The Proud and the Free

by Howard Fast

  But he paid no more attention to me, going on with his conversation with Laurens, who now carefully avoided my eyes; and I walked to the big tent and entered. There Levy sat at a camp table, with the journal of the Line, that old, weather-beaten, leather-bound book which we had treasured so carefully through our rising, open in front of him – wherein he was composing the details of the day’s march; and he looked up as I came in, his thin face a little more worn, a little more lined, his hair streaked with gray, but otherwise no different, and he squinted at me because my back was to the light.

  Hello? he inquired.

  I walked over and showed him my face, and a slow smile came and wrinkled him all over, and he stretched out both his hands for mine.

  Jamie Stuart, and God be praised for keeping you sound and healthy.

  And how goes it with the Line, Leon Levy?

  This and that, Jamie Stuart. Some are dead and some are gone, and now there is a great campaign brewing in the Southland, but where will men be found to fight it? The people are tired of war.

  You look tired, my friend.

  We get tired. But what should I say about you, Jamie Stuart? You are different. Are you happy here in this pretty place, and are you with the beautiful lass whose name is Molly? Is it a good life here?

  It’s a good enough life, I answered him, but I am here to enlist in the Line again.

  To that he made no reply, but looked at me searchingly for a long while; and then he nodded and got the papers and prepared them.

  Sign your name here, lad, he said.

  I signed my name, and once again I was a soldier of the commonwealth, and then I went and drew my overalls and put them on, and then I reported back to Butler and Laurens.

  So you see, I have a long memory, said Butler.

  I stood at attention and said nothing.

  An astonishing long memory, and your overalls are torn, Stuart.

  They were issued to me this way, sir, and I have not had time to mend them.

  And dirty.

  Nor to wash them, sir.

  I said before, specifically, Stuart, that you were to address me as Colonel Butler.

  I am sorry, Colonel Butler.

  Sorrow, Stuart, is not an admirable quality in a soldier. Discipline is more becoming, and it seems to me that twenty-five lashes would wipe out your sorrow and instill a decent regard for soldierly qualities. Do you agree?

  He wanted me to plead or protest, and I would have died before I did either. Laurens stood beside him, silent, but watching me narrowly; and I knew that he would not interfere, nor did I desire him to.

  Do you agree, Stuart? Butler pressed.

  You are my commanding officer, Colonel Butler, I answered him.

  We will add five lashes for insolence. A round thirty. Have you anything to say to that, Stuart?

  Nothing.

  You are taciturn, Stuart. Never were there a more loud-mouthed, dirty-spoken lot of unhanged cutthroats than the men of the 11th Regiment, but they have all become admirably meek and silent. I am pleased to find you no exception, Mr. Stuart.

  So there was my introduction to the Line, and they did it properly, that same evening, as the sun was setting, drawing up the men to parade and laying on the thirty lashes with the drums beating and with a fine concourse of townsfolk watching from the road. As an evidence of humor and understanding, a short man and a tall man were instructed to handle the whips, so that Kabanka and Levy were forced to administer my punishment; and then the same two, when I was finished and fainting with pain, carried me gently to the hospital tent, where Andrew MacPherson rubbed bear fat into my back and Jack Maloney and Billy Bowzar tried to cheer me.

  I am cheerful enough, I said evenly, and happy enough, so leave me alone.

  And because they understood me and knew me, they left me alone there with my own thoughts and the strong, soothing fingers of the barber.…

  Why did they whip you? Molly Bracken asked me, when I returned to tell her what I had done and that I would live at the manse no longer.

  Because they have long memories, and they have not forgotten what happened in January, I answered her, looking at the fine, ripe wholeness of her, looking at the sunlight which came through the window and lay upon her hair. She sat in her parlor facing me, her hands in her lap, her back straight, a strong, contained woman and like a rock to my eyes; and I, who would be twenty-three years old in a day or two, and old enough and proper enough to have a house somewhere and a wife to care for it and children to raise up, stood in the coarse canvas overalls that marked a man apart from the whole world.

  And as I stood there, looking at her with fondness and wonder and a certain separateness too, a hint of the logic of my life came to me; for my youth had passed away, as it does at one moment or another for all men, and the cold consciousness of death faced me and I faced it and recognized it and greeted it equitably and fairly – there in that sweet and sunlit country parlor, with its soft olive-greens and pale blues that were so much a part of that era. Well and gently do I remember it, the country furniture that was already old with the satiny quality of our good white pine, shaped by German cabinetmakers already dead and moldering in their graves, the hand-hooked rugs, the small, high windows with their diamond-shaped panes of glass, not the glass you see today, but the glass of an earlier time that played with light and made an enchantment out of it, and the spring sunlight all over the place, on the pewter, on the broad, pegged boards of the floor, on my Molly’s hair and on the Dutch maids who danced all over the wallpaper. In there, in that quiet place in the old manse, I began to understand the forces which drove me and the necessity which I recognized and obeyed. No man is anointed, but in many men the blood flows and the heart throbs only if they seek the freedom of their own kind; and then this freedom is not an abstraction but a liberation for themselves from their own chains. It is the salt with which they savor their food, and without it they would starve.

  So when Molly Bracken said to me, Were you not ashamed that the whole town should stand there and see you whipped? I was able to answer, This was not something for me to be ashamed for.

  Could they punish you for doing no wrong?

  What is wrong for them is not wrong for me, I told her. Do you understand that?

  How can I understand that, when I understand you so little? You love me and yet you hate me, and when you look at me a part of you is here and a part of you is elsewhere. What honor is there in a dirty pair of overalls – and why should it be you when the whole world is content to abide in its place?

  Because I am not content.

  And you will never be content, Jamie, never.

  But I will, I answered her, I will, Molly, and you must pity me because I will.

  Who ever pitied you, Jamie Stuart?

  No one, I said, no one. But you must.

  Why? Why?

  Because I love you the way no one else will ever love you, and I can’t have you.

  It’s a love that comes of talk and nothing else, Jamie Stuart, and your heart is not involved – for when a man loves a woman, he marries her and takes her for himself.

  I will not do that.

  Because you cannot, she said bitterly.

  Because this world is no damned good as it is, I cried, and the bread I eat is too salty for me to swallow! What cursed indifference there is in this place; and for five years I fought for the freedom of my country, and this is my country where my mother and my father died as bondslaves, chattels, flesh they were to buy and sell, and I will not be bought and I will not be sold, for there is something in me that is as proud as any man who ever lived and there is something in my comrades that is proud too, and in the gentry who lead us there is also a pride, so I will follow them and fight for them and take their lashes across my back – because now it is their turn and I move a step with them, but someday it will be my turn, even if I am dead and rotten in the earth, someday it will be my turn! But that you cannot understand, for in this cursed place there i
s no pride and only a crawling the way animals crawl – and that is the way I crawled into the kirk to plead with God to allow me to live forever!

  To allow me to live forever, I said to her, and to hell with that! I will not crawl and abase myself and scrabble for myself and only myself and cheat my neighbor and find an apprentice whose hands I can live from while I starve him and cut muskets to sell a government which never pays or thanks the men who die with those muskets in their hands or apprentice myself to a church and pray while other men fight and die for freedom – no, thank you, I want none of it! I want no such life forever! But every one of my comrades who laid down his life, every one of them lives a little bit in myself, and in that way myself will live and can never die, because my blood is here and mixed into the earth of this land. And this will not be like other lands because the foreigns came here and died here, and that can never be wiped out – never! It’s a better immortality than the other kind!

  And is that what you believe?

  It is what I believe.

  Then God help you, she said, because I cannot.

  She was crying now, and I turned up her face and looked into her eyes.

  I was wrong, I told her, in what I said before. Never pity me.

  I never pitied you, Jamie Stuart, but you will pity me.

  I will not.

  Promise me, she said.

  That I promise you: that I will not. It will mean such a lonely waiting – a year or five years or ten years –

  It will mean such a lonely waiting, she whispered.

  And will you wait?

  If you want me to, she said. If you want me to, I will wait – or if you want me to, I will go with you and live by the camp the way the other women do.

  Then never cry no more, and you I will never pity but only love. For once I could not love, and there was no love in the boy you walked the fields with and picked flowers with and lay in the grass with and taught to read the printed word and taught to speak gently and softly the way you speak so gently and softly, my beloved heart, my darling. I am learning to love. I am learning to be strong and whole, the way a man should be, and I will be that way when I return to you.

  When you return …

  When I return, I whispered, when I return, my dear.

  And then I held her tightly in my arms, and on my back I felt her hands, pressing against the open welts that the whips had left.

  And that was in May, ten days before we marched out of York village to the South, and of those last days I must now tell and then make the finish – for though we little knew it then, we marched from York village to the last great battles of the war.

  I must tell of Jack Maloney, who was in many ways like a brother to me, and few enough men like him there were; if I paid a price for my part in the rising, he paid it tenfold, day in and day out. There was a particular hatred for Jack Maloney, because he was a soldier in a way that few enough of the Continentals were, and it was through him, and a couple of hundred like him who had deserted the British at the very beginning of the war and came into the foreign brigades, that we became singular among the armies of the states. In his lifetime, he had forgotten more of soldiering than most of our officers ever knew, and for this they could not forgive him. His discipline, his exactitude, his bayonet which always sparkled like it was made of silver, his overalls, clean and neat always, his face shaven in field or camp, his manner, his bearing like a king, his inner calm which was never shaken – all of these combined in a goal which they must conquer to prove themselves. But it was no easy thing to conquer Jack Maloney, and he took what they gave. I think only I knew what it took for him to stand up to the cane and the swordflat; and he said to me once:

  Jamie, we should not have taken them back. When this is over, they will cast us away like dogs.

  That’s done with, I told him. That’s over and done with, just as the old Line is done with.

  How much can a man stand?

  What he has to, he can stand.

  It was about then that our recruits began to come in, a handful of raw lads from the militia, some sailors from Philadelphia, some Naygers of the Virginias and some riflemen from the back country. One by one, the brigade officers returned, each with a handful of men, until the new recruits numbered a little better than three hundred, and they were formed into two regiments and kept carefully apart from the rest of us, of the old foreigns. Day after day they were drilled, in a hurried attempt to make some semblance of soldiers out of them, and the very haste of the officers made us think that the Southern campaign would be joined soon. Often it occurred to me that this forming them into separate regiments was the best proof of the absolute incompetency of our officers, since without question they would bolt at the first volley of ball or the first load of grape; but afterwards I learned that our gentry were by no means incompetent in their plans.

  Soon after this, all leaves were canceled, and I saw no more of Molly Bracken. Pickets and sentries were drawn from the militia, and the camp was closely guarded as final preparations were made for a long march. And then, a few days before we left, Anthony Wayne arrived, bringing with him four cannon, an artillery company of some sixty men and a small baggage train, which held a few hundred pounds of corn meal and a great deal of coopered powder and shot bar. The artillery company were all of them strange men, and many of them had the voice and appearance of Yankees. They encamped about half a mile from us, on the edge of York Common, and we saw nothing of them before we marched.

  The day after Wayne arrived, the two regiments of the foreign brigades were drawn up for parade inspection. Having no trumpeters, we were awakened before dawn by the drums beating us to arms, and we turned out in the smoky, wet morning with full equipment and knapsacks on. No one knew what this meant, whether we were about to march or whether there was some trouble in the area or whether this was an ordinary parade. If the last were so, it was exceedingly early in the morning, without even sufficient light to allow for any kind of proper inspection.

  The only officers present at the beginning were four captains and seven lieutenants, and they ran back and forth as we turned out of our brushwood shelters and our tents, shouting at us to double our time and bend our legs and laying their canes across our shoulders with lusty abandon. Captain Gresham, a burly lad who had come to us two years ago from the Light Horse Troop, went at Jack Maloney who was crouched down lacing his overall leggings, and told him to stand up like a man and get to hell into ranks.

  I’m still dressing, answered Maloney, standing up.

  Dress before you turn out, damn you! cried Gresham, jabbing his cane into Jack Maloney’s belly.

  Mind the cane, protested Maloney, mildly enough. The ranks are still forming.

  And mind your lip! roared Gresham. I will have none of your damned insolence! he cried, lacing out with the cane and catching little Jack Maloney on the side of the head, so that he went down like a tenpin.

  As Maloney struggled to rise, Angus MacGrath thundered like a bull and charged the captain, who turned to run. But MacGrath seized him, raised him in his hands and shook him like a puppy until he dropped his cane; and, still as with a puppy, Angus cast him away, picked up his cane, and broke it into pieces. Now the other officers came running, drawing their swords, and it well might have been murder and revolt then and there, had not Maloney himself called:

  Stand to ranks! Stand to ranks!

  The drummer boys took his hint and beat to parade as manfully as they could, until the roll of their drums echoed like morning thunder – while we ran on the double and fell in. In less time than it takes to tell it, our regimental lines were formed, and we were each of us standing to arms and looking straight ahead. Gresham had picked himself up and the other officers were grouped around him, talking excitedly in low tones. And still it was before sunrise, and only now was it light enough to see anything clearly. Now the drummers stopped their playing, and the officers came toward us in a group. Jack Maloney stood alongside of me, and I squeezed h
is arm and whispered to him:

  Easy, lad, and easy does it. You’re an old soldier.

  God damn them, Jamie!

  God damn them, I agreed. God damn them to hell and back again, but they are the officers and we are the men of the Line, and that’s that. So easy does it.

  Now the officers were standing in front of the ranks and about a dozen yards away, the eleven of them in a close group and still whispering to each other. The two regiments were side by side and four ranks deep, and making a right angle at the end of our parade were the drummers and fifers, with Chester Rosenbank standing in front of them, his face white and sick – for there was something terrible and brooding upon this wet field on this cold May morning, and there was something that all of us knew and yet none of us knew. And I said to myself, We are not the Line and the Line is dead and dissolved, and we are naked here. And I was afraid the way I had not been afraid in a long, long time. Then the first burst of morning sunlight – not the sun yet but just the light – cut into the gloom, and the night mists fell until we stood knee-deep in a sea white that slowly broke up and rolled away; and then all around us was the gracious Pennsylvania countryside, bathed in the pure morning light and cleansed with the pure morning air. The crows rose from the meadows and sadly bid the night farewell and a rooster somewhere sang the morning in. The mists fell away from the tents, and from the other end of the encampment we heard the drums beating to parade, beating up the militia and the recruits. All this we could see on that green and golden morning: the distant figures of the new recruits, the horses grazing in the pasture we had made, the morning birds in the air – the intolerable sweetness of a new day still unmarred.

  The officers came toward us. Captain Purdy stepped forward from the group and called:

  Stand to arms!

  We stiffened and presented.

  MacGrath!

  Angus MacGrath stepped forward and waited.

  Advance six paces, soldier MacGrath! snapped Purdy, and in answer to his command Angus counted off the six paces and stood waiting. Watching him, I wondered again as I had wondered so often in the past what force commanded us and moved us; for here was this miserable little man, Purdy, hurling his orders at the great Scottish dignity of Angus MacGrath, Angus MacGrath who was like a mountain of endurance and courage and forbearance, tireless and simple and wise in a manner Purdy would never know and could never know. Yet because we were steeled in the years of discipline, we responded and obeyed.