Sergeant Lamb's America

by Robert Graves

  (1) General Burgoyne’s army being exceedingly reduced by repeated defeats, by desertion, sickness, etc., their provisions exhausted, their military horses, tents, and baggage taken or destroyed, their retreat cut off, and their camp invested, they can only be allowed to surrender prisoners of war.

  Answer: Lieutenant-General Burgoyne’s army, however reduced, will never admit that their retreat is cut off while they have arms in their hands.

  (2) The troops under His Excellency General Burgoyne’s command, may be drawn up in their encampments, where they will be ordered to ground their arms, and may thereupon be marched to the river side to be passed over in their way towards Bennington.

  Answer: This article inadmissible in any extremity; sooner than this army will consent to ground their arms in their encampment, they will rush on the enemy determined to take no quarter. If General Gates does not mean to recede from this article the treaty ends at once. The army will to a man proceed to any act of desperation rather than submit to this article.

  General Gates did recede from this article, and the following was substituted in its stead:

  The troops to march out of their camp with the honours of war, and the artillery of the entrenchments, to the verge of the river, where their arms and artillery must be left. The arms to be piled by word of command from their own officers. A free passage to be granted to the army under Lieutenant-General Burgoyne to Great Britain, upon condition of not serving again in North America during the present contest; and the port of Boston to be assigned for the entry of transports to receive the troops whenever General Howe shall so order.

  It becoming generally known to both armies that the articles of capitulation were being discussed, the enemy’s fire slackened; and, though the rain continued, our condition was sensibly bettered. Our remaining oxen and other cattle were slaughtered and some fresh meat distributed to us. Our people began to greet and discourse with the Americans on the opposite bank of Hudson’s River; and a few riflemen even emerged from the forest on our right and exchanged rations and keepsakes with the Light Infantry and Grenadiers. On the morning of October 18th Mad Johnny Maguire came down to the river with me and several others. My comrades began shouting across the water friendly challenges to wrestling and boxing matches, and a big fellow with a gun seven foot long cried out, evidently to me: ‘You now, the tall sergeant with the moon face, will you kindly oblige me with a sweet turn at the blackthorn stick?’

  These were the accents of the city of Dublin, and I burst into loud laughter. ‘No, my Kevin Street bully,’ I replied. ‘The small sword is my weapon.’

  The American grew very wrath and ‘Don’t you dare to laugh at Cornelius Maguire, you rascal lobster,’ he said, ‘or I’ll swim over this stream and scuttle you with one blow, so I will.’

  At this, something appeared to strike Mad Johnny Maguire’s mind very forcibly. He darted from our midst and plunged into the river. ‘Och, Corny, Corny,’ he cried, ‘I hardly knew ye.’

  Cornelius Maguire, seized by a similar impulse, plunged in to meet him. They found their feet on a shallow place near the middle, where they hung on each other’s necks and wept. Their ‘Och, Johnny, my darling brother’, and ‘Och, Corny, my jewel’, soon cleared up the mystery for us. Cornelius Maguire had emigrated to America twenty years previously, at about the same time that Mad Johnny Maguire had entered the British Army. Each had been totally ignorant that he was engaged in hostile combat against the other’s life.

  Our minds were set at rest on October 18th, when we learned that General Gates had yielded to General Burgoyne’s threat of a desperate assault, should his demand for honourable terms be rejected, and that the articles were now signed. It was consoling that we had preserved the dignity of the British character and extorted from a successful foe, vastly outnumbering us and straining every nerve to tarnish our honour, so plain an admission of the awe in which they held our enfeebled arms. We were aware, however, that General Gates was prompted to rapid compliance not only by our resolute front but by news of Sir Henry Clinton’s capture of Forts Montgomery and Clinton with a charge-bayonet five days before. The Seventh, Twenty-sixth, Sixty-third, Fifty-second, and Fifty-seventh were the regiments employed on this honourable service. The great iron chain-boom, weighing fifty tons, there stretched by the enemy at prodigious expense across the river, had been speedily removed, and our ships freed to sail up the river as far as Albany. General Gates feared for his arsenal in that town and resolved to finish off one business before becoming involved in another. It consoled us for the surrender of our thirty-five pieces of brass ordnance and our five thousand muskets, to learn that General Clinton had captured more than that amount of cannon, together with great stores of powder and provisions, in Fort Montgomery.

  Our minds were filled with delightful thoughts of a safe and prompt return to our own land, where we might hold up our heads as men who had fought stoutly, and where we would also find great arrears of pay awaiting us to console us for our present indigence and hardships.

  Mad Johnny Maguire and his brother fell into a severe dispute, since they were resolved never again to part, as to whether Johnny should now discharge himself from the British Army and settle down with Corny on his farm at Norwalk in Connecticut, or Corny should quit the American Army and the two together go west into the new territory of Kentucke. The moral issue was debated with great warmth and, their fraternal love being as strong as their respective loyalties, it was with difficulty that we could restrain them from reciprocal injury.

  Chapter XXV

  OBEYING OUR officers’ orders, we piled up our arms in a meadow, near the confluence of Fishkill Creek and Hudson’s River, and emptied out our cartouche-cases. It was found that not fifteen rounds a man remained to us. A great stench arose in this meadow from the decaying bodies of horses that lay about it. They had been allured there, from the deep ravine where we kept them within the camp, by the scent of rich grass – the enemy shot the poor beasts down as soon as they began grazing. There were soldiers who now wept at being parted from the muskets that they had carried so long and cared for so well, and that seemed almost a part of themselves; and I own that for days I missed the familiar weight of my piece upon my shoulder, and felt in a manner naked without it. No American troops were present at this melancholy scene, General Gates having confined all to camp except a few companies of riflemen who lined the fringes of the forest as a precaution against any treachery on our part. Lieutenant-Colonel Hill preserved the colours of The Ninth by taking them off the staves and sewing them in the lining of a mattress. He eventually was able to present them to His Majesty at St James’s Palace, who rewarded his faithful services with the appointment of aide-de-camp to himself and the full rank of colonel.

  That same day, October 17th, we were marched off in the direction of Boston. We passed through the long ranks of our enemies, who had spent the whole morning scrubbing and cleaning their persons and firelocks in order to make the best appearance possible. There were fourteen thousand of them in the parade and some thousands more posted in reserve. The men were in general taller, thinner, and more sinewy than ours. Our veterans remarked that they would have liked these rebels better had they shown that command of mind which should dignify an army when victorious in the field; for it seemed to them that the features and tones even of the American regular troops betrayed an improper exultation. Lieutenant Anburey of The Fourteenth, in his published account of these transactions, has written: ‘As we passed the American enemy, throughout the whole of them I did not observe the least disrespect, or even a taunting look, but all was mute astonishment and pity.’ Neither I, nor such of my surviving comrades as I have consulted, can account for the discrepancy between what we saw and what the Lieutenant saw, unless by the suggestion that we were of a more jaundiced and irritable temper than he: for pity there was none, but either sour looks or good-humoured sallies at our expense, to which we did not care to reply. The truth is, we had been so scribbled against, by their
newspaper writers and pamphleteers, as base mercenaries and British scum, and so preached against by their ministers, who represented us in Biblical imagery as mere monsters – with swords for tongues, claws for hands, hoofs for feet, and our mouths dripping with the blood of children and virgins – that few Americans could cast out this strong prejudice from their minds. Add to this, that we could hardly expect from peasants, fighting in defence of their homes, the same courtesies as passed, for instance, between our armies and the French, when professionally opposed in battle upon the neutral soil of Germany or the Low Countries.

  The American regular or ‘Continental’ troops wore buff and blue uniform with stout knapsacks, and carried muskets, twenty thousand of which had been secretly bought from our enemies the French by an American emissary in Paris; the riflemen were conformedly dressed in linen hunting shirts and legging; the militia were clad, according to their own parochial fancy, in coats of military cut but of many different stuffs, colours, and facings – their firelocks also showing much diversity of quality and pattern. Besides these troops there also were numerous companies of well-whiskered rustics in workaday dress, many of whom carried immensely long guns of the sort used for duck-shooting, but some only pitchforks or knives bound to poles to serve as pikes. It was the monstrous many-coloured, fleecy wigs affected by the elder men that caused us most amazement and recalled the times of Good Queen Anne, when men wore haystacks upon their heads.

  The Americans certainly had proved very smart in repairing their deficiencies of warlike material. We had at first thought that they would have to yield for want of gunpowder: for the quantities that they won by capture, or by sale from the Spanish, French, and Dutch were wholly insufficient to their needs. But a simple countryman had approached the Massachusetts Assembly with a specimen of his own manufacture of gunpowder, from the salt-petre contained in rotten stable-refuse, and undertook to show them how more could be made in eight months than the province had money to pay for. His process was adopted. Flour-mills, which were very numerous in New England, were thereupon converted into mills for gunpowder, and of this product there was soon a superfluity. The Americans also were very short of lead for bullets and ran into their moulds clock-weights, waterspouts, cisterns, leaden ornaments from house-fronts, statuary, and printers’ founts of type, and were reduced at times to pewter spoons and dishes. Paper for cartridges, neither too thin nor too thick, was hard to come by, and the Continentals were supplied on one occasion with a whole edition of a German Bible printed in Philadelphia. The leaves of vestry-books were also much used in New England for this purpose. In one respect, we learned, the smartness of the Yankees recoiled upon them. For the French muskets supplied being insufficient to the needs of the whole American army, the militia were sometimes served out with trade-muskets, showy and defective, that had been manufactured for sale to the simple fur-getting Indian, or to the African chiefs of the Guinea Coast who took them in exchange for slaves. They frequently burst at the first discharge and proved fatal to the soldiers who bore them. Most of the muskets used against us were manufactured by country blacksmiths in imitation of the Tower musket, but not to a single standard, so that if a part were damaged the piece would be useless until a new part could be forged to match.

  When the head of our column arrived opposite the enemy’s general headquarters, General Burgoyne in plumed hat and a rich new uniform delivered up his sword with a flourish to General Gates, wearing a plain blue frock, cocked hat, and spectacles, who received it courteously and returned it to him. The other officers were likewise permitted to retain their swords and fusils. Major Skene, by the bye, wrote himself down humbly as ‘a poor follower of the British Army’. During these proceedings their musicians played the tune of ‘Yankee Doodle’, which had now become their national paean, a favourite of favourites, and used alike among them as the lover’s spell, the nurse’s lullaby, and the soldier’s marching song. The word ‘Yankee’ signifies ‘coward’ in the Cherokee Indian tongue, but from being used as a term of reproach it had become a word of glory to all New Englanders. The verses of the tune were exceedingly frivolous.

  During the delay of some minutes caused by the compliments exchanged between the Generals, I found myself halted opposite some Massachusetts troops: I believe they were a Captain Morean’s company. Among these I recognized James Melville, or Mellon, who had been prisoner at Quebec. I asked him: ‘Fighting again? Did you not give your parole?’

  He grinned and replied: ‘They gave me a paper to sign. But I owe King George nothing. A forced promise, I’ll swear, is no promise.’ He then asked his officer for permission to break ranks and give me a drink from his flask: which was refused, as the orders were very strict against this. Yet he tossed the flask to me, I drank rum from it and was about to toss it back when he cried to me that I might keep it in return for my former benefits to himself; which I did, gladly.

  We now retraced our steps once more along the road to Stillwater, which was a gloomy enough stage on our two hundred mile journey; encamping on the hill over the ravine where we had abandoned our tents and our wounded. The tents were gone, but the hospital was still crowded with our sick, who were receiving considerate treatment. To my joy I found Terry Reeves sitting at the door on an upturned keg, nearly recovered from a bullet wound in the foot; he did not wish to be parted from us again and hobbled forward with the company the next day. We were shocked to discover on a visit to General Fraser’s grave that some rough Americans had added to their former disrespect of his obsequies by exhuming the corpse. Their excuse was that they thought that we had concealed guns in the grave, and muskets in the coffin. It was certainly their custom to credit us with a ‘smartness’ altogether foreign to our British nature; but more likely the hope of these frontiersmen was to find, in the pockets of the General’s uniform, a watch, or money, or some article of value that had been overlooked by the mourners in the anxiety and solemnity of that evening’s work.

  We crossed Hudson’s River by General Gates’s bridge of boats at Stillwater; the township was very well named from the sudden calming of the turbulent stream opposite it. The American army passed us, marching down to Albany against General Clinton’s small army – which, however, soon retired upon hearing news of our disaster.

  That morning a thanksgiving sermon had been preached before the American army. The Chaplain fully set forth to his hearers that the Almighty had done more for them than they had done for themselves. He preached from Joel ii. 26: ‘But I will remove far off from you the Northern army, and will drive him into a land barren and desolate, with his face towards the East Sea, and his hinder part towards the Utmost Sea; and his stink shall come up, and his ill-savour shall come up, because he has done great things.’ Great things our Northern army had indeed accomplished in the way of battle, and none could deny it; that General Howe had not come to our assistance with his twenty thousand men, or that General Clinton’s force had marched too late, was no fault of ours. Now we were, in the words of the text, being driven into a land barren and desolate, with our face towards the East Sea; and as for our stink and ill-savour, the inhabitants of the country soon made it plain to us how grossly their nostrils were offended.

  Saratoga was distant from Boston some two hundred miles. From the outset of our march we experienced much hardship, sleeping in barns and being given but scanty provisions. The way before and about us presented an uncheering appearance, mountainous and uncultivated, with no pleasing scenery to amuse the eye. I was now able to congratulate myself on my prescience in burdening myself with the Congress bills, which passed current in these parts. I still retained one thousand dollars of them. The remaining four thousand I had given to the surgeon of the hospital to purchase comforts for the poor fellows under his charge; which gift, I believe, saved many of their lives. Of what was left I kept one hundred dollars for my own use and divided up the remainder among the men of my company: I regarded it as plunder and to be put into the common stock. We therefore fared better t
han most of the army so long as this money lasted. New England rum, which we purchased at Bennington, the first place of pleasant appearance that we arrived at, kept us alive through the very cold nights of our passage over the Green Mountains. Many soldiers paid for their drams by selling their cartouche-cases, which seemed unnecessary luggage now that our muskets were taken from us. The mountain roads were almost impassable to our wagons, and when we were half over, a heavy fall of snow occurred, which caused several men to die of cold. A soldier’s wife bore a child under the lee of a baggage cart that cruel night, and both survived.

  The Americans were very glad to sell our people Continental paper in exchange for ‘hard money’, as they termed gold and silver. At Bennington, in Vermont State, they offered nine paper dollars for each golden guinea, thus halving the professed value of the paper, and when we had crossed the Green Mountains and arrived at Hatfield and Hadley in Massachusetts, on the Connecticut River, we could get eighteen. The price of guineas grew still better, the nearer we came to Boston, and by the time we had passed through the back country of Massachusetts and approached the sea-board, we came to realize how low was the confidence of the more sagacious Americans in the ability of Congress to redeem these paper promises. For at Worcester, two or three days’ march from our destination, we could get as much as thirty-five dollars for a guinea. As the war continued, the value of a paper dollar declined to less than one penny, and at last the entire issue, having served its purpose of raising the wind, was silently repudiated. But what appeared strange to us was that though the Americans depreciated Congress money in this way, by offering to sell it to us at so great a discount, yet always, whenever they sold any article at a price in paper dollars and we paid in hard money, they made no allowance for the difference in exchange; but for the honour of their country reckoned a paper dollar the equal of a silver one. We were the Egyptians, as it were, whom these Children of Israel – who, by the bye, bore Biblical names almost to a man – spoiled of our silver and gold.