Conceived in Liberty (23 page)

Ely says: “We'll endure, Allen.”

I remember Washington's words. How much can a man endure? I stare around the dugout curiously, as if I had never seen it before—smoke-blackened logs, packed dirt on the floor, a double tier of beds, built onto the wall, a few rags hanging from wooden pegs. A musket rack. Moss Fuller's musket is there, Clark Vandeer's, Henry Lane's, Aaron Levy's. Kenton Brenner's, Edward Flagg's, Meyer Smith's, Charley Green's——

A roll call—the muskets answer, each one an individual. Charley has a musket with a silver-inlaid stock, the work of Paul Revere. Clark's is a French piece. There are three long-barrelled Valley-country muskets.

I say to Ely: “The rain has stopped.”

“I know,” Ely answers softly. He is looking at the muskets, too. His big grey head is bent over.

He comes over to me and sits down. He says: “Best not to keep the women here tonight.”

“I'll stay here,” she says. not moving from her place by Charley's bed.

I nod to my woman, and she goes to the door.

“Tell them you're Allen Hale's woman. They'll keep you.”

She's anxious to go. After she's gone, small as the dugout is, it seems curiously empty.

“Ely,” I say, “there were three hundred of us come out of the Valley country.”

“I know.”

“Will any go back?”

The next day we buried Charley Green. We laid him in the hillside, just away from the abatis. We put a wooden cross as a marker on his grave. We laid him where he could see the blue hills, off to Philadelphia.

XIX

J
OB
A
NDREWS,
a Massachusetts man, crying for us to come and see. He's run up the hillside, laughing like a child. We make a circle round him, and he shows us what he has, a delicate purple flower.

“The first,” he says. “A winter flower.”

It goes from hand to hand until it falls to pieces. Men hold it close to their noses, trying to sniff its perfume. We handle it tenderly.

“Only one,” Job says.

“More later.”

“I seen these blossoms come in great banks.”

We go to the grand parade under a blue sky that's rolling with clouds. The wind out of the west is cool and clean, and brings a fragrance of spring. We are without our ragged greatcoats.

The brigades form, and the drums beat out their roll. Steuben rides onto the field, and we smile. We've found a man to love, a man like ourselves, coarse, hard, living with the earth, but patient and gentle as a woman.

He dismounts and walks toward the brigades. He has mastered a broken English, which he delights in using.

“Mine children,” he says.

We laugh. He's taught us to laugh again. We're a few hundred broken soldiers, but he respects us. It's a new thing with us.

“Mine children—ve learn to march dis day.
Ja
—ve learn to march vere ve vant, take vat ve vant. Vat der British have, ve take—
ja?
”

We imitate him. “Ya—ya, Baron.”

We march back and forth, across the grand parade. We have learned to lift our feet, snap them forward in the Prussian fashion. We have learned to march in close order, ten men moving as one. We have learned about bayonets.

He pleads with us: “Mine children—you vill not use der bayonets to cook food? Please. You vill clean der bayonets?”

He tells us to sit down. The staff officers protest. They tell him that he is mad. These men are beasts—and he is destroying what discipline is left in the army. Men on parade do not sit down.

He doesn't understand, and he shakes his head. “But a democratic country—I thought things would be different,” he says in German.

“We are at war, Baron.”

“I know, I know—I've seen a little of war. But my own way. Let them sit down.”

We sprawl about, watching him curiously. He says: “I make mit der bayonet vat you call a show—
Ja
? You vill vatch.” He walks through the brigades, seeking a musket and bayonet to suit him. As he walks, his rage mounts. Musket after musket, he examines and throws aside in disgust. Finally, he cries:

“Vat pigs—vat svine! Vy did I come to dis accursed country—to dis land of peasants?” He stamps back and forth in a fury of rage, and we watch him without heat. The rage will cool. We know enough of rage. We were penned up like beasts for a winter; some of us went mad.

He cools. He selects a musket and bayonet, and goes out before us. He salutes us, says:

“Vatch careful, mine children.”

A short, fat man, he moves awkwardly as he goes through the drill. Beyond him, a cluster of our officers observe with expressions of mingled amusement and resentment. Steuben walks back, whirls, and runs toward us with fixed bayonet presented. He thrusts at the air, wrenches, and plucks back the bayonet.

“As dis,
ja?
Der British are clumsy fools—
ja?
Der virst—brezent, barry—t'rust!” He lunges again. We roar with laughter. We call out:

“More, Baron!”

“Give us one for General Howe, Baron!”

“Give us the whole thing—over again, Baron!”

He doesn't resent our laughter. He joins in himself, laughing and panting at the same time.

“Now—mine children, mit all. Attention!”

The brigades form. The endless drill goes on again: present bayonets, four steps and lunge. Parry, four steps and lunge. We march up and down the parade. We march endlessly, eternally, until our heads are whirling. We lunge at the air, again and again, long lines of tattered men.

Steuben is tireless. He seems to know only one thing—drill. Morning, noon, and night, he drills us. He comes up to the dugouts alone, examines our muskets. He tells us how to clean our bayonets, how to edge a musket-flint to make it spark, how to divide powder into the proper amounts to make a sure load.

He comes into our dugout once. It is toward evening, and we are resting from the drill, lying in our beds.

He enters, and we stumble to our feet. He says in German: “Be seated—I pray you. You understand German?”

We nod, and he looks round the dugout curiously.

“You lived here all winter?”

“All winter.”

He turns to our musket rack, and his lips move as he counts the guns. He says:

“Where are the rest of the men who live here?”

“They're dead.”

He shakes his head, walks to the fire and stares into it. “I have seen some terrible things,” he mutters. “I have seen men suffer——”

The drills go on. The sky turns a shade of blue taken out of our dreams. The locust trees along the Schuylkill bud green. The brown dirt on Charley Green's grave sends up little shoots of growing things.

XX

I
AM OUT
with Ely on sentry duty—a cool, clear night. We meet each other and walk slowly toward Charley's grave. I bend over and pick a bit of grass from it.

I hold it out to Ely. He takes it in his hand and stands there looking at it.

“I had in mind that Charley would be with us,” I say. “I had no thought that he would die …”

Ely says, thoughtfully: “There will never be another winter like this. When you were born, Allen, I stood outside your house with your father. It was a bitter, sad thing to hear your mother scream. All night long, she screamed out in pain. You were born in the morning.”

I listen; it comes to me that Ely is an old man, part of a past.

“There'll be something out of this winter, Allen—something from our suffering. I don't know what, I'm not a learned man. But we've given birth—do you understand?”

“I don't know——”

“You're only a boy, Allen. You're making something for yourself. It's not for Jacob or me.”

“What, Ely?”

“A way of life—a new world for men. The Jew who came from Poland, a great distance, seeking it. The men who died——”

“For whom?” I demand. “They let us starve here, while they filled their fat bellies.”

“When your enlistment's over, Allen, you'll go back?”

I shrug.

“You're looking for something. Allen. Only find it. It needs a strong man.”

I'm thinking, a man like Ely, a strong man to take things and hold them. I'm thinking of all who went—Moss, Kenton, Charley … My turn sooner or later.

I say to Ely: “God—I'm sick for home.”

He nods. “I know how that is, Allen.”

“You'll come home with me, Ely?” I ask him eagerly. “You and Jacob—the three of us back to the Mohawk?” I take his hand.

“There's too many died here, Allen,” he says, shaking his head.

“But why—why must we keep on? Ely, I'm afraid.”

He says, gently: “Go back, Allen. If you wish to go back—then go.”

We walk apart, and I turn again and again to watch the lean figure of Ely, Ely an old man already, Ely with a knowingness that frightens me because it's away from me, out of my world.

The next day I go to General Wayne's quarters. I try not to think of what I'm doing. I try not to think of how the green shoots are pushing themselves up through the dirt on Charley Green's grave.

Wayne is sitting at a desk, writing, when the orderly brings me in. He glances up at me, and his brow puckers. I can see that he remembers me.

“What do you want, sir?” he asks me.

“I want to sign papers for re-enlistment.”

He stares at me. The orderly leaves me alone, and Wayne sits for what seems a long time, staring at me, looking at my torn, filthy clothes.

He says oddly: “Your name's Allen Hale——”

“Yes, sir.”

“What regiment?”

“The Fourteenth Pennsylvania.”

He takes a paper from his desk, and looks at it thoughtfully. Then he says to me: “That girl you had with you when you deserted—you loved her?”

I don't answer him; I am strangely aware of myself. I don't want to speak of Bess; she is too close to me now; she will be closer.

“Why are you staying with the army?” Wayne asks.

I can't tell him; I can't put it into words to tell him.

“Haven't you suffered enough?” Wayne demands, his voice rising.

“I haven't suffered,” I say quietly. “Those who suffered are dead. I haven't suffered.”

Wayne stands up and comes over to me. He holds out his hand, says: “You know me, sir.”

I take his hand.

I walk back to the dugouts slowly. As I climb the hill to where the Pennsylvania brigades are encamped, I notice the new grass. New grass—its color the faintest, purest yellow-green. Tiny blossoms of violet.

I come to the top of the hill and look round. A faint illusion of green all over the countryside, rolling hills, a blue sky almost near enough for you to reach up and feel of it.

I come into the dugout. I say to Ely: “I've been to Wayne's quarters.”

“You'll be going home soon?”

Jacob is watching me, curiously. His long, dark face has a trace of sadness on it. For once, the hard, inherent cruelty of his tight mouth has relaxed. He has the dignity of a silent king as he stands in the little dugout. It seems that into him—not into Ely or myself—has gone the force of all the men who died there. He stands there alone. There's nothing to endure about Jacob: I see him going out in a magnificent flash of black fury; sooner or later, he'll go that way. Now, as if he had suddenly realized himself, he's alone. As much as on Washington's, the force and weight of the revolution is upon his shoulders. The stiffness of his shoulders makes it all the more marked. All during the winter, those shoulders had never once bowed, never once moved from their tense, upright position. Then I see him as the Jew, and I realize for the first time how close together they were in force and understanding.

“I'm not going home,” I say. And dully: “I enlisted again—for a time of three years.”

Jacob shakes his head. It is the first time I have ever seen pity for any man in his eyes.

“You shouldn't have done that, Allen,” Ely says.

Jacob sits down on the edge of one of the beds. He's terribly alone there—the double row of empty beds behind him. His eyes wander around the dugout slowly, from Ely to me—groping for others when he knows there are no others. His eyes come to rest on the musket rack, and it seems to me that he is counting the muskets.

“You shouldn't have done that,” Ely says again, sadly. “It's my fault.”

“There was nothing for me to go back to.”

“Your people, Allen—come spring planting, they'll be watching for you. It's on me, your enlistment—and my words that kept you here.”

I try to explain. And then, suddenly, I'm tired, and I don't want to explain. I want to go outside and lie down in the sun. I say: “All that's gone. None of us can go back, Ely.”

Jacob nods. “There will be war for years—God only knows how long.”

I go outside, feeling that I am leaving behind me two old men who are strangers. I feel bitter—sad. I'm left alone.

I walk through the trees, and find a little space of meadow where the sun beats through. I lie down there. The ground is cool, but not too cold. The sun is a beating pulse in my eyes.

I lie there for a long time, watching the small, bundled clouds drive through the sky. I think of Bess, not of a person who is dead, but of a woman I will meet again some day. I think a little sadly of the boy Allen, who despised her—but there is no feeling of hate or resentment in me, not for her nor for the boy I was and whom she loved.

XXI

W
E SHAVE
our beards. A great amount of hair going away. One man lies flat on his back while another shaves him. The knife scrapes and cuts the skin.

We bare our feet. Bandages fall apart as we unwrap them. Feet that are black knobs of filth. We bare our feet and walk gingerly—barefooted.

About two or three hundred of us lie naked along the Valley Creek—Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Massachusetts men. We wash our clothes with sand and ashes, hang them on the trees to dry. All along, up and down the creek—a beggar's wardrobe, tattered breeches, paper-thin coats. We roll over and over in the icy-cold water and then come out into the sun to dry. We can't get enough of the sun. First it burns us red, blisters our backs; we turn brown slowly. We've become a cult of sun-worshippers. The cold is in our bones. We take long hours in the sun the way we'd take a tonic. The hot, salty sweat is good as it runs into our eyes and our mouths.