Citizen Tom Paine (20 page)

Paine carried his musket now; he saw them tar and feather a harmless old man, whose only sin was that he swept the hearths in Carpenter's Hall; he died after Paine and a few others had taken him from the stake to which he was bound. A round dozen had the nerve to remain—sullen, desperate men with guns in their hands, and they buried the old man openly. Paine said softly, “God help them when the day of reckoning comes.”

Houses were burning; the volunteer fireman's association had gone to pieces completely; the houses burned and left their trail of smoke across the blue sky.

Paine reflected curiously upon what such a situation does to men, for among the few rebels who stayed was Aitken, a somber, aging man who nodded when Paine told him about the new
Crisis
paper.

“I'll print it,” he said.

“And when the British come?”

Aitken shrugged; he didn't seem to care. Paine begged him to make some provision for leaving the city and getting his presses out, but he shook his head stolidly.

“A man does what a man can,” he said. “I have no other place to go.” And he stayed behind. When Paine came to say good-by, the Scotsman handed him five hundred freshly printed leaflets.

“Go on,” he told Paine. “Get out before it's too late.”

Paine found an old, swaybacked nag, bought a saddle for a few dollars, and rode out of one end of Philadelphia as the Hessians marched into the other. And on the Baltimore Pike, he drew up his horse and sat for a while, listening to the beating of the British drums.

He asked himself, “What am I now, propagandist without presses? Rabble rouser lingering at the scene of death after the mob has fled? Revolutionist surveying the dead corpse?” He rode slowly on the old nag, and often he looked over his shoulder at the city that had nursed a thing called America. He lay down to sleep in a copse, hobbling the nag first and keeping his musket by his side, but his dreams were not good. And the next day he stopped at a farm and called:

“Halloo!”

It was shuttered; a musket poked through a slit in the wood told him to be off. “Where is the army?” he called “God damn you and the army,” the slit said.

And wasn't it always that way when they suffered defeat, the countryside growing black and sullen, the houses shuttered, the cattle locked away, the whole face of the land becoming black and fearful? It had been so in New York, in Jersey, and now in Pennsylvania, and Paine began to wonder who it was that made and fought the revolution, when the fat, staid prosperity of the land was so awfully against it. He rode on and in circles, and once when he faced a farm, a bullet ripped the cloth of his jacket. In a cornfield, his horse tethered beside him, he lay and watched the blood-red sun setting; and never before had he been so lonely a stranger in so lonely a land. He saw once, far off and down a road, three men of the continentals, unmistakable, gaunt and barefoot and ragged as they were, but as he whipped his nag down on them they raced into the woods. And a milkmaid, whom he would have asked for a drink, parched and hungry as he was, fled into a barn when he made toward her. A frightened land. Paine rode in broad, slow circles. He rode out of dawning and into sunset, a lonely Englishman, a renegade Quaker who pursued a will-o'-the-wisp called revolution; he lay alone and hungry, and remembered Irene Roberdeau's eyes and voice, her throat and her swelling breasts, and he cursed himself, his fate, all his destiny and all that was Tom Paine.

And then one evening, he was stopped by a fierce, half-naked sentry, who wore a bloodstained bandage over his matted hair, and demanded:

“Who goes there?—God damn you, answer up or I'll blow out your dirty guts!”

“Tom Paine.”

“The hell you say!”

“Then look at me. What is this?”

“General Greene's encampment. Let's have a look—”

He sat having dinner with Greene, the flies of the patched tent thrown back, a fringe of autumn trees dropping their leaves against the orange light of campfires, and Greene saying:

“I tell you, Paine, you brought back my soul, I was so filthy tired and done in. Do you understand?”

Paine nodded; how was it that Greene looked on him as a savior, that Greene held his hand and tried to let Paine know how it had been at Brandywine? In appearance, they were closer now, Greene's handsome face worn and lined, incredibly aged for a man so young, Greene's buff and blue uniform faded and ragged, his boots worn through at the toes.

“So we lost Philadelphia,” Greene said, after Paine had told him. “Not a shot fired, not a hand raised, but we gave it up to them. It could have been a fortress, and was it you who said this was a people's war?”

“I said it.”

“Are you tired, Paine?”

“Tired, yes. There's nothing good about war, nothing decent, nothing noble. You say, I will take up a gun and kill my brother, because the ends justify the means, because my freedom and my liberty are my soul's blood, and how can I live without them? Make men free so that the land will shine with God's holy light! And then they run away, they leave their own houses, they close their shutters and blow out your brains, if, God forbid, you should want a drink of water, and they damn you for a banditl If we were like the Jagers, it would be different, but we're little men, general, little, tired, hopeless men.”

“Yes—”

“And now what?”

“God knows. We are beaten and beaten.”

“And him?”

“Washington?” Greene shook his head. “We're going to attack—he's bewildered, well, we all are. We had a count and we still have eleven thousand men left—that's strange, isn't it? And they're at Germantown with less than seven thousand, so we're going to attack. But we are afraid; go outside later and talk to them, Paine, and you'll see how afraid we are. We had a talk about it, and no one knew what to do. But Wayne, you know him?”

“I know him.”

“He sat in a corner and pretended to read a book, didn't say anything, just fire in him and sometimes he'd look at me as if I hadn't the guts of a rat left, and finally Washington asked him what would he do, what had he to say, and he answered, ‘I'd say nothing, I'd fight, sir, fight—do you hear me, fight, not run away, but fight!'” Greene's voice slipped away; Paine prodded him.

“And then?”

“And then we looked at each other, because we were all afraid—and tomorrow we attack. For God's sake, Paine, go out and talk to the men.”

“Yes.”

As he rose, Greene caught his arm. “What will you tell them?”

“About Philadelphia—”

“Do you think—”

“They ought to know. It's time for them to begin to hate. This isn't a revolution, it's civil war.”

The nightmare of the Battle of Germantown Paine would not forget until his dying day. And a nightmare it was, so impossible a nightmare that not for months afterwards could the actual action be pieced together. In four columns, the American troops drove on the British and Hessians who were very nearly trapped. But the columns could not co-ordinate; it was dawn, and fog lay over the field like a pall of heavy smoke. Paine rode with Greene and was separated from him; lost, he ran into a whole regiment of continentals who were also lost. They fired at him; screaming with fury, he got into them and saw that half were drunk, the other half too weary to do more than stand oafishly. Then a storm of firing broke out ahead of him, and the men scattered. Riding toward the firing, Paine came on a steady stream of wounded. Most of them lay on the road, too weak to move. The fog made it dark as evening, and only by voice did Paine recognize Doctor Mulavy, who had been with Greene at Fort Lee. In a bloodstained apron, he yelled at Paine to find water, mistaking him, mounted as he was, for an officer.

“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—”