Washington and Caesar

by Christian Cameron

  “What’s in front of you?” asked Jeremy, scribbling on a little pad.

  “Militia and some rifles. Perhaps more rifles now than there were.” Caesar looked at Martin, who nodded.

  “I think they are just waiting for us to leave so they can get in these woods and start firing on the camp,” said Martin.

  “Rotate another company out here so we can get powder and water,” said Caesar. Martin was proving to have a head on his shoulders. He nodded at Caesar’s pronouncement. Jeremy handed them his canteen, which was full, and another.

  “All I could bring. Lieutenant Martin, Captain Stewart says that this is not going well, and that the column has been very slow to leave camp.”

  Martin nodded slowly.

  “I think the attacks by the grenadiers are an attempt to force the enemy to break contact so that the rest of us can withdraw in something like safety. Captain Stewart thinks the grenadiers have gone too far, and so does Major Simcoe.” He paused as if he feared he was saying too much. “The Jaegers are right there behind you, where we started this morning. If you have to pull back, at least they can fire over you once you are in the low ground.”

  Martin looked up at him.

  “I take it that means the light infantry are going forward. To rescue the grenadiers?”

  “It could mean that, sir. I’m sorry to be obtuse, but it could mean that.”

  Caesar leaned in. “But Jeremy doesn’t feel he can say, because it wasn’t in the message he was given, but rather in something he overheard, am I right?”

  Jeremy smiled. “Just so, Julius.”

  Martin shook his head. “We need water and powder.” He sounded worried. As Jeremy rode off, Caesar touched his arm and smiled. Martin brightened up immediately.

  “You just remind me if I forget, Sergeant,” he said in his official voice, immediately cheerful and businesslike.

  “You’re doing very well, if I may say, sir.”

  “Why thankee, Julius Caesar. Thank you for that.”

  Because they weren’t running, they could make their water last, and the shade of the trees was a relief that many soldiers on that field would have killed for, but the heat grew until it seemed the principal enemy. Men stopped firing because they lacked the energy to load, and everyone was wet with sweat. Caesar and Martin moved constantly and were the most tired because of it, but the action was never anything but an exchange of shots at extreme range. Jeremy’s first horse was their only casualty except for a graze to Angus’s head that ruined his hat and made him proud as Lucifer.

  But it went on and on. The smoke simply sat on them and seemed to do nothing to drive off the incessant whine of the mosquitoes. They lay in their sweat and the stink of their powder, coughing at the heavy air and eaten by the bugs, worse than any day Caesar could remember in the swamp.

  The firing began to rise again to the south, but the smoke and haze of the day now hid the hill where the grenadiers were all together. Moments later, though, Major Simcoe came riding up on his big gray charger almost white with lather and dust. He had a bugler behind him and two junior officers, all in the dark green jackets and blue facings of the Queen’s Rangers.

  “Damn, it’s hot,” he said when he met Martin. He waved to Caesar, and this time Caesar brought Fowver so that they would all have the same story. He waited until they were near him and then unrolled a little map drawn on the back of a letter.

  “I think they are trying to pin the rearguard here,” he pointed at the hill, “and then get around to attack us here and here,” he pointed at the woods they were in and another opposite, where the Highlanders were, “to cut us all off and force our surrender. I think that General Clinton decided this morning to attack here,” he pointed back to the hill that the grenadiers had taken, “to break up the attack and give us time to get free.”

  Caesar followed it all. It was the most spread-out battle he had been part of, and it seemed to move at a glacial pace, perhaps because of the heat. And even with a map and Simcoe’s explanation, it was too confused a battle for him. They seemed to be defending in two directions and attacking in a third.

  “It seemed to work, and then something has spurred the rebels to another effort, and I think they are building to an attack right here.”

  “Where are the light infantry?”

  “Gone off to support the grenadiers.”

  Caesar looked at the camp they had left that morning, now nearly deserted. Simcoe pointed him off to the right, where a column of green-coated men was approaching.

  “I want you to launch an attack here and try and get a prisoner. I’ll move into these positions behind you. Then you fall back through me, get some water and powder and join the lights of Colonel Robinson’s Loyal Americans as a reserve with the Jaegers and my rifle company.” He pointed to the rear, where green-coated men from the Loyalist regiments were moving into the shade.

  Martin nodded to Caesar and he had his whistle to his lips in an instant. Fowver ran for the head of his platoon.

  It was like a repeat of the early morning. The enemy fired sporadically but wouldn’t stand, and the Guides moved forward to a patch of brushy ground by a little stream just a few hundred paces away. The move took them five minutes. Their reward was a trickle of cold water in the stream, and Caesar ignored Simcoe’s wave that they should return immediately while he had Willy and Jim filling canteens at a basin in the little stream. The canteens had narrow necks and they didn’t fill fast, and their situation in the patch of brush was too precarious to allow them all to fill at the same time, so the corporals moved up and down, risking their lives in the new volume of fire from across the hazy flats. As soon as the last canteen was filled, Caesar gave the signal and they all fired together, not to hit anything but to make a solid screen of smoke that hung, concealing them for a minute or more, and then they ran back as quickly as a day’s fierce heat and too little water allowed.

  Their wood was full of green-coated men in tall helmets. Caesar knew a few of the men in the Queen’s Rangers and he accepted a little cigar from a corporal who had just taken a long pull at his canteen. Mr. Martin was explaining the frustrating nature of their attack to one of Colonel Robinson’s men, a black.

  “There’s no cover to approach them,” he said, and Simcoe just nodded.

  “Go on back to camp and rest. I’ll send for you if I need you.”

  They crossed the long field to the camp area, deserted except for the other soldiers in reserve. The Highlanders looked fierce, still capable, but they were so red in the face that Caesar worried for them. The handful of mounted troops were watering their horses all the time, and the Jaegers lay in the sun and burned, their pale complexions betraying them. Caesar kept looking up the ridge to the place where the grenadiers and now the lights had gone. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d gone into action without Captain Stewart, and he didn’t like the sound of firing to the south.

  As soon as they started up the hill, Crawford knew that they were too late. It was obvious that the grenadiers had been clawed cruelly by the artillery fire they had heard during the whole miserable march to the hill. As they started the climb in the full heat of the mid-afternoon sun, the grenadiers were retiring. They were magnificent soldiers, and not one of them ran, but their companies were the size of platoons and they were withdrawing off the hill steadily. Stewart could see that he had already lost men to the heat and expected that the grenadiers, in action all morning, would be worse.

  Crawford couldn’t see what pressure they were taking from his spot at the left end of the company. And then he looked to the front in time to see the whole woods fill with Continentals like a bucket filling under a pump. In a moment there were hundreds of them forming just above him on the hill.

  “Halt!” cried Captain Stewart, racing down the line. The company next to theirs kept marching and was instantly exposed to a storm of fire. Stewart yelled to McDonald and then rode up to Crawford. McDonald was leading the firing.

  “H
old here for as long as you can, but for God’s sake give the ground if you must. I’m going to see what the grenadiers intend. I’ll be back in a moment.”

  Crawford saluted and turned to face the front. The rebels, who had been a mob a moment before, were forming like soldiers. Crawford’s company fired into them and they took the volley at close range and continued to form their line. A company off to the left was already firing. Crawford stepped out of the line and walked back to the center, where Captain Stewart usually stood to fight the company. The first platoon was almost loaded and, never taking his eyes from the enemy, he nodded to McDonald, who was preparing to fire. His men were outnumbered badly, and he doubted that these well-drilled enemy troops would fire any worse than they formed. He spared a glance for Captain Stewart riding low in his saddle off to the right and well up the hill, and Jeremy following him, and he saw Stewart’s horse go down as if all its legs had been cut at once. Stewart did not rise.

  Jeremy leapt his horse over his downed master and fired a pistol at the first rebel to appear in the distance. He looked around desperately, but the grenadiers were just too far off to the right and the rebels were pouring down this part of the hill. He dismounted.

  A ball had killed the horse dead. Its whole weight lay on Stewart, and Stewart was barely conscious.

  “Get ye gone, Jeremy!” he muttered.

  “Nonsense, sir.” Jeremy tried to give him a little water but the movement caused Stewart to faint from the pain. Jeremy cushioned his head with his saddlebags and took a moment to do those things he had heard veterans recommend you do when you are about to be captured. He took his watch and put it next to his skin, concealed his ivory-handled dagger in his boot, and put several golden guineas inside his shirt. He saw the rebels forming their company just forty yards away and he worried that they might fire on him, so he tied his white stock to his sword and waved it. The enemy company marched right by him, their officer simply waving at him.

  “Come, that’s gentlemanly,” he said aloud, hoping his words would comfort Stewart, and turned to find another party of rebels with a tall man in an old blue coat at their head. They were moving carefully, formed in open order, and a number of them had weapons pointed at Jeremy. He held out his sword to the leader, who looked faintly familiar.

  The leader grinned. “You killed Weymes,” he said.

  Bludner raised his pistol and shot Jeremy dead.

  Forty minutes later, Sir Henry Clinton’s counterattack with all the grenadiers and lights and all the reserves cleared the hill to the crest, and Caesar ran to the fallen horse. Stewart was gone, but Jeremy lay there, his hands out on the ground and his legs a little apart, lying face down. He had been plundered thoroughly, his watch and guineas taken and all Stewart’s saddle gear ripped clear of his horse. Caesar picked Jeremy up and threw him over his shoulder. Jeremy was still wearing his breeches, covered in blood, and his boots—apparently the tight fit was more than casual plunderers were prepared to face. He carried the body down the hill as the sun pounded on them and the order was given that finally allowed them to start an orderly withdrawal from the field. He carried Jeremy for over an hour, until the first halt, not speaking to the men around him.

  When he gathered the men of the Guides and told them to prepare for a burial party, some men from Stewart’s company appeared with a cart. The cart had some wounded grenadiers in it, but the grenadiers were quickly convinced that their cart could carry a dead man as well. They stepped off into the heat, and marched all night with the cart in their midst, and the moans of the wounded grenadiers were like a lament for Jeremy, and defeat.

  To the south, George Lake’s men stood on the crest of the hill and watched the last of the British light companies march away from them. They were too tired to pursue, and they had taken casualties themselves, although more from the heat than the enemy.

  “I think we won,” croaked a man in George’s company. It was said quietly, as if the saying would break the spell.

  George stretched the fingers of his right hand where he had clutched a musket all day.

  “Well, boys, they were trying to retreat when the day started, and at the end of it, they retreated.” He looked at the ranks of his men and smiled. “On the other hand, we’re here, and they ain’t, which is a sight better than we’re used to.”

  They gave a weak cheer, and another as they saw Washington and his staff ride out of the stuffy gloom again. Lake saw Lafayette peering down the hill at the backs of the last British light troops, and listened to them as they tried to count the casualties, and then, in the boldest moment of his life, George Lake stepped in front of Washington’s horse.

  “Give you the joy of your victory, sir,” he said, amazed at his own voice. Washington looked up from a map and peered at him for a moment, and then smiled, the thin-lipped smile that never showed his teeth.

  “Not much of a victory,” he said, but his men began to cheer again, and the cheer spread in waves. And then Washington’s grin split his face, and his eyes kindled and the cheers went on. Lafayette shook his hand, and then George’s, and then they were all around him, a wave of noise that spread from the center until the British could hear it two miles away.

  Caesar was keeping the men together with physical threats by the time they halted, and Mr. Martin was bringing up the rear with the stragglers. But when they had rested for a few minutes and their legs stopped shaking, they took a little water and some hard tack and felt human enough to bury Jeremy.

  They took turns digging as they always did, although he was just one man, and the contributions from Stewart’s company made it go fast. Some of Stewart’s men had stripped Jeremy’s boots and bloody breeches and then put on clean from his baggage, and they wrapped him in a clean linen sheet. Virgil carved him a cross from a downed branch as quick as he could, and Mr. Crawford paid the farmer in whose field they were going to plant him to get a stone. They were close to areas that their patrols would operate when they came out from New York, and Caesar thought they might get this way again. He didn’t seem able to think of much else, except that Jeremy had become a friend of a sort he had never had before. Jeremy had taught him so much. And that—like Sergeant Peters—he was dead.

  McDonald came up to him and just nodded a few times, and then put Jeremy’s ivory-handled button dagger in his hand.

  “He had it in his boot. We thought you ought to have it.” Some other men from Stewart’s company nodded behind him.

  When Jeremy was in the ground and they had fired a volley over him, some officers came up to protest the firing, but Mr. Martin and Mr. Crawford sent them packing. Virgil, Willy and McDonald lit pipes, and they passed the tobacco around as they had for their dead since Virginia.

  Caesar found that he couldn’t get the pipe into his mouth and it struck him that he was crying, great choking sobs that wracked him until Virgil put his arms around Caesar and hugged him close a moment. He hadn’t cried for Tonny, or Tom, or Peters or any of the others, but he cried for Jeremy, and Virgil sat beside him with his arm around him, as the night suddenly cooled with the passing of that awful heat.

  4

  New Jersey and New York, July 4, 1778

  Jeremy was dead.

  It hit Stewart at different times, because Jeremy had been there so often and because he was weak and needed the man. Both men, Jeremy the servant and the other Jeremy, who could make a joke about Miss McLean and a suggestion about Sally. Sometimes in one breath.

  He would have to do something about Sally. Even in a fever, he could see that.

  He lay in a little house somewhere in the Jerseys and watched the sun creep across his white, white quilt. He thought about Jeremy, and Sally, and once he found himself having a conversation with Jeremy who was not, of course, there. He worried for a little that he was losing his mind, but later he realized that he had a fever.

  Men came to see him from time to time, and a girl fed him soup. He didn’t really know the men, but he had enough spirit to see that they
were Continental officers and that they were kind. He had visited their wounded often enough. It was that sort of war, sometimes.

  Then he woke in the night and was well. Weaker, somehow, than when he dreamed and spoke with Jeremy, but better, too. He’d had fevers before, and he knew this one had just broken. He lay awake, thinking about Jeremy in a different way. He smiled a little, and slept.

  When he next awoke, one of the men was by his side with a watch, looking at his pulse and counting, while another was standing behind him.

  “Quite a credit to the trade, this fellow. Healthy as a horse in no time,” the nearer man said, putting his hand down on the coverlet. “You awake, sir?”

  “I am.”

  “It always pleases a doctor when one of his patients does him the courtesy of surviving a treatment.”

  “Give my man the bill.” That little pain. He had no man. “Perhaps not. Give it to me, I suppose.”

  “I think the Continental Army is footing the bill, sir. But I need to tell you that your leg, while healing, has been shockingly set about, and that I took a pistol ball out of your shoulder, and another out of an older wound low on your back. It was there, and I thought I might as well cut.”

  Stewart nodded, a little troubled by the number of wounds, and puzzled, as he couldn’t remember getting any of them.

  “Can you tell me what happened?”

  “Not I, sir. Perhaps Captain Lake, here. But you are on the mend. I’ll look in again later—always a pleasure to see one that heals, eh?”

  The doctor indicated some medicines to the lady of the house and bowed his way out. The officer remained, watching him in silence, as the lady moved about the little room, tossing the pillow and sitting him up. His arm was in a very tight bandage that went across his chest, and his leg was in another. He was afraid to look at the base of the bed, so sure was he that one of his legs was gone, but she moved the blankets to air them and roll him over to strip the sheets, and he saw it. It wasn’t exactly handsome, and there was some blood and some yellow fluid on the bandage, but the whole leg was there.