully as he rose to leave. When I go back to school teaching, it will be nice to wear a medal. Good night, he said. Good night.
He walked out, breathing on his spectacles and polishing them and rubbing his eyes. He will be weeping when he is outside, I thought.
Medals, said old Scottsboro.
Well, gentlemen? Bowzar smiled.
Medals, old Scottsboro mumbled.
If the British – said Levy, almost to himself – are marching on us from the east, and the Yankees from the north and the gentry from the south, all our problems will be solved, no? I won’t mind a finish the way a soldier should finish, the way the Polish man finished.
Time for that, said Bowzar. There is the Jersey Line still, and nobody knows what they will do …
But before the night was over, we knew that too. All things came to us that day. Johnny Laurens came to us in Nassau Hall, knocking on the door and then smiling as he walked in, his greatcoat open, his youthful, handsome face flushed and healthy. He stood strong and tall and confident, looking at the twelve of us as we sat around the table, never bothering to remove his cocked hat, for we were twelve small, shrunken men who had prodded our dreams too much – whereas he stood there as one who had never overmuch had the need of dreaming.
Forgive the Jew Gonzales, he said, for I talked him into bringing me here, after he had intimated that you might meet all night long. What I have to say will not wait all night long.
What have you to say, now that you are here? Billy Bowzar asked him coldly and bitterly.
Only this: that Joseph Reed, the President himself of Pennsylvania Country, will come here and talk with you and treat with you on the terms General Wayne laid out. I am empowered to say that – your terms and General Wayne’s terms. You must take this or leave this.
And what be them terms? asked old Scottsboro.
Three main points – the rest can be settled if you talk with the President. The points are these. One: No reprisals to be taken against any member of the Line. Two: All soldiers whose enlistment has expired to be discharged. Three: All proven bounties to be paid.… On your part, you must pledge the discipline and will of the men who remain.
That is very little you give us, said Bowzar slowly.
Or a great deal, depending how you look at it.
We will let you know tomorrow, Bowzar said.
Laurens smiled, nodded, and then, as by a sudden impulse, saluted. He turned on his heel then and left.…
The salute lasts in my mind. We were finishing, but a brigade officer of the Line saluted us; and I sometimes wonder whether if Johnny Laurens had not laid down his life so soon, we might not have been remembered a little better – and then
I wonder why we should want a better memory. What is the memory for all such things as we did? Johnny Laurens had a smile and a gentle manner and the juice of life ran strong in him, but there was never a moment’s doubt where he stood. They stood in one place and we stood in another, and so it was until the end, and I must get on with the end, for I have told much and yet there is much more to tell.
Leaving the Committee to talk, I went out into the night and on my rounds. Filled with a great restlessness, I could not remain there with them and listen to them debating what could not be resolved; for when all is said and done, they were good, brave and strange men, not proud but filled with the sense of freedom, and thereby their debating came to nothing at all. If they had been adventurers, they could have embarked on some wild and terrible adventure; but though they came from all parts of the world to fight in the foreign brigades, they had come to have a deep love for the land on which they fought, for over many a year they had sealed a pact on it in blood. So they who led an army had no place to lead it – and they talked on and on, and at the back of their minds was the thought that surely they were not singular, and if the Jersey Line rose to join them, and then the Connecticut Line, could not the Revolution go on, in terms of the simple folk who did the fighting?
In a sense, they were not wrong; the bird that pecked in us pecked in others – even though we did not know it; even among the Yankees, for the Massachusetts troops had put their names to a petition, laying out the same demands that we had. And their officers responded more cleverly than ours: they marched; men who march have less time for brooding than those who sit still, and though their feet bled and though their limbs froze, the Yankee troops marched on and on through the forests of the North. Southward they marched until word came that the Midland armies had done strange and frightening things. But this we did not know, and we had no way of knowing it until that night, when, in my restlessness and loneliness, I walked from point to point on the perimeter of our Princeton defenses.
What a cold night that was – when a twenty-two-year-old lad walked among the defenses of an army he and a few others led! The curious Midland midwinter thaw had vanished, and the mud had turned into steel, with a thousand knifelike edges. As the cold increased, I heard that snapping, brittle winter sound, the small agony of the land’s surface, and I drew closer the blanket I had thrown over my coat. I was out of my thoughts now; I went from fire to fire, exchanging a few words here and there in the easy way of men who have known each other a long time. At each place, it was All’s well – but well only because no enemy was fool enough to come through those frozen woods and fields at night. And then I came to the bridge, where the two Jersey men were, half-frozen, crouching so close to the flames that they singed the edges of their clothes. Oh, like great, beaten dogs they were, with their dirt and their beards and the misery in their eyes.
As I came into the firelight, they looked up at me, their mouths full of toasted corn bread that crumbed over their beards; it is not pleasant, when your belly is full, to watch starving men eat.
Have ye no rum, Sergeant? one of them said.
These are Jersey men, Jamie, said Prukish, who was in command of the post.
Jersey men – said someone else – and the look of them! But they have had it bitter, coming all the way down from Pompton, where the Jersey Line rose up against its officers.
The Jersey Line rose! I cried.
Aye – one of them mumbled – aye, Sergeant, that is the truth of it. The Jersey Line rose, God help us.… A little rum would be a pleasant thing – he said, looking from face to face, stuffing his mouth again with the corn bread – ye have none? No. Well, that’s the way it goes …
I shook his shoulder. What’s this about the Line? I demanded. You hear me?
He nodded, and the tears from his bloodshot eyes ran down over his dirty cheeks.
He’s a sick man, Sergeant, said the other.
That’s right. I be a sick man now.
Talk up! I shouted at the other.
You got no business shouting at me, Sergeant. I came a long way, a powerful lot of walking with the cold weather on. I seen some bad things too. So I say to myself, with them Pennsylvania lads, I’ll just rest easy and sweet.
Did the Jersey Line rise up? I asked softly.
Sure, Sergeant. They rose up and they was put down. They brought down the Yankee men, and the Yankee men shot us. They just stood there, them Yankee men, with the tears rolling down their faces, and when the order was given, they shot our lads. So that was that with the Jersey Line, Sergeant, and we two of us, we think, We’ll off and tell the Pennsylvania lads, which is necessary anyway. You wouldn’t never shoot us and we wouldn’t never shoot you, but who would have thought the Yankee men would have done it? Not the Yankee men themselves, if you ask me, because they stood and cried like children when our leaders was brought out to be shot down. But they done it anyhow.
His partner, meanwhile, had rolled over close to the fire and gone to sleep. So close he lay that I could see the hairs of his beard begin to curl and crackle, so I kicked him awake and pushed him away.
Come both of you with me to the Committee, I said.
We done enough walking tonight, Sergeant.
Come now, come now, I answered gently, and there you’ll find a warm place, and maybe a glass of hot toddy too. A blazing fire ye will find, and tallow candles stuck in sticks, while here in the open you can never be warm. So come along now, lads.
Thus they came with me, forcing each step that took them to Nassau Hall, and while they walked they told me. There was not much to tell, for it was essentially our own tale with all gone wrong with them that had gone right with us. There were many differences, of which I will tell you; for the Jersey Line, while it was a Midland body with many foreign folk in it, was not like our Pennsylvania army, just as no force on all the continent was like ours. There were only two regiments in the Jersey Line, the 1st New Jersey, with two hundred and thirty-nine on its rolls, and the 2nd New Jersey, with just a little less than that – but it was not only in numbers they differed. They had nothing like our Committee and they could not make theirs into something like it, for there were not in the Jersey regiments men who had fought through every engagement from Boston to today, like the grim and knowing veterans of the 1st Pennsylvania, who had been made into sergeants and corporals for our whole Line. Also, while the men of the Jersey Line had dwindled, they were overburdened with officers – one for every four men – and their condition of sickness and starvation was even worse than ours. For all of that, they had driven the gentry from their ranks and were on their own under their sergeants when the Yankee men came down, and that broke their hearts. The leading folk of their Committee were taken out and the Yankee men formed firing squads and shot them down – with the tears streaming, they shot them down; and these two had come on to tell us.
So I took them to Nassau Hall to talk with Bowzar and Maloney and Williams and the rest. There I took them, but I did not go in myself.
I knew what the outcome would be. Regardless of how they talked or how much, we of Pennsylvania were alone – alone we were, at the end of the road. Now we would talk to Reed and make terms with him, and the dreams we had dreamed would be no more than fanciful desires.
It might take days or weeks from now on; but to all real purposes, the rising was finished.
PART NINE
Being an account of the leave-taking of the foreign brigades, how each went his separate way, and of what befell Jack Maloney and myself.
THUS IT CAME about that in time we made our peace with the officers, through Joseph Reed, the President of the Commonwealth; for we were alone now, and no place to go and no future of our making that we could comprehend. But it was no such peace as the Jersey Line made; even at the end, they took no liberties with the foreign brigades, but kept their word – all men who had served more than three years were free to leave if they chose to leave. The terms were our terms, but they were terms for departure not
for remaining. Our terms for remaining were that we should choose our own officers, and that we should be clothed like human beings and fed and paid; this they would not or could not accept, but our Committee had an obligation to the men and the men were sick to their hearts with service under the gentry for the gentry’s way of fighting a war.
So, still holding the Line intact and under arms, we paraded once again and formed up foursquare on the meadow at Princeton, on a cold winter afternoon with the snow clouds building up in the east. In a way, that was the end, although there is more to tell that must be told; for there at Princeton was the last time the regiments, the riflemen and the artillery company of the Pennsylvania Line stood together at dress formation to listen to the drums beating and see the old regimental flags flying and hear the order of the day read out. There were tears in many an eye before that afternoon was over, for the foreign brigades were something and they had made something, and now they would be no more. And many a lad was there like myself who knew little else but the camp and the march, and had no home to go to and neither kith nor kin. With the cold east wind blowing, we stood to attention, and then at our ease with our captured muskets grounded, listening to Billy Bowzar. He had climbed up on top of a caisson, and there he stood, legs spread, hands on hips in that manner we knew so well, his curly red hair blowing in the wind, his square face reassuring and becalming; for you listened to Bowzar and heeded him, in battle or out of battle; he was a calm man and a knowledgeable one.
My comrades, he said, when you chose myself and the others to be the Committee of Sergeants, you had the power to keep us or replace us, as you saw fit. You kept us every one, and for this we are glad. On our part, we tried to serve you in what ways we knew, and we served you as best we could. There were adventurous things we might have done, and if we had done them you might have followed us, but we reasoned that a man’s life is not something to adventure with unless the cause is worth while. Therefore, we sought for a way in which the Line could serve your cause and the cause of our country and its folk – and yet remain as we were, with discipline but without the officer gentry. How many hours we sat together seeking such a way, I need not tell you, for that you know. We found no way. When we heard that the Jersey Line would rise up, we thought perhaps the whole of the land would join us; but that is over, and there is no way left without shedding the blood of our own people. That would be sorry business, to turn brother against brother, and that we rejected. We were right in rejecting it – but we did not do so out of our weakness, but out of our strength!
