The men came to a stop. The line was curved back, in places completely broken, men just a loose mass. Those pulled from the line stood about, some moving to rejoin the ranks, others just sitting down on the cold ground, glad for the break from routine.
“All right, my lads, fall in around me,” he called.
The men, many now deflated from their pride of but minutes before, gathered in around him.
“You know what it is I was doing?” he asked.
No one spoke.
“How many of you have been in a battle?” he asked.
About half of them raised their hands.
“Where?”
“I was at Germantown,” one of them announced. “Paoli,” another said. “I’ve been with this damn army since Boston,” another cried.
He looked at the man, as Du Ponceau pointed him out. He had a deep furrow across his left cheek, the scar a slash from a blade or musket ball.
“Your name, soldier?”
“Sergeant Harris, headquarters company of His Excellency General Washington.”
“That wound?”
“Princeton,” Harris replied coolly.
“And what do you think?”
Harris looked around at the others.
“It’s one thing to march about like parade soldiers out here,” he announced, “another thing when the bullets and grapeshot fly.”
“Precisely. You are a good man,” von Steuben responded, and he reached out to slap Harris on the shoulder.
“You men have done well today and I am proud of you.”
He looked around at the gathering. A few grinned, most were silent, nearly all of them shivering from the cold.
“It is March. In two months the campaign season will again be upon us. In those two months, by God, I will teach you everything I know. You are good men and I know you will learn.
“We will start tomorrow with the same thing. Marching in line by step at regular time, then quick time. That shall be easy after what you learned today.
“Then it shall be marching by column, and, in an instant, the blink of an eye, you shall jump quickly and go from column into line.”
As he spoke, he held up his hands to demonstrate.
“Then it shall be marching in column at regular time, quick time, and at the run. Then it shall be forming line in any direction commanded, marching, and now shall come the hard tasks of keeping that line while wheeling about, changing fronts, and continuing to advance.”
He was warming to his subject now.
“You will learn to do so and then more. How to withdraw while under fire, how even to form square against cavalry or go to open order against artillery and then back again in an instant.
“And that is even before I will let you shoulder your muskets again.”
There was a murmur from the crowd.
“I know, I know you pride yourselves that you can shoot, but how many of you can claim with certainty that you have ever actually shot an enemy you aimed at?”
He looked around at the group, several dozen hands went up, there were some comments back and forth, a few boasting, others taunting, some of the hands were finally lowered.
“Oh, I must have shot a hundred Turks myself,” he offered with a disdainful wave, “and that was with a pistol at a hundred paces.”
Some of the men laughed and a few more hands went down.
“It is disciplined fire, concentrated on a single point, that wins the fight in an open field,” he announced sharply. “All of you firing together, at my command. First one rank and then, as you reload, the other, and by God you will fire at least two rounds a minute, every one of you. That means every fifteen seconds you will sweep the field before you…”
He gestured to the open field, now bathed in the slanting light of a cold late-afternoon sun, the flurries of morning and midday having cleared. It promised to be a cold night.
“Fifteen seconds. That means never again will you shoot and then before you reload the enemy can be upon you with bayonets. For as one line reloads the second stands ready to smash down any attempt for them to charge. Do you see that?”
There were some nods of agreement, especially from the veterans of previous fights.
“I still prefer to do my fighting hunkered down,” one of the men replied, “nice and safe behind a wall or tree. This is foolishness.”
Von Steuben looked at the complainer and nodded.
“How many fights have you been in?”
“I was at Paoli,” the man replied tensely.
“And how many of your comrades were bayoneted to death while trying to lie down behind a wall?”
The man glared at him.
“If in those first seconds of surprise you had formed a battle line and even in the dark opened fire, how many of the enemy would have been left standing?”
There was no response.
Von Steuben stepped closer to him.
“I understand what you feel. Believe me, I do. I fought in the Seven Years’ War. I faced enemy lines at fifty paces and had to stand firm and not flinch. If we broke, if we lay down, they would have slaughtered us like sheep. In such a fight there is only one way to fight back. To hold your line. Hold your line!”
He nearly shouted the last words.
“Hold your line, and then give back to them as hard as they hit you. Then it becomes a battle of nerves,” and as he spoke he clasped his two hands together as if they were wrestling, “nerves and endurance.”
“Let one hand feel that it is the stronger in courage, in firepower, in its will to stand and deliver, and I promise you, men, the other hand will weaken, collapse, and run away.”
He gestured now with one hand going limp and the other hitting it.
“Stand with me for a month, men. Let me teach you all that I know. You have already mastered much today, there will be more tomorrow. Stand with me, and then when you are ready, go back to your own regiments and in turn teach them as I have taught you.”
“I’ll do my teaching in good American,” one of the men announced, and there was open laughter, von Steuben joining in, then calling on Vogel to give the man a good curse in English, which he did, to even more laughter.
“In one month you will be ready. Then in the next month you will teach your comrades. Once they have learned we shall bring you together not just by regiments but by entire brigades and learn yet more new things. How to march in brigade column and then deploy to line of battle with all possible speed. How one regiment can support another on the line, and turn an enemy flank while others hold them in place. There is much to learn, much to learn.”
He looked around at the group.
“You are good soldiers, though I will say standing close to you hurts my nose and I fear for how many lice I now shall have.” He made an exaggerated gesture of plucking one off his sleeve and crushing it with his fingernails.
Again, laughter.
“Fall into line!”
The men sprang back to their position, line forming, still far too slow for his liking, but nevertheless, forming up far better than they had in the morning.
“Attention!”
They did as ordered, heads turning slightly to face the center, where he now stood.
“If after today you do not have the stomach for this, or think it folly, tell your commander tonight and he will send someone else in your place. For, by God, tomorrow, though we have laughed today together as comrades, I will tolerate no lack of discipline. If you waste my time, starting tomorrow, I will have you driven out of the ranks and break this stick over your back or head.
“Do we understand each other?”
Caught off-guard by his sudden change of mood, the men were silent.
“We now have one month to teach you what a Prussian soldier takes a year or more to master. I think you are of sterner stuff than the Hessians whom I know some of you fear to face. In a month you will be ready to face them, in two months’ time you must train your comrades to do the same. In t
hree months’ time, if you prove to be the men I think you are, you will see fear in the eyes of your enemies and know true victory on the battlefield, and I swear I will stand in the line with you that day.
“Think upon what I have taught you and what I have said today. You are dismissed.”
He turned and stalked off, his staff falling in around him.
My God, he thought inwardly. What a tangled mess this all is. He actually pitied those poor men. With the temperature dropping, the chill was even striking into his bones, and he had on his heavy wool uniform and cape. Some of them indeed were little better than scarecrows.
Of course after but a day of drill they could march in line, on a parade field, but the last maneuver, when he forced some of the men to act as dead and wounded—within seconds all semblance of formation disintegrated. At Minden he had seen entire companies swept away in the blink of an eye by concentrated blasts of grapeshot from batteries of the enemy’s six-pounders. Assaulting a fortified line, covered with heavy twelve-, eighteen-, and twenty-four-pounder guns, entire regiments could be cut in half in a single salvo. Yet still they were expected to continue to press forward at the double, dressing line as they did so, keeping formation and ready to fire or press in the charge on command.
His young staff was silent, walking to either side of him. None of them had ever actually been in a fight. They knew their drill, of course, but the reality of a battle, the man next to you decapitated, his brains splattering into your face and you were expected to keep control, to lead and not become unnerved?
They were nearly as green as the men he was training.
He looked around at them and smiled.
“My lads, you did well today,” he offered with a smile, hiding all his inner fears.
His few words of praise caused grins of delight.
“Vogel, what is the suggestion for dinner tonight?”
They had managed to hire one of the women working in the camp to cook their meals and tend to their small headquarters house. She had gone into the army with her husband, who had died the week before from the flux, and one of Lafayette’s staff had recommended her as someone of good character who needed the work. Besides, she could speak German.
“Mrs. Wismer said it will be boiled mutton, that was what was issued.”
“Ah, my favorite,” he lied. He detested mutton, but if that was all that was available, for the moment it was better to claim it was his preferred dish, and he led the way across the field.
Peter, legs numb, raced to where the muskets were stacked, and was glad to see that no one had tried to run off with his weapon, though a few arguments did break out between men of the headquarters company and those of other regiments when a few of the preferred second-model Brown Besses were supposedly grabbed by mistake, and battered Charleville or the detested Dutch muskets left in their place.
Harris settled the arguments, backed up by the others of the company before they set off as a group back to their barn.
“Tomorrow we stack weapons together, boys,” Harris announced, “and one of the men detailed off as sick can keep guard on them.”
There was a chorus of agreement.
“What do you think of all this?” Peter asked.
“That German?” Harris asked.
Peter nodded.
“It’s one thing to do what he says marching around out here. But with a grenadier company coming straight at you, covered by light infantry?”
“Like he said,” Harris replied, forcing a smile, “we got thirty days for him to teach us, thirty days for us to teach the rest of the army, and then thirty days after that we face the bastards again.”
Peter looked around at his comrades. All of them had lost weight, some a stone or more, their faces drawn, haggard. As a headquarters company they were expected to be clean-shaven, which only served to reveal how thin and malnourished most of them were. Seven of the men of the company had so far died, three from the flux, one from smallpox. One had just simply collapsed and another had frozen to death while on sentry duty one night. Two more had deserted. They were faring a little better than most companies, at least, but still one out of six who had been with the ranks when they marched here were gone. And now the starving time was truly beginning to set back in again, for the countryside for miles around had been stripped clean by Anthony Wayne’s foraging expeditions. Food was running short and disease was taking an ever-increasing toll.
Ninety days and it would be nearly summer, and he wondered how many of them would be alive by then.
Chapter Fourteen
Philadelphia
April 9, 1778
In the crowded room, with candles lit only around the stage itself, they were in near darkness, pressed in on all sides by the audience, intent on the play before them. The actors were arguing how to spell “declaration,” two of them trying to duel with long quill pens. The audience was laughing good-naturedly at the farce.
“I didn’t know you were here,” Allen whispered, leaning over. His attention barely focused on the play…Elizabeth having just slipped up to his side and taken his hand. Contrary to the custom when it came to evening fashion, she was not wearing a wig, but had her natural hair piled high, adorned with the first flowers of spring. The scent was intoxicating.
“How did you get here?” he whispered.
“I walked.”
“No, I mean…your father?”
She giggled like a schoolgirl.
“He’s off to New York to meet his business partners, and Mother is ‘taken with the vapors’ and asleep. I swore the servants to secrecy and just walked here.”
Her boldness startled him. They stood silent for a moment, hands clasped, acting as if they were watching the play. A character lampooning Thomas Paine drew loud hisses from the audience as he waved a sheet of paper attempting to sing his lines—that his “common sense” should rule them all. A captain in the front of the audience, more than a little drunk, climbed up on the low stage and snatched the piece of paper, made an exaggerated gesture of using it to blow his nose and then wipe himself, which drew gales of laughter, as he bowed and returned to the audience.
Allen knew it wasn’t part of the play—his friend André would not have written something quite so crude. The actor playing Paine fumbled for a moment, then shrugged, held up an imaginary sheet, and kept on singing, his efforts greeted with mocking cheers. Allen, a bit embarrassed, looked over at Elizabeth, who made no attempt to let go of his hand to offer applause.
“Have you read his work?” she whispered, while the forced hilarity lampooning Paine and now Jefferson waving his “Declaration” focused the attention of the rest of the audience.
The memory of Jonathan clutching The American Crisis in his dying hands flooded over him again. And yes, he had read Common Sense, and found himself torn when he did so. Always pragmatic, he had agreed in some ways with the argument presented but saw, as well, that it was a document that, in the end, would be drenched in blood. Its ideas were now tearing the country apart, and history had always shown that such revolutions, filled with high promises, almost inevitably ended in yet more tyranny, violence, and suppression.
“Yes, I read it,” he said softly.
She looked up at him inquiringly.
“And?”
“I think it has caused more anguish than hope. Jonathan read it, he believed in it with all his heart and soul, and now?”
He paused.
“I doubt if I can even find the grave where they buried him.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, “I didn’t mean to bring back painful memories.”
“It’s not your fault,” he replied.
The character of Jefferson broke into a duet with Paine, the two of them dancing a hornpipe, the audience laughing and booing good-naturedly.
“It was in this very room,” she whispered, and he could sense her anger. “I stood outside this building when the Declaration was read for the first time. It was such a moment…”
<
br /> The two characters on the stage finished their song and then the taller actor playing Jefferson, one of Grey’s staff, leaned over and embraced Paine, played by a short, rotund sergeant of the light infantry, the act triggering ribald laughter and comments.
She let her hand slip from Allen’s and left the room, no one noticing her leaving.
He followed her out onto the front steps of the meeting hall.
She looked back up at him.
“I didn’t come here to argue politics and the war with you, Allen,” she whispered.
“Then why?” and there was a touch of nervous ness in his voice.
She smiled at him.
“I’d like to think there was a certain fondness between us, long before this war ever started.”
She stood on tiptoe, leaned into him, and offered a gentle kiss on the lips.
He let his arms slip around her and held her close, kissing her again and then again.
They stood thus for several minutes. More than a few couples were outside doing the same, or wandering off into the darkness together.
“Perhaps when the war is over?” he finally whispered.
“What after the war is over?”
“Your father would accept me, for having served the Crown. I can return to my family’s business. Perhaps then we could…”
His voice trailed off, and he inwardly cursed himself for being so tongue-tied.
“Yes, I would like that,” she replied, and he could feel her begin to tremble as she drew him in closer. “But there is tonight as well…”
“What?”
He was shocked beyond words.
She looked up at him, smiling, and then jumped with a start when the muffled report of a gun, and an instant later a second one, echoed from within the meeting hall.
He laughed softly.
“End of the play,” he whispered. “John Bull just shot Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine.”
“Fitting behavior to be expected,” she said, stepping back slightly.
“It is only John André offering some satire,” he offered.
She didn’t reply.
“We were saying,” he offered, trying to bring her in closer again. She accepted his embrace but did so stiffly.
Valley Forge: George Washington and the Crucible of Victory Page 37
