by Jack Fernley
‘But do you? You know my name, Baron von Steuben, you may know of my past exploits, my service for the King of Prussia, you may even know of my reputation for military strategy and training, but what do you know of me? Why I am here?’
‘To crush us for a few purses of gold no doubt.’
‘There you are wrong. Totally wrong. You see, you know some facts, but you know nothing about me. Just as if I only knew the basic facts of your time as a doctor or as a surgeon’s mate in the British Army and then fighting the same army you once served in, as if I didn’t know about the tragedy of Catherine’s death—’
‘Don’t speak of her.’
‘Why not? Are not her death and that of your son at the core of you? The man you really are. Does it not give colour to your character, meaning to your actions?’
Hand eyed von Steuben, unsure of how to respond.
‘Yes, I have arrived in America with a small force of the finest soldiery you could find in Europe. Killers like no others. Men trained beyond the capabilities of most ordinary men. But you do not know what really motivates me. You should look to what spurs me into action.’
Wearily, Hand said, ‘And what would that be?’
‘Revenge. I too had a wife, and two daughters. I married young, at seventeen. I was a junior officer in an infantry unit during what you call the Seven Years’ War, and was with King Frederick. The English were our ally, but King George’s uncle, the butcher the Duke of Cumberland, refused to defend the Rhine, his priority was to protect British Hanover. So our armies abandoned Wesel, where my family were living. My wife decided to leave the town and take refuge in Hamelin. She thought the British, our allies, would protect her and our children. It was a fantasy. Cumberland was defeated by the French at Hastenbeck, and in their retreat, the British did what the British always do. Murder. Rape. None of my family survived their retreat.
‘So, you see, you would need to know this to understand why I am here in America.’
‘I don’t understand: you’re here with the British.’
Von Steuben came off his chair and crouched in front of Hand.
‘That is what I call my “cover story”. All good spies need a cover story, Edward Hand. I have sailed with no little difficulty here, offering General Howe my assistance to bring this war to a quick close. In doing so, I have been able to learn close at hand his strategies, his strengths, his weaknesses. I have behaved like the filthiest of worms to get what I want. I have been prepared to do what it takes to gain the advantage. And now I have that advantage, I am here to offer myself to General Washington. Not just me, my troops as well. We can transform the Continental Amy into the finest fighting force since the days of Charlemagne, win America the freedom it deserves and create a new society based on those principles of freedom you hold dear.’
‘You are here to fight with us?’
‘Of course. Is there a more noble cause in the world today?’
‘And yet you hold me, tied like a prisoner.’
‘Well, I cannot allow the people of Trenton, who would wish to see you hanged, see me treat you as an honoured guest. Besides which, I have to be sure of your commitment.’
‘My commitment?’
‘Your commitment. How am I not to know that yourself and Patrick O’Leary have not joined those others who are leaking from Washington’s camp on a daily basis?’
‘Ah, I understand your trickery, sir. I see your plan now for what it is. You attempt to comfort me with the soft balm of your story, hoping I will reveal myself as a spy, and then you will have me. And I will be hanging from one of those trees in Morrison’s yard by nightfall. I would prefer an honest trial to one conducted here amid the shadows of your duplicity.’
‘Bravo! Very good!’ Von Steuben laughed aloud, sat back on his chair and clasped his hands across his lap. ‘Let us parry no more. Let me come straight to the point. I wish to offer my services to General George Washington and I wish for you to act as my ambassador. I will come with all the men in my service and I suspect that I may be able to win over all the Hessians employed by Colonel Rall. They are mercenaries, but they are not stupid. The possibility of defeat does not interest them. The possibility of success excites them.’
‘You wish for me to introduce you to General Washington?’
‘I do. As soon as possible.’
‘What, shall we just ride to his camp together? Here’s a German general I recently met, he says he wants to come over to our side. He would hang me for stupidity, or rather I hope he would. What kind of knave do you take me for?’
‘I take you for no such thing. Why would you, let alone the general, trust me to enter your camp without evidence that I am to be trusted? So I have a plan.’
He sat back in his chair and continued.
‘I will entrust you with the details of the layout of the troops and artillery here in Trenton. I will suggest a plan of attack for General Washington. The attack should be made on the evening of Christmas Day. Any later and Rall will be ready. He refuses to set up defences for the town, but even he must realise that he must sooner rather than later. Regardless, the town has to be taken before reinforcements arrive. And those reinforcements are not too far from here. They should be at Bordentown, but they remain at Mount Holly, a few days’ march. Their leader, Colonel von Donop is apparently much taken with a doctor’s widow in the town and is . . . well . . . one should be polite and leave it at that. But Rall’s patience will soon break and he will demand von Donop and his troops come to Trenton. Once they arrive, you will have no chance of breaking this army. With this damned weather, the river will permanently ice over soon and then Howe will have Philadelphia open to him.
‘Washington will be aiming for three crossings. From a military point of view that makes sense. He will want to cut off any possible retreat and stop von Donop from moving to support Rall. But he has no need. As I have said, von Donop is distracted and I will ensure he does not need to worry about a retreat from Trenton. Besides which, the river will be unbridgeable around the Trenton Ferry, or below it at Bristol. The weather is not for turning, believe me. The perfect place to cross will be at McKonkey’s. He should place all his forces there. The ice will make any other crossing impossible.
‘He should advance on Trenton in two columns, along the River Road and the Pennington Road. He will meet little resistance on the way. I shall see to that. Once in Trenton, he should aim to place his cannons at the head of King and Queen Streets. The fighting will be bloody there. It needs to be bloody. Your army needs a famous victory and you shall achieve one.
‘I will sit apart from the fighting. I will assign the men under my command to hold the Assunpink Bridge. We shall not enter the fray. No matter what orders I receive from Rall, my troops will remain steadfast. Once the battle is won, I will present myself to General Washington and offer our services.’
He held out a sealed parchment. ‘Here. These are the plans, but in greater detail. I ask you to present them to the General and stay with him when he opens it. I believe he will find them satisfying.’
‘Sir, he will be suspicious. This has the making of some trickery, only a fool would agree to this.’
‘Of course, which is why you are going to take with you the most precious thing I have as proof of my honesty. Let me introduce you to Frau Hanna Reitsch.’
TEN
O’Leary could not be sure whether it was Reitsch’s strength and fortitude or her beauty he admired most on the haul back from Trenton to Buckingham. He had never come across a woman like her.
Von Steuben told Rall he was sending the spies, along with Reitsch and a few covering troops, to Howe at New York. The colonel was happy with this, especially when the baron said Reitsch would report the capture of the agents was Rall’s work. As it was, Hand, O’Leary, Reitsch and half a dozen men left on horses at nightfall. The clear sky of the day had given way to a night of intermittent snowfall, the paths were hazardous, the horses slipping, on several occasions they were
almost thrown. The crossing at McKonkey’s was slow and painful, yet at no stage did Reitsch demure. And then when they presented her to Washington, Gates, Greene, Knox, Sullivan, Mercer and Alexander Hamilton, the aide-de-camp, she was astonishing. O’Leary liked strong women, but he had never known such a woman as her, standing in front of these high and mighty generals and delivering a strategy for an attack on Trenton that was bold and to his ears unarguable. Sullivan, in particular, was affronted to be addressed in this manner by a woman, making no attempt to disguise his contempt, but as she spoke, with clarity and forcefulness, the others appeared to concede her qualities. Hand remarked to O’Leary that it must have been similar when Joan of Arc had appeared at Orleans. It was another of his historical analogies, part of what he called his education of Pat O’Leary.
After Reitsch finished, Washington asked to retire with his coterie and welcomed her to make the full use of his officers’ mess, along with Hand and O’Leary, which was how they came to be sat on benches, feasting on pork and cabbage, fresh bread and brandy.
‘Miss, that was a mighty performance back there. Is this a common thing in Hesse, for ladies to address military commanders as equals?’
‘I don’t come from Hesse. I was born in Silesia, in a town called Hirschberg. You know what that translates as, Mister O’Leary?’
‘Aach, I’m afraid my German is a little scratchy, miss,’ he laughed nervously.
‘It means “Deer Mountain”. I grew up outdoors, on the deer mountain, hunting, trekking, climbing.
‘When I was eight and my brother twelve, Father took us away from our mother for an expedition to the mountain. Not in the summer, when the days are long and the sunlight comes pouring down through the pine trees, when every creature underfoot appears as your friend in the warmth. No, this was February. February in Silesia is worse than December in New Jersey. We had jars of pickled cabbage, wurst wrapped in oily paper, and a rye bread that you had to chew and chew again, hard as the rocks we fell against. We drank only schnapps. We must have had water, but I remember only the schnapps. We were deep into the deer mountain. There were no paths, no roads, of course, no other people. Just isolation. Just wilderness.
‘On the third day, we tracked a deer, a doe. All day we followed her, silently. There would be a moment when my brother or I would disturb her, we would snap a twig or send a small rock down the mountainside. Her ears would bolt upright, she would turn her head and those beautiful eyes would shoot straight at us, boring into us. The look of disdain she had, no human can compete with that look of contempt! And then she would skip away. All Father said to us was, “Did you see her face? See what she thinks of you?” And we would start again.
‘Just before nightfall, we killed her. My father said we had played enough and he shot her, with his . . .’ she hesitated, ‘with his musket. One shot. Father led us to her, had us look at her, crumpled on the ground. Even then she wore that look of contempt. “Children,” he said. “she is the queen of this mountain. Men named the mountain after her. This is her dominion. Remember that look she gave you when she caught us prying on her? That pride did not last a day. You proved yourselves, you overcame her, you conquered her and her lands. If you can overcome the Queen of Deer Mountain, there is nothing, no one, you can not overcome.”’
‘And that was the lesson you took away from that trip?’ asked O’Leary.
‘No, it was nonsense. We didn’t beat her, the gun beat her. Science beat her. I learned that machinery is everything, without the guns, without the food that came from a pickling factory or the schnapps from a brewery, we would have been two dead children up a mountain, probably a dead father as well. I believe, Mister O’Leary, in science first. With science as your partner, there is nothing that the human cannot achieve.’
‘But that doesn’t explain why as a woman you have such confidence in the presence of these great men. Your deportment is a rare thing, Frau Reitsch, you must acknowledge that?’
‘Doctor Hand, I do. And there perhaps you are right: Father’s behaviour did create in my mind a belief that I was equal to men. But not by design.
‘The morning after we had killed the doe, my brother and I woke up to find father had left our camp, with the deer. By the small fire we had made, he left a note, a note to my brother. “Hans, I have returned home. You will return home with Hanna. Ensure her welfare and prove yourself as a man. Father.” I can see that note clearly today. I was furious. Furious that he had left us and furious that he thought that I needed the protection of my brother. My brother was not furious. My brother was – is this how you say this – he was “shitting his breeches”?’
Hand laughed, ‘Yes, ma’am. It’s something that Pat here is a master of.’
‘My brother had no idea. He had been following our father blindly, where I had been thinking throughout, “Where are we? How do we get back to Hirschberg?” I had never stopped planning, I was prepared for it. My brother, my brother started to cry and I had to comfort him. And I told him that I would lead him home.’
‘And you did?’
‘I did. My brother was terrified that we did not have enough food to survive the journey – we had been on the expedition for three days – but actually Deer Mountain is not so big. You can trek to its summit in a matter of hours. We had simply moved around the mountainside. If he had been more alert, he would have seen that. We were home within a few hours.’
‘And your father, he was proud that you brought your brother home?’
‘He never knew. My brother was terrified that my father would be angry with him for failing the test. He begged me not to say anything. I was happy to say that Hans had been strong and led us back to the hearth and Mother. What good would it have done for me to have said anything else? Men, I realised, are prone to weakness. But help a man cover his weakness and they are for ever in your gratitude. Would you not agree?’
She looked at them with her piercing blue eyes. Hand had an image in his head. The haughty disdain of a doe on a German mountainside.
ELEVEN
‘Sir, we cannot be certain that this is not a trap. That is the cause of my reticence over this plan. That and that we appear to be taking instruction from a handmaiden. Not so many years ago, a woman like that would have met her natural end at Salem.’
A furious debate had broken out as soon as Reitsch had taken her leave. For weeks, Washington had been planning an attack aimed at turning the tide. Two days earlier, he had confided in his command staff. Reitsch’s dramatic appearance suggested that the plans had leaked, that the enemy had them.
There were two sides to the debate. Greene, Knox and Mercer led the faction supporting Washington’s plan, but prepared to make subtle changes in line with the information brought by the German. Sullivan, Stirling and Gates opposed. Sullivan argued for a very different course, an attack from the north on Trenton, and believed it was insane to even listen to the German. Gates, as gnomic as ever, repeated his view that any attack under present conditions (by which he implied Washington’s leadership) was doomed to disaster.
‘Enough, John, such talk of Salem is contemptuous. The plans she has brought from von Steuben do not alter our general course of action, they merely give us some cause for refinement as Knox and Greene have argued.’
‘Sir, that her plans are so close to your own suggests to me that your designs have in some shape been released to the enemy. I will repeat this: we will be walking to an entrapment that will ruin us all,’ Gates said furiously. ‘You know all too well my feelings on this issue as it is. Our men are shoddy, ill-equipped and unprepared to take on a well-trained body of soldiers such as these Hessians. Of your commanders, I have the greatest experience of the field, yet you prefer to listen to the prattlings of a boy, a Boston bookseller, over the considerations of a renowned man of action! Now, you contemplate carrying these plans through, even though the evidence suggests the enemy has full knowledge of them. Pray, what has to happen to alter you from his disastrous course of acti
on? Will you not be satisfied until General Howe sits in this room, warming his feet at your hearth?’
There was a snort of indignation from Henry Knox, the Boston bookseller himself, but Washington moved quickly before Knox could find words.
‘Gates, your patronising of the deliverer of the Ticonderoga cannon ill becomes you. But, please explain to me how if only the commanders in this conference were given any understanding of my designs, they fell into the hands of the enemy? Sir, you cannot be suggesting that someone here passed my thoughts to the enemy?’
Gates snorted in derision and Mercer, in an attempt to prick the mood, said, ‘I am afraid that Horatio’s opposition is really that he cannot bear the possibility that a woman may possess a military mind.’
‘Hugh, she has no military mind, she is a messenger girl. The architect of this mischief is this Baron von Steuben, if not Howe himself. This is madness, sheer madness. If Congress were to understand the nature of these events, they would not countenance this attack.’
‘Then perhaps we should be grateful that Congress are not here.’ Now Brigadier General Stirling joined in the debate. ‘Let us discuss this no more. The debate has changed my view. The general’s mind is set, we should proceed with the plan.’
There was a small murmur of assent, only Gates and Sullivan stood opposed.
Washington, buoyed by the confidence of others, looked directly at Gates and Sullivan. ‘Gentlemen, I did not hear your assent, but I assume you retain your discipline.’
‘You can have no doubt of my allegiance to you and our joint cause, sir. You will not mistake my passion for anything other than a hearty debate, I hope?’
‘I do not, John. Horatio?’
Gates stared back and then, ‘The die is cast. We proceed in unity.’
Washington moved back to the centre of the long table on which sat their rudimentary map of Trenton and its environs.
‘So, gentlemen, let us make our plans clear to all before we depart. We aim for three crossings, one to the south under John Cadwalader—’
