Infernal Revolutions

by Stephen Woodville

  So, malicious rumours benefiting everyone, the ship of fools sailed on. Aside from the main protagonists, others on the periphery of my mental world passed the time in surprisingly innocent pursuits. Ned Lester and Roger Masson, those archetypal louts, would on calm days indulge in a spot of fishing, taking it in turns to hold each others’ legs while one reached a line and baited hook down into the ocean below. The result was often a succulent meal of cod, splendidly cooked by Anne, who, after the allegations about her love life, would garnish it saucily with a squeeze of lemon. Then there was Little Bob, who could be found when off-duty in the company of a young midshipman he had befriended, helping him to study for his exams. Claude Jepson would be off talking to the animals, while Billy Corden, the fifer, would help Anne with the washing, which, in the absence of rainwater, had to be done in buckets of collected urine, giving him a social status little higher than mine. Others in our company with whom I had become friends of a sort, such as Simon Scattergood, Gilbert Gray, and Laurence Taylor, charmingly sang catches together, until told to ‘cease or drown’ by the ever-malignant Sergeant Mycock.

  Whatever their several hobbies, all came together at meal times, and we would eat on a table lowered between guns specially for the occasion. Normally ‘twas an exercise in stoicism as we nibbled gingerly the putrid pork, the slimy peas, and the leathery cheese; but occasionally, partaking of fresh fish and sitting there in the breeze of an open gun hatch, we really felt ourselves to be very fortunate fellows. As the ship creaked and the shanties played, we would gaze out at the other ships in our convoy, and muse pleasantly on the drama of warfare. All things considered, this was better than being stuck up a chimney, or starving to death on Grub Street, and for a moment I understood Mr Axelrod’s passion for the military life. ‘Twas dangerous, and mostly unpleasant, but when the clouds did break, they broke to reveal a brighter life than the unadventurous or unimpressed could know about; and this secret knowledge, surely, would benefit me when serious work restarted on my Night Thoughts.

  Finally, after about seven weeks at sea, a vaguely familiar smell began to permeate even our nostrils. At first we could not quite place what it was, then Claude Jepson came up with the answer: pine. Enquiries of ratings who had made this voyage before revealed that this was the smell of the gigantic forests of America, and its appearance meant that landfall was only about forty leagues away. Awestruck, humbled, I had an unaccountable urge to burst into tears. Instead, I made my way to the forecastle at the first opportunity, and there – while men below strained at the heads – I strained my eyes for sight of land. Nothing could be seen, but there was a most brilliant red sunset in the offing, as though all the colonies were aflame. All aflame myself, I breathed in deeply of the scented air rushing in my face, and thanked God that I was alive. I was still in raptures ten minutes later, when Dick Lickley came to retrieve me.

  ‘New York in two days, mate, so I’m told. That means Ned Lester will be winner of the Atlantic Crossing Sweepstake. Lucky bastard.’

  ‘We’re all lucky, Dick,’ I said, lower lip trembling, the poet in me lanced and bleeding. ‘We’re all winners, to be witnessing this.’

  ‘There, there,’ said Dick, putting his arm around my shoulders and escorting me back to the gundeck for my own safety. ‘Not far to go now. Then ‘tis a good bladdering in a New York tavern for you, my boy. That will cure you of your madness, or nothing will.’

  Nothing then would. And I was thankful, because my so-called madness had enabled me to glimpse Life As It Should Be Lived. Shaking, a nervous wreck, I blubbed openly for hours, until a pail of seawater was dashed with great vigour into my face.

  ‘Now shut it,’ said Sergeant Mycock.

  10

  New York

  ‘By the deep twelve!’

  ‘Five points to port, Sir!’

  ‘Steady as she goes there, Mr Knowles.’

  Navigational shouts rent the air as the Twinkle edged into the forest of English oakwood that was New York harbour. Ordered to be silent while the delicate manoeuvres took place, the men watching from the decks nevertheless whispered to each other excitedly.

  ‘Just look at that land, will yer, Isaiah. Gaw, how I’d like to sow a few seeds in there.’

  ‘Carrots, George. Thousands of pounds of carrots. Big ‘uns too, they’d be, I’d wager.’

  ‘No, barley is the only crop for that sort of soil.’

  As a cultivated townsman, who had never had his hands in the good mother earth his entire life, and had no intention of ever doing so until I was lowered in it dead, I registered these remarks with amused detachment. Here they were, the peasants, three thousand miles from home, on the edge of a spanking new continent all romantic and free, and all they could think about was planting vegetables and crops on the first bit of land they clapped eyes on. Lucky for them Mr Axelrod was on another ship.

  But at least their thoughts, if parochial, were wholesome, unlike those of the foaming quartet of drunken Hessians pushing against the taffrail, who were unable to conceal their impatience to get ashore and start planting seed of another kind. As their sergeants struggled to control them, the soldiers cheered and waved their rum bottles over their heads, linking arms round each others’ shoulders and singing brutalsounding Teutonic songs that seemed, if pure vocables of sound were anything to go on, to involve much shoving and pushing and ripping. They had as much charm as bull terriers, and made even French popinjays preferable as drinking companions. What on earth did they feed them in the dark cities of Cologne, Hanover, Munich and Frankfurt? Dr Werner never told me. The inevitable delays in getting ashore, made worse in this case by the protracted diplomatic negotiations that were apparently going on between the British and Rebel leaders, only served to whip up the Hessians’ frenzy even more. As they angrily threw their empty bottles into the sea, they grasped the taffrail and started shaking it with all their might. ‘Schon Land. Bew-tee-full Fucken Mädchen.’ It took a hail of whips and musket butts administered by their officers to silence them.

  I too was mightily pleased with the look of the place, though not for the same reasons as the farmers and the Germans. ‘Twas the refreshing aura of space and bigness that captured my fancy; indeed, never before had I seen such a noble prospect as this. Amongst the woods of Manhattan Island I could make out a fort, several churches, many notable mansions, and a fine set of commodious quays and warehouses. To the east lay the green pastureland of Long Island, while to the west lay Staten Island, dotted with big, fat, colourful Dutch barns and farmhouses. Under the sparkling sun, wrapped in the invigorating scent of pine, the whole scene exuded health and prosperity. Indeed, ‘twas incomprehensible why anyone should want to rebel in so idyllic a place, and thus attract the envious eyes of loutish soldiers, most of whom were dissatisfied with their lot back home; but no doubt I would find out sooner or later, things never being what they seemed at first sight.

  Whilst waiting to disembark, we learnt to our relief that most of the initial dirty work in the area had been done for us. (‘Good,’ beamed Thomas Pomeroy upon hearing the news, ‘Splendid’.) The army, consisting mainly of crude Hessians in these attacks, had routed the rebels at Long Island on 27th August. Then they had crossed to Manhattan Island and almost trapped George Washington and his troops there in what would surely have been another rout, had the rebels not escaped north to a place called Harlem Heights.

  ‘It’s a rout,’ was Dick Lickley’s considered opinion.

  ‘It’s a rout, wife,’ said Thomas Pomeroy to his gloomladen wife. ‘If we keep on routing at this rate we’ll be home by Christmas.’

  His wife looked up at him with a clear trusting look in her eyes. His son regarded him steadily from under his tricorne, as though wondering what a rout was.

  ‘Yes, wife, I really think we will.’

  Thomas, accustomed to appropriating the future, had decided that this would happen, and began to make contingency plans for his family’s departure.

/>   The rest of us, less adept at such thought dislocation, made simple plans for a simple campaign in the present, and talked of martial things.

  ‘What do you think it feels like to be shot, Harry?’ asked Dick, resting from his strenuous attempts to knock down a screeching gull with a well-aimed piece of hardtack.

  ‘I imagine if it doesn’t kill you outright, or knock you unconscious, there’s a numbness at the point the shot enters, followed several seconds or perhaps minutes later by the most agonizing, burning, aching sensation. Just like being knifed in fact.’

  Dick took aim and let loose another piece, which clonked the gull on the head without effect.

  ‘It’s nothing like that.’

  ‘What’s it like then?’

  ‘Nothing like that.’

  Only Dick Lickley knew what everything in the world felt like, looked like, smelled like, sounded like and tasted like, but he was not good at communicating this knowledge. Usually this superciliousness exasperated me to the point of frenzy, and he knew it, but this morning, my mind expanded under the beneficent rays of natural beauty, ‘twas a rich source of soft laughter. As were the subsequent reflections on life and death that were initiated.

  ‘Look,’ he went on, ‘the chances of us emerging unscathed from this bloody war are minute. If we’re lucky we’ll get our heads ripped off by a ball and die quicker than you can say Sam Johnson. If we’re not, we’ll end up blind, or crippled, or – worst of all – having our limbs sawn off by some bloody butcher of a surgeon, screaming in agony, only to die anyway of shock or bloody gangrene; so ‘twill have been pointless enduring the pain in the first place. I therefore suggest that ‘tis our human duty, until that day, to savour every minute of life available to us. Sniff the flowers, admire the scenery, marvel at the new sights this continent has to offer; in short, to relish everything that nature throws at us.’

  ‘Aye, and shag women,’ someone cheered.

  ‘Aye,’ came up a mass male choir, ‘shag women!’

  Even the noisome vapours of the docks – which hit us when we eventually disembarked in a flotilla of jolly boats, yawls and barges – could not diminish the holiday mood of the occasion. It sustained us through a day’s unloading, and was still present when we bedded down at night in our first American barracks, Trinity Church on Broadway. There, as we tossed and turned in the pews, various volunteers took it in turns to entertain the captive audience with improvised masques, burlesques, harlequinades and impersonations. Eventually, despite the increasing catcalls, a distinctly unsteady-looking Dick appeared in the candlelit pulpit to perform a turn.

  ‘Give us a song,’ someone called from the back, ‘or fuck off.’

  ‘A pleasure,’ Dick slurred, reaching down behind the pulpit and bringing up a pewter pot of beer, which he swigged from lustily, froth piling up on his top lip. Then he tossed the pot yobbishly into the audience to great cheers, gripped the lectern firmly for greater support, then opened his mouth like a little thrush.

  Out came, to the surprise of everyone, a fine tenor voice and the distinctly secular song Gloria, I Cannot Love You More.

  It’s been thirty nights, my dear, of nonstop loving

  My idea of Heaven is turning to Hell

  Release me please and let me recover

  My sense of touch, of sight, of smell.

  It was a song of subtle insight into the realities of desires, albeit lost on a regiment of sexstarved soldiers, who, if the subsequent growling was anything to go on, could not comprehend the lyrics past the first line.

  ‘All right, that’s enough,’ croaked a voice that was vaguely familiar. ‘Please, Dick, this is a church, a house of God, and not the place for either profanity or beer.’

  This was Parson Blood, who’d just come in off the street with an armful of Bibles, Common Prayers and Religious Tracts. He peered apprehensively over the top of his stack, bracing himself for a deluge of abuse.

  ‘As you say, Parson,’ replied Dick unexpectedly. ‘I’m buggered anyway.’ He clattered down from his position and shuffled into his reserved spot in the front pew, where he stretched himself out, drew a blanket over himself, and fell sound asleep, a thrilling example to the insomniacs amongst us.

  Parson Blood, emboldened by this show of obedience, carefully laid down his books on the altar and climbed into the pulpit himself. He looked even more haggard than usual, and appeared to be suffering from a bad cold. Ignoring the odd call to give it a rest he composed himself as best he could, loosened a few lumps of phlegm in his throat, blew his nose, and then, looking eerily like a deathshead in the flickering candlelight, launched into his speech.

  ‘This is the first time I have had the opportunity to address you as regimental chaplain from, as it were, my proper position. I have had several informal chats with you on a one-to-one basis, or in small groups, but useful though those contacts were, I feel I would not be doing my job properly unless I addressed all of you in the manner of a shepherd tending his flock.’

  Vigorous bleating inevitably arose.

  ‘Please, please. Do not deride my every word. I talk of matters affecting your souls, and these are times when, let us face it, Death cannot be very far away. ‘Tis a foolhardy and dangerous thing to mock representatives of the Lord.’

  ‘You’re no representative of anyone, let alone the Lord,’ came a bold Irish voice, ‘and ‘tis blasphemous of you to claim such a distinction. You’re a weak and meek man, of neither use nor ornament, addicted to sherry and the soft life, like most of your kind. I bet you won’t be tending your flock when the fighting starts.’

  The Irishman had obviously articulated the feelings of the whole battalion, for suddenly the church was in uproar. Cries of Too Bloody Right! and Hang Him! echoed round the New Yorkers’ Holy of Holies. I poked my head up and peeked over the top of the pew to see a flurry of waving fists and ugly contorted faces. I was astonished that anyone could get so worked up about religion, until I was told that some of these men were veterans of the fighting down in Charleston, just shipped in, and it was probably less an affront to their religious faith, supposing they had any, than the thought that Parson Blood was a shirker that affected them so. I looked back at Parson Blood and watched him visibly flinching under the waves of hatred; and though I reacted badly to religion myself, I sympathized deeply. He had, after all, volunteered to come with the army to America, and I knew what a good man he was, but without the mighty speaking voice and dramatic style of a George Whitefield or an Edmund Burke, or someone of that ilk, he had no hope of reaching men like these en masse. His cause was a Lost One, and I watched in embarrassment and sorrow as Parson Blood climbed down from the lectern and slunk abjectly away, his important sermon undelivered. Resolving there and then never to venture to speak in public myself, I brought my head back down below the parapet, pulled my blanket over me, and waited for silence and sleep to descend.

  But it took more than a whole day of exhausting physical work to subdue the most committed insomniac in the British Army, and I was still waiting at dawn, alone in a sea of gently heaving flesh which snored, whistled and snorted like a horse. I looked around at my sleeping comrades and wondered why they could relax and I could not. Unable to answer, I clasped my hands behind my head and looked up at the ceiling of the church, murky and cavernous in the wan moonlight. Like the lights of passing flambeaux that occasionally flickered through the windows, stray thoughts and memories of my old life darted through my mind in a most hellish farrago, so that I was glad for the odd diversion when it came. At various intervals throughout the night, with varying degrees of clarity, I heard in the streets a skirl of bagpipes; an argument of some sort between tough Scottish and Irish voices; the odd boom of a cannon out in the bay; a subdued muffled drumbeat (which instantly had me sweating); and a strange scraping sound, as of a giant slab of iron being dragged along a cobbled street. More disturbing than diverting were what sounded like the distant cries of the Damned in Hell, though
as these sounds were right on the edge of my hearing, I dismissed them hopefully as sleepstarved Fantasy.

  As the dismal light of dawn began to shade the ceiling, it belatedly occurred to me that I had heard no bells ringing the hour – which struck me as strange considering how many church steeples I had seen from the Twinkle. Had the officers, in rare consideration of our need for sleep, had them removed? Then I remembered someone telling me that the Rebels had melted down all the bells into cannons. This in turn reminded me of the reason for my being here – to be shot at and killed by damned Liberty Lovers, some of whom, no doubt, were lying not two hundred yards from where I was now. This realization ended attempts at sleep once and for all, and, haggard though I was, I waited eagerly for Sergeant Mycock’s rasping cockcrow to rouse us to arms. Night thoughts, once so eagerly hunted, had now turned around to hunt me.

  11

  The Spymaster

  Mercifully, I was back in the old comforting routine of drilling and marching not two hours later. This time, however, the drilling was carried out at a place called the Battery, at the southern tip of the island, and the marching was done in the streets around the city. At first, this change of scene gave our manoeuvres added zest, and I found myself goosestepping with great vigour as the Loyalist crowds cheered us on and threw flowers over us. And when the adulation waned, which it soon did, there was still the interest of the elegant streets themselves to occupy our darting eyes. There were the doors with big white R’s chalked on them, signifying the homes of Rebels; there were the tempting dram shops; there were the smoking chop houses; there were beaver pelts and deerskins on sale in the markets; there was the plinth of the equestrian statue of George III on the Bowling Green (the statue itself having gone the same way as the churchbells); there were the demon barber shops; there was the source of the howling I had heard and would continue to hear at night, viz. Van Cortlandt’s Sugar House, now operating as a Rebel prison; and last but not least there were the skulking Brother Jonathans themselves – the scurviest, most worthless jackanapes ‘twas possible to imagine, yet in their way gruesomely fascinating. Their clothes were plain, with a cut at least five years behind the latest Brighthelmstone style, while their speech, in the conversations I overheard, seemed about two hundred years out of date. It was clearly English, but with a sort of faint countrified growl, as if they were outcasts from the Forest of Arden.