Citizen Tom Paine

by Howard Fast

  “Water, I say, water!”

  “What’s up there?”

  “Paine?”

  “Yes, what’s up there?”

  “God knows. Paine, where am I to find water?”

  He rode on, blundering into a column of Jagers, green-clad, roaring in German as they rushed past him, taking no notice of him. Then, above the sound of the battle, he heard Harry Knox’s booming voice. He followed it and through the haze saw naked artillerymen swinging into position a battery of twelve-pounders. Knox was bleeding and sweating and yelling, and when he saw Paine he ran to him and pointed to a great stone house that loomed vaguely in the drifting mist.

  “Look at that! Look at that!”

  Appearing like magic from the mist and smoke, half a hundred figures raced over the lawn for the house; suddenly, it exploded with fire, and the figures twisted, dropped like punctured bags, some of them lying where they fell, others crawling away. A perfect fury of musket fire broke out from another direction, and Knox shrieked at his artillerymen.

  “Load, you bastards! Load, you dirty bastards!”

  A group of men appeared, running with all their strength, and no one knew whether it was an advance or a retreat, and an officer came by, spurring his horse out of the mist and then back into it again. Paine’s nag bolted, and it ran until it was caught in a slow-moving band of cavalry. They were speaking Polish, most of them, and they moved on slowly, Paine with them, walking into a burst of grape that tore them to pieces and sent their horses in every direction.

  Coffee was served, and corn cakes and cheap molasses, all put down on the claw-leg table, hot and steaming as they came in, one by one, and stood around. It was nine o’clock in the morning, a day later, and they had been invited to the little Dale house to have breakfast. They stood around, and no one had an appetite, Paine and Greene and Sullivan and Wayne and Knox and Stirling and the Pole, Pulaski, and Stephan, as sorry and bloodstained and tattered and dirty a high command as had ever been seen. There was no talk, but rather a dazed, sullen expectancy as they waited for Washington. And then Hamilton came in, went to the table, and began to cram his mouth full, saying:

  “Good, you know, have some.”

  “Where is he?”

  “He’ll be here. This is good breakfast, and you don’t know when there’ll be more.”

  “Angry?” Wayne asked.

  “Just as always.”

  There weren’t enough chairs. Some sat, others backed against the wall. Greene grasped Paine’s arm and nodded. Then Washington came in, walking straight through and looking neither to left nor to right, pouring himself a cup of coffee and taking a piece of pone, and telling them, not harshly:

  “Go ahead and eat, gentlemen.”

  Nevertheless, they were afraid of him. Paine had coffee; Greene stood with his legs planted wide, staring at the floor, as if there were some complicated problem there that defied his understanding. Pulaski pulled at his mustaches while tears welled into his very pale blue eyes, and Wayne bit his nails. And the big Virginian, eating slowly, said to them:

  “There is no point in discussing yesterday, gentlemen. Tomorrow is more pertinent.”

  They looked at him, but no one answered.

  “Make out your reports concerning the battle. We will go on and perhaps our fortunes will fare differently—”

  Then something broke the dam, and they all began to talk at once—hoarse, strained voices trying to pierce through the haze that almost destroyed them the morning before. And Washington, taking Paine by the arm, said:

  “Tell me, sir, you were at Philadelphia, and was it bad?”

  “Very bad.”

  “And do you think it very bad with us?”

  “No,” Paine said definitely.

  “Why?”

  “Because you are not afraid,” Paine said quietly.

  “Just that?”

  “Just that.”

  Then they shook hands.

  Marching south to prevent reinforcements for the enemy from sailing up the Delaware, and failing in that. Failing at Fort Mifflin and Fort Mercer. Failing in a child’s ambuscade against a few hundred Hessians; failing in a simple maneuver because the men tripped and fell from weariness. Failure and failure and failure. Twelve miles through the rain and muck, and a panicky scramble from a dozen British dragoons. Two thousand men slop along from dawn to dusk, and then one day the ground turns hard. The roads that were swamps, cut or worn in between the two shoulders of meadowland or forest, as most roads were at the time, become as nasty and sharp as corrugated iron. A cow’s track in the muck freezes and becomes a deadly weapon. A ripple of mud drives its point through a paper-thin sole. A bloodspot stains the road, and then another, and then still another. Flakes of snow fall as if a down quilt were ripped open and fluffed across the sky. As a mark on the road, as a sign is the bright red blood in the cold white snow. Now march north again, for word has come from the tall Virginian to join him. There is a place called the Valley Forge.

  “I tell you, comrade, that our cause is just!”

  Paine is changing, and his flesh is gone. He was a strong man with broad shoulders and hands like flails, but the flesh is gone, the cheeks sunken, the eyes hollow. With his big musket a killing weight on his shoulder, he walks in the ranks, coughing, stumbling, falling as the others fall, leaving his own trail of blood. How else are comrades bound? “I tell you, our cause is just,” he says, and Greene, who leads this pathetic army, thinks to himself, “They will kill him some day, because you can’t whip dying flesh.”

  They don’t kill him, they listen. And twenty who would have deserted hear a man say in a whisper:

  “Men live by glory, so listen to me, comrades. All things come out of this, and the deed we dared is beyond my understanding and yours. But if you want to go home—”

  “God damn you, Paine, we’ve heard that before!”

  “Go home.” And then silence until someone says, “Go ahead, Tom.”

  “Men are good,” and he looks around at the circle of beggars.

  “Why?”

  “Even the simple fact that we want to go home. Bad men don’t want to go home. We are good men, quiet men, little men. And we are taking the world for ourselves; they drove us like slaves for five thousand years, but now we are taking the world for ourselves, and when our marching feet sound, my God, friends, who will be able to stop their ears? But this is the beginning, the beginning—”

  “I want you to stay with me,” Greene told him one evening. “Tom, I need you. I want you to take a major’s commission.”

  Paine shook his head.

  “But why? I don’t speak of rewards, that’s a long time off, but where is the virtue in being nothing, in not drawing a shilling’s pay, in knowing that if you’re captured, you’ll be hanged an hour later?”

  “I’m not a soldier,” Paine said.

  “Are any of us?”

  “This is your war to fight, Nathanael, and mine to understand. I am not even an American, and where is the end for me? You’ll be free, but I’ll have my chains—”

  “I don’t understand that.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Paine said uneasily, and then smiled a bit as he reminded Greene that he was still the secretary for the Office of Foreign Affairs.

  As they approached Valley Forge, Paine came down with an attack of dysentery. Colonel Joseph Kirkbride, whom Paine had first met at Fort Lee, was due for a leave, and asked whether the other wouldn’t share it with him.

  “You can stand a rest,” he told him.

  Paine, who could barely stagger along by now, agreed. Greene provided the horses, gripped Paine’s hand, and begged him to come back again.

  “I’ll come back,” Paine smiled. “A bad penny turns up, doesn’t it?”

  Kirkbride lived in Bordentown, in a comfortable frame house, hearths five feet wide, a feather bed at night, a steaming bath in the kitchen, and, best of all, books. He had Swift, Defoe, Shakespeare, Addison, Pope, Clairmon
t, the vulgar little novels of Dreed. Paine was sick and weak and tired, and he let go of reality, curled in front of the fire and wandered with Lemuel Gulliver, prodded the amorous filth of Gin Row with Muckey Dray, recaptured Defoe’s England, dreamed, whispered parts from Hamlet and Lear, ate and slept. They had few visitors, and both men wanted to be left alone, to forget for a while. They drank a good deal, not to drunkenness, but to the warm, sleepy contentment of satisfied animals. They talked little; they looked out of the windows and watched the snow fall, the drifts pile up, always with the comfort that they could turn around and see the flame roar in the hearth.

  In that way, two weeks passed before Paine rose one morning and announced, as if the thought had only just occurred to him:

  “I’m going back.”

  Riding along a frozen road where his horse’s hoofs drummed like musket shots each time they bit through the crust of ice, Paine saw a blur in the meadow beside him, and going over knelt beside a man frozen stiff and dead, musket beside him and face turned up to the sky—a deserter but a continental, a life gone and cold loneliness in a lonely land.

  That was the way it was and had ever been, winter and the land against them, closed doors and closed shutters, no different in Pennsylvania than it had been in Jersey.

  At night he crouched close to a small fire; a step could mean death and he kept his musket beside him; he warmed his hands; he lay in his blanket and looked up at the cold winter sky. It was not safe to ask one’s way nor to declare one’s party. He was looking for a place called the Valley Forge, and only one man whom he spoke to had anything to say about it, “A sad spot, mind me.”

  He stayed one blessed night in a Quaker household, a big, square man, soft-spoken, and a woman whose smile was innocent as a child’s, and trying to thank them and tell them who he was, received from the man, “Nay, we know thee not, but as a stranger cold and hungry. And if thee are one of them, keep thee council.”

  “You don’t like the continentals?”

  “We love man, but hate bloodshed, murder, and suffering.”

  “And is it murder to fight for freedom?”

  “Thee will find freedom a thousandfold more within thee.”

  Leaving, Paine said, “The road to the encampment?”

  “The Valley Forge?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thee will find it. God has chosen a place of perdition on earth. Look thee in the sky, and where the devil stands, they be.”

  This was the Valley Forge. When he came, it was night, and a sentry, muffled in a blanket, barred his path. There was a bridge across the Schuylkill and a pink sky over the snowy hills. There were dugouts, lines of them back and forth like dirty lace, half dirt holes, half log. On a frozen parade ground, a flag waved. Fires burned, and dark figures moved in front of the flames. The hills jutted like bare muscles, and the leafless trees swayed in the wind.

  “I am Paine,” he told the sentry, and the man coughed, laughed, showed his yellow teeth at the feeble pun.

  “So we all are, citizen.”

  “Tom Paine.”

  The man sought in his memory, found a reminder, and shook his head. “Common Sense?”

  “Yes. Where’s the general?”

  “Yonder—” The man had lost interest, huddled back in his blanket.

  “Yonder” brought him past dugouts, an artillery emplacement, a log hospital where the wounded groaned, sang and screamed, and other sentries to whom he gave the same answer:

  “Paine.”

  “Go on.”

  He had walked a mile through the encampment, along the river with the hills over him and to his left, when he saw in the dusk the fieldstone house that was Washington’s headquarters. There was a drift of smoke from the chimney, a light in the windows, a sentry in front and a sentry in back. They let him in. Hamilton, a thin, hollow-eyed boy, years older than when Paine had last seen him, stood in the vestibule, recognized the onetime staymaker of Thetford, and smiled and nodded.

  “Welcome.”

  Paine blew on his hands and tried to smile.

  “You like our little place?” Hamilton asked.

  There was something in his tone that made Paine ask, uncertainly, “Is it worse than what I’ve seen?”

  “That depends on how much you have seen.”

  “I walked through from the bridge.”

  “Then the best is yet to unfold,” Hamilton said bitterly. “You must go to the dugouts, Paine—you must go and talk to them, and probably they will cut your throat. Do you think you have seen them at their worst—but we are breeding a new brand of beast here. Why don’t you ask why?”

  “I know why,” Paine nodded.

  “Do you—but you worked for that swinish Congress of ours. Do they know that we’re starving, naked, dying of hunger and disease and cold, rotting—rotting, I tell you, Paine!”

  Going up to him, Paine took him by his jacket and said quietly, “Get hold of yourself. I don’t even know where Congress is. Get hold of yourself.”

  Hamilton giggled and swallowed. “Sorry.” He giggled again. “Go in there—he’s in there.”

  “Don’t be a fool.”

  “Sorry,” Hamilton said.

  Washington rose as Paine entered the room, peering for a moment to identify the stranger, and then smiling and holding out his hand. He looked older, Paine noticed; war was making old men of this young and desperate group; thinner, too, and strangely innocent as he was now, wigless, in a dressing gown with an ancient cap on his head, his gray eyes larger than Paine had ever imagined them to be. He was genuinely glad to see Paine, begged him to sit down and take off his coat, and then, in a very few words, described the tense and terrible situation at the encampment, the lack of food and clothing, the alarming increase in venereal disease, due to the abundance of women who lived with the men, some of them camp-followers, some of them wives, the daily desertions, the shortage of ammunition, the increasing anger even among the most loyal at the fact that they had not been paid for months.

  “All that,” Washington said softly. “I tell you it is worse than last year, and you remember that. Unless the country helps, we will break, I can tell you that, Paine. I can tell no one else, but, Paine, we are close to the finish—you must know. Not through the enemy, but ourselves, and then the revolution will go like a bad dream.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Go to Congress and plead. Go to the country and wake them up. Make them understand—tell them!”

  “I want to stay here.”

  “Don’t stay here, Paine. Here it is hell, and I don’t think even you can help us. Go to Congress, and somehow we will last out this winter—I can’t think of the next. Somehow, we will endure.”

  10

  REVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE

  HE FOUND the Congress at York, and curiously enough he was welcomed. A dinner was given for him, and there were Rush, Abington, the Adams cousins, Lee, Hemingway, and others. The guest of honor was Tom Paine, shaven and with a new jacket and shoes. “What he has seen and suffered,” Hemingway said, “should be an inspiration for all of us.” Well-fed, honest men they were; claret was the drink of the evening, bottles sparkling up and down the table like a whole line of British redcoats. James Cranshaw, at whose beautifully furnished home the dinner was given, played host as in old times, carrying in the whole roast suckling pig himself. Two beef and kidney puddings flanked the roast, and two platters of fried chicken flanked the puddings. Hot bread, both corn and wheat, gave off their good smell, and there were cornucopias full of dried fruit. “For the land is plentiful, let it be known far and wide.” Sitting next to Paine, Cranshaw pointed out the beauties of his Philadelphia Chippendale:

  “You will note, sir, the simple lines and the undecorated backs of the chairs. For the highboy, I confess nothing equals the mahogany product of Newport, in particular the brothers Granny. For chairs, Philadelphia holds the crown and nothing in England is as good, I say nothing, sir. In New England they desecrate the p
roduct with ladder backs and peasant seats of rush; here our sidechairs are quiet songs of beauty, the ball and claw arrived at its final function, the fretted back become Grecian in its gentle curves. Shall one doubt the future of America?”

  “I wonder,” Paine thought.

  They plied him with food and drink, and they talked of everything under the sun but the war. Not until the meal was done, the flip served, and the ladies had retired to the drawing room, did they come to the point. Then, over snuff and cigars, they pumped Paine about what he had seen at Germantown and Valley Forge.

  “But you will admit that the leadership was mediocre?” they prodded him.

  “The leadership, gentlemen, is sacrificing and courageous.”

  “But stupid.”

  “I deny that! Soldiers are not made overnight. We are not Prussians, but citizens of a republic.”

  “Yet you cannot deny that Washington has failed constantly. What you told us you saw at Valley Forge is only final proof of his unfitness!”

  “Unfitness!” Paine said quietly. “My good gentlemen, God help you!”

  “Aren’t you dramatizing, Paine?”

  “What is the case in point?” Paine asked. “Do you want to be rid of Washington?”

  “Let us say, rather, co-operate with him,” Lee said smoothly. “What Gates has done at Saratoga, his capture of Burgoyne’s entire army, proves—”

  “Proves nothing!” Paine snapped. “Have you forgotten that Gates deliberately abandoned Washington at the Delaware last year? I’m not afraid of words, gentlemen, and I’d as soon say traitor as anything else. At a price, Gates will sell, and I am not sure others haven’t a price—” staring from face, to face.

  “Paine, you’re drunk!”

  “Am I? Then I’ll say what I would never dare to sober—I’ll say, gentlemen, that you disgust me, that you are breaking down all that is decent in our Congress, that you are ready to sell, yes, damn it, ready to sell, and that when you lose Washington, you lose the war—”

  The next night, someone tried to kill him, a pistol snapping and missing fire, and a week later a note that said politely that some things are spoken of, some not. But Rush sought him out in a tavern and said: