Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  The sun was now shining again with a heat so fierce and intense that the earth smoked vapor all around us. It was at this time that I, personally, experienced the only close fighting of the day, which brought a sudden end to this most amazing and bloody skirmish.

  I had been lying full length behind a bush in the lines of the Palatine regiment, eating a crust of bread; for that strange battle-hunger had been gnawing at my vitals for an hour. Some of the men were eating, some firing; the steaming heat almost suffocated me as I lay there, yet I munched on, ravenous as a December wolf.

  I heard somebody shout: “Here they come!” and, filling my mouth with bread, I rose to my knees to see.

  A body of troops in green uniforms came marching steadily towards us, led by a red-coated officer on horseback; and all around me the Palatines were springing to their feet, uttering cries of rage, cursing the oncoming troops, and calling out to them by name.

  For the detachment of Royal Greens which now advanced to the assault was, it appeared, composed of old acquaintances and neighbors of the Palatines, who had fled to join the Tories and Indians and now returned to devastate their own county.

  Lashed to ungovernable fury by the sight of these hated renegades, the entire regiment leaped forward with a roar and rushed on the advancing detachment, stabbing, shooting, clubbing, throttling. Mutual hatred made the contest terrible beyond words; no quarter was given on either side. I saw men strangle each other with naked hands; kick each other to death, fighting like dogs, tooth and nail, rolling over the wet ground.

  The tide had not yet struck us; we fired at their mounted officer, whom Elerson declared he recognized as Major Watts, brother-in-law to Sir John Johnson; and presently, as usual, Murphy hit him, so that the young fellow dropped forward on his saddle and his horse ran away, flinging him against a tree with a crash, doubtless breaking every bone in his body.

  Then, above the tumult, out of the north came booming three cannon-shots, the signal from the fort that Herkimer had desired to wait for.

  A detachment from the Canajoharie regiment surged out of the woods with a ringing cheer, pointing northward, where, across a clearing, a body of troops were rapidly advancing from the direction of the fort.

  “The sortie! The sortie!” shouted the soldiers, frantic with joy. Murphy and I ran towards them; Elerson yelled: “Be careful! Look at their uniforms! Don’t go too close to them!”

  “They’re coming from the north!” bawled Mount. “They’re our own people, Dave! Come on!”

  Captain Jacob Gardinier, with a dozen Caughnawaga men, had already reached the advancing troops, when Murphy seized my arm and halted me, crying out, “Those men are wearing their coats turned inside out! They’re Johnson’s Greens!”

  At the same instant I recognized Colonel John Butler as the officer leading them; and he knew me and, without a word, fired his pistol at me. We were so near them now that a Tory caught hold of Murphy and tried to stab him, but the big Irishman kicked him headlong and rushed into the mob, swinging his long hatchet, followed by Gardinier and his Caughnawaga men, whom the treachery had transformed into demons.

  In an instant all around me men were swaying, striking, shooting, panting, locked in a deadly embrace. A sweating, red-faced soldier closed with me; chin to chin, breast to breast we wrestled; and I shall never forget the stifling struggle — every detail remains, his sunburned face, wet with sweat and powder-smeared; his irregular teeth showing when I got him by the throat, and the awful change that came over his visage when Jack Mount shoved the muzzle of his rifle against the struggling fellow and shot him through the stomach.

  Freed from his death-grip, I stood breathing convulsively, hands clinched, one foot on my fallen rifle. An Indian ran past me, chased by Elerson and Murphy, but the savage dodged into the underbrush, shrieking, “Oonah! Oonah! Oonah!” and Elerson came back, waving his deer-hide cap.

  Everywhere Tories, Royal Greens, and Indians were running into the woods; the wailing cry, “Oonah! Oonah!” rose on all sides now. Gardinier’s Caughnawaga men were shooting rapidly; the Palatines, master of their reeking brush-field, poured a heavy fire into the detachment of retreating Greens, who finally broke and ran, dropping sack and rifle in their flight, and leaving thirty of their dead under the feet of the Palatines.

  The soldiers of the Canajoharie regiment came up, swarming over a wooded knoll on the right, only to halt and stand, silently leaning on their rifles.

  For the battle of Oriskany was over.

  There was no cheering from the men of Tryon County. Their victory had been too dearly bought; their losses too terrible; their triumph sterile, for they could not now advance the crippled fragments of their regiments and raise the siege in the face of St. Leger’s regulars and Walter Butler’s Rangers.

  Their combat with Johnson’s Greens and Brant’s Mohawks had been fought; and, though masters of the field, they could do no more than hold their ground. Perhaps the bitter knowledge that they must leave Stanwix to its fate, and that, too, through their own disobedience, made the better soldiers of them in time. But it was a hard and dreadful lesson; and I saw men crying, faces hidden in their powder-blackened hands, as the dying General was borne through the ranks, lying gray and motionless on his hemlock litter.

  And this is all that I myself witnessed of that shameful ambuscade and murderous combat, fought some two miles north of the dirty camp, and now known as the Battle of Oriskany.

  That night we buried our dead; one hundred on the field where they had fallen, two hundred and fifty in the burial trenches at Oriskany — thirty-five wagon-loads in all. Scarcely an officer of rank remained to lead the funeral march when the muffled drums of the Palatines rolled at midnight, and the smoky torches moved, and the dead-wagons rumbled on through the suffocating darkness of a starless night. We had few wounded; we took no prisoners; Oriskany meant death. We counted only thirty men disabled and some score missing.

  “God grant the missing be safely dead,” prayed our camp chaplain at the burial trench. We knew what that meant; worse than dead were the wretched men who had fallen alive into the hands of old John Butler and his son, Walter, and that vicious drunkard, Barry St. Leger, who had offered, over his own signature, two hundred and forty dollars a dozen for prime Tryon County scalps.

  I slept little that night, partly from the excitement of my first serious combat, partly because of the terrible heat. Our outposts, now painfully overzealous and alert, fired off their muskets at every fancied sound or movement, and these continual alarms kept me awake, though Mount and Murphy slept peacefully, and Elerson yawned on guard.

  Towards sunrise rain fell heavily, but brought no relief from the heat; the sun, a cherry-red ball, hung a hand’s-breadth over the forests when the curtain of rain faded away. The riflemen, curled up in the hay on the barn floor, snored on, unconscious; the batt-horses crunched and munched in the manger; flies whirled and swarmed over a wheelbarrow piled full of dead soldier’s shoes, which must to-day be distributed among the living.

  All the loathsome and filthy side of war seemed concentrated around the barn-yard, where sleepy, unshaven, half-dressed soldiers were burning the under-clothes of a man who had died of the black measles; while a great, brawny fellow, naked to the waist and smeared from hair to ankles with blood, butchered sheep, so that the army might eat that day.

  The thick stench of the burning clothing, the odor of blood, the piteous bleating of the doomed creatures sickened me; and I made my way out of the barn and down to the river, where I stripped and waded out to wash me and my clothes.

  A Caughnawaga soldier gave me a bit of soap; and I spent the morning there. By noon the fierce heat of the sun had dried my clothes; by two o’clock our small scout of four left the Stanwix and Johnstown road and struck out through the unbroken wilderness for German Flatts.

  XIX

  THE HOME TRAIL

  For eleven days we lay at German Flatts, Colonel Visscher begging us to aid in the defence of that threatene
d village until the women and children could be conveyed to Johnstown. But Sir John Johnson remained before Stanwix, and McCraw’s riders gave the village wide berth, and on the 18th of August we set out for Varicks’.

  Warned by our extreme outposts, we bore to the south, forced miles out of our course to avoid the Oneida country, where a terrific little war was raging. For the Senecas, Cayugas, a few Mohawks, and McCraw’s renegade Tories, furious at the neutral and pacific attitude of the Oneidas towards our people, had suddenly fallen upon them, tooth and nail, vowing that the Oneida nation should perish from the earth for their treason to the Long House.

  We skirted the doomed region cautiously, touching here and there the fringe of massacre and fire, often scenting smoke, sometimes hearing a distant shot. Once we encountered an Oneida runner, painted blue and white, and naked save for the loin-cloth, who told us of the civil war that was already rending the Long House; and I then understood more fully what Magdalen Brant had done for our cause, and how far-reaching had been the effects of her appearance at the False-Faces’ council-fire.

  The Oneida appeared to be disheartened. He sullenly admitted to us that the Cayugas had scattered his people and laid their village in ashes; he cursed McCraw fiercely and promised a dreadful retaliation on any renegade captured. He also described the fate of the Oriskany prisoners and some bateaux-men taken by Walter Butler’s Rangers near Wood Creek; and I could scarcely endure to listen, so horrid were the details of our soldiers’ common fate, where Mohawk and Tory, stripped and painted alike, conspired to invent atrocities undreamed of for their wretched victims.

  It was then that I heard for the second time the term “Blue-eyed Indian,” meaning white men stained, painted, and disguised as savages. More terrifying than the savages themselves, it appeared, were the blue-eyed Indians to the miserable settlers of Tryon. For hellish ingenuity and devilish cruelty these mock savages, the Oneida assured us, had nothing to learn from their red comrades; and I shall never be able to efface from my mind the memory of what we saw, that very day, in a lonely farm-house on the flats of the Mohawk; nor was it necessary that McCraw should have left his mark on the shattered door — a cock crowing, drawn in outline by a man’s forefinger steeped in blood — to enlighten those who might not recognize the ghastly work as his.

  We stayed there for three hours to bury the dead, an old man and woman, a young mother, and five children, the youngest an infant not a year old. All had been scalped; even the watch-dog lay dead near the bloody cradle. We dug the shallow graves with difficulty, having nothing to work with save our hunting-knives and some broken dishes which we found in the house; and it was close to noon before we left the lonely flat and pushed forward through miles of stunted willow growth towards the river road which led to Johnstown.

  I shall never forget Mount’s set face nor Murphy’s terrible, vacant stare as we plodded on in absolute silence. Elerson led us on a steady trot hour after hour, till, late in the afternoon, we crossed the river road and wheeled into it exhausted.

  The west was all aglow; cleared land and fences lay along the roadside; here and there houses loomed up in the red, evening light, but their inhabitants were gone, and not a sign of life remained about them save for the circling swallows whirling in and out of the blackened chimneys.

  So still, so sad this solitude that the sudden chirping of a robin in the evening shadows startled us.

  The sun sank behind the forest, turning the river to a bloody red; a fox yapped and yapped from a dark hill-side; the moon’s yellow light flashed out through the trees; and, with the coming of the moon, far in the wilderness the owls began and the cries of the night-hawks died away in the sky.

  The first human being that we encountered was a miller riding an ancient horse towards a lane which bordered a noisy brook.

  When he discovered us he whipped out a pistol and bade us stand where we were; and it took all my persuasion to convince him that we were not renegades from McCraw’s band.

  We asked for news, but he had none, save that a heavy force of our soldiers was lying by the roadside some two miles below on their way to relieve Fort Stanwix. The General, he believed, was named Arnold, and the troops were Massachusetts men; that was all he knew.

  He seemed stupid or perhaps stunned, having lost three sons in a battle somewhere near Bennington, and had that morning received word of his loss. How the battle had gone he did not know; he was on his way up the creek to lock his mill before joining the militia at Johnstown. He was not too old to carry the musket he had carried at Braddock’s battle. Besides, his boys were dead, and there was no one in his family except himself to help our Congress fight the red-coats.

  We watched him ride off into the darkness, gray head erect, pistol shining in his hand; then moved on, searching the distance for the outpost we knew must presently hail us. And, sure enough, from the shadow of a clump of trees came the smart challenge: “Halt! Who goes there?”

  “Officer from Herkimer and scout of three with news for General Schuyler!” I answered.

  “Halt, officer with scout! Sergeant of the guard! Post number three!”

  Dark figures swarmed in the road ahead; a squad of men came up on the double.

  “Advance officer!” rang out the summons; a torch blazed, throwing a red glare around us; a red-faced old officer in brown and scarlet walked up and took the packet of papers which I extended.

  “Are you Captain Ormond?” he asked, curiously, glancing at the endorsement on my papers.

  I replied that I was, and named Murphy, Elerson, and Mount as my scout.

  When the soldiers standing about heard the notorious names of men already famed in ballad and story, they craned their necks to see, as my tired riflemen filed into the lines; and the staff-officer made himself exceedingly agreeable and civil, conducting us to a shelter made of balsam branches, before which a smudge was burning.

  “General Arnold has despatches for you, Captain Ormond,” he said; “I am Drummond, Brigade Major; we expected you at Varick Manor on the ninth — you wrote to your cousin, Miss Varick, from Oriskany, you know.”

  A soldier came up with two headquarters lanterns which he hung on the cross-bar of the open-faced hut; another soldier brought bread and cheese, a great apple-pie, a jug of spring water, and a bottle of brandy, with the compliments of Brigadier-General Arnold, and apologies that neither cloth, glasses, nor cutlery were included in the camp baggage.

  “We’re light infantry with a vengeance, Captain Ormond,” said Major Drummond, laughing; “we left at twenty-four hours’ notice! Gad, sir! the day before we started the General hadn’t a squad under his orders; but when Schuyler called for volunteers, and his brigadiers began to raise hell at the idea of weakening the army to help Stanwix, Arnold came out of his fit of sulks on the jump! ‘Who’ll follow me to Stanwix?’ he bawls; and, by gad, sir, the Massachusetts men fell over each other trying to sign the rolls.”

  He laughed again, waving my papers in the air and slapping them down on a knapsack.

  “You will doubtless wish to hand these to the General yourself,” he said, pleasantly. “Pray, sir, do not think of standing on ceremony; I have dined, Captain.”

  Mount, who had been furtively licking his lips and casting oblique glances at the bread and cheese, fell to at a nod from me. Murphy and Elerson joined him, bolting huge mouthfuls. I ate sparingly, having little appetite left after the sights I had seen in that lonely house on the Mohawk flats.

  The gnats swarmed, but the smoke of the green-moss smudge kept them from us in a measure. I asked Major Drummond how soon it might be convenient for General Arnold to receive me, and he sent a young ensign to headquarters, who presently returned saying that General Arnold was making the rounds and would waive ceremony and stop at our post on his return.

  “There’s a soldier, sir!” said Major Drummond, emphasizing his words with a smart blow of his riding-cane on his polished quarter-boots. “He’s had us on a dog-trot since we started; up hill, down dale
, across the cursed Sacandaga swamps, through fords chin-high! By gad, sir! allow me to tell you that nothing stopped us! We went through windfalls like partridges; we crossed the hills like a herd o’ deer in flight! We ran as though the devil were snapping at our shanks! I’m half dead, thank you — and my shins! — you should see where that razor-boned nag of mine shaved bark enough off the trees with me to start every tannery between the Fish-House and Half-moon!”

  The ruddy-faced Major roared at the recital of his own misfortunes. Mount and Murphy looked up with sympathetic grins; Elerson had fallen asleep against the side of the shack, a bit of pie, half gnawed, clutched in his brier-torn fist.

  I had a pipe, but no tobacco; the Major filled my pipe, purring contentedly; a soldier, at a sign from him, took Mount and Murphy to the nearest fire, where there was a gill of grog and plenty of tobacco. I roused Elerson, who gaped, bolted his pie with a single mighty effort, and stumbled off after his comrades. Major Drummond squatted down cross-legged before the smudge, lighting his corn-cob pipe from a bit of glowing moss, and leaned back contentedly, crossing his arms behind his head.

  “I’m tired, too,” he said; “we march again at midnight. If it’s no secret, I should like to know what’s going on ahead there.”

  “It’s no secret,” I said, soberly; “the Senecas and Cayugas are harrying the Oneidas; the renegades are riding the forest, murdering women and infants. St. Leger is firing bombs at Stanwix, and Visscher is holding German Flatts with some Caughnawaga militia.”

  “And Herkimer?” asked Drummond, gravely.

  “Dead,” I replied, in a low voice.

  “Good gad, sir! I had not heard that!” he exclaimed.

  “It is true, Major. The old man died while I was at German Flatts. They say the amputation of his leg was a wretched piece of work.... He died bolt upright in his bed, smoking his pipe, and reading aloud the thirty-eighth Psalm.... His men are wild with grief, they say.... They called him a coward the morning of Oriskany.”