Conceived in Liberty (28 page)

Ely says: “So they've made you a captain, Allen.”

“They've made me a captain.”

There is no emotion inside of me, but I find that I am crying. I taste the hot salt tears with my tongue.

XXIV

T
HE MORNING
passes, and we wait. They will attack some time—or never. Behind us, across the Wenrock Brook, General Greene has massed the army to throw off any attack. But meanwhile we are to hold off the British. We are to hold them off until they have exhausted themselves upon us, and then we are to let them roll over us—to be defeated by the massed Continental army, when it forms. We are a thin line of men behind a hedgerow and a stone wall. We have been fighting all morning—fighting in hell. We have sweated out all the water that is in us. We are bone-dry, fleshless, naked men. We are weary to death. We are three brigades formed into one, and God only knows what we will be tonight.

We lie behind the stone wall, in the burning sun. The men crouch close to the wall, seeking shade, but the sun is almost directly overhead, and there is no shade. They plead with me to let them go to the brook and drink.

I hold my musket and say: “I'll kill any man who moves from this wall.” Yet I wonder who is saying it. Who is Allen Hale? Ely looks at me, almost with fear; but had he expected anything else? Hadn't he known? Hadn't he formed me for this, destroying himself? Now Jacob was dead. At the beginning—with a bloody round hole in his head. There are two men left, Ely and myself; and there is no rest for me.

The battle rolls toward us. We stare at the long lines of redcoats, at the Hessians in their green uniforms. A play that we are watching.

I count the cannon shots. I try to study the field. I don't allow myself to remain still, to fall into the dull apathy that precedes sleep. I walk up and down the line, looking at muskets, feeling the powder pans, warning men to keep their wet hands from their flints. I speak out, and the words are strange to me as they come from my lips:

“Don't handle your flints. Keep your muskets in the sun. Keep your muskets dry. Let your powder bake in the sun. Hot powder is better than cold. Loosen your ramrods—loosen your ramrods.”

Ely watching me—always watching me—his eyes never off me for a moment. I have an impulse to say to him: “Why, why don't you understand? For the love of Christ—if you don't understand, who will? Must I be alone—like Jacob, like Washington, men crying out in their loneliness, men impelled by fire and letting no man touch them for fear they will lose some of the fire? You're left—you're the only one! You planned this for me! Jacob's dead.”

But I say nothing to him, and it comes to me that I'll never speak to Ely again. I've left Ely. I've left him behind, and there's no going back to him. As Wayne understood us this morning, when he saw his picked corps—his beloved Pennsylvanians—melt away like a pack of frightened deer, in that way I understand Wayne now. I understand Washington. There's no joy in that, no achievement. I'm cold inside—and empty.

They form for attack. Afterwards, I learn that these are the Royal Fusiliers who are attacking us. That they are picked men, the sons of the noble families of England, the finest soldiers in the world. That they are men without fear.

I don't know that now. I see a column of English soldiers marching to sweep us out of the way. They have detached themselves from the main body, and they come across the fields, boldly and bravely. They hold their muskets at salute, and they march the way men march on parade. I have never seen such marching, and I recognize the perfected thing which Steuben tried so vainly to teach us. But we are not soldiers, and we will never march like that. We are farmers, naked, filthy man-things. I cry it to myself; I speak it to myself the way I would sing a song I loved: we are not soldiers. We will never march as they march. We are farmers. We are free men, and we know fear—we know hate and suffering. We are weak the way men are weak. We can fight only for what is ours, only for what is ours.

I notice how the men are staring at the English column. It has a fascination for them. It is unreal, lifeless. It has no association with life. We are a part of life, and we know only things that are a part of life. But this is no part of life, this column of men marching into the face of our guns with perfect precision, with drums beating and with fifes playing. I recognize the tune they play—“Hot Stuff”—the tune they played when they marched up Bunker Hill.

For myself, I destroy the fascination, the illusion. There's enough ice inside of me to destroy it. These are men—men out of the other world—to be destroyed. Ice inside of me to destroy them. I walk up and down our line, speaking softly:

“Hold your fire—hold your fire. No man is to shoot until I give the word. I'll kill any man who leaves the ranks. Keep down; keep out of sight. Don't watch them.”

I see a boy, no more than a boy, a lean farm lad, rising to his feet, staring with his mouth wide. I crash my open hand into his face.

“Get down! Behind the wall! Don't watch them! Keep under the wall.”

Wayne is behind us, sitting on his horse, smiling a little, a man of ice—a man who is all ice. He bends his head at me, but I don't want his praise. I turn my back on him, stand behind the wall watching the English.

They are very close to us now, still they have not moved their muskets from parade position. With each step, the long line of bayonets sways, a crop of shining, shimmering steel. A drummer walks at one end of the line, his hat pushed back on his head, his head moving to the rhythm of his drum. He carries a high, English military drum, gold bands at top and bottom, a crown and lions on the side of it. He has a broad grin on his face, and he struts as he plays his sticks.

Their officers march out in front, sabres bared. They turn sometimes, glancing back at their men, as if they were reviewing the column on parade, swinging on their heels.

It seems that for a moment the battle has paused—to watch this, to watch a single regiment of young, fearless fools sweep a lot of farm louts out of their way.

I say to myself, This is England—this is all of Europe. This is what we are fighting, this crass contempt of man, this laughing contempt of the life of man, of the soul of man, of man's right to live, to know simple things and to be happy with simple things—to have no man over him. I say to myself, This is what we shall be fighting always, time without end. The fight will go on, and there will be no rest. We are life. Naked, starving, dirty farmers are life. They, out there—they are a laughing contempt for life. I tell myself that.

They are very close to us, none of them much more than boys—laughing, flinging jokes at each other with a twist of the head. They show their teeth, hold their heads high. Their clean-shaven, clean-cut faces laugh contempt at us, contempt at death, contempt at life. They've lost life; they've lost fear. They've lost the power to suffer and endure and exist. They're of the past. They are magnificent, but their magnificence doesn't touch me. What is that to me, who have spent a winter in hell, who have seen men die, men who were the blood and soul of me?—Kenton Brenner, who died in shame so that I might live; Charley Green; Aaron Levy—a Jew who had come five thousand miles to die with a dream that someday men might be free; Jacob Eagen, a man of flame and selfless in that flame; Edward Flagg, a farmer who went because he believed in something. The Fusiliers are to be pitied, but I don't pity them. How can I pity them? I walked into the log hospital at Valley Forge and saw a thousand men dying in hell; and the hell was theirs before ever they were dead. I saw nameless men piled in the snow, because the ground was frozen like iron. They were meat for the wolves that roamed the camp, and they didn't die smiling. They died clinging to life, wanting life. They were the blood of men who had always clung to life, who recognized the life of man, the free, beautiful life of man as the one holy thing on God's earth. They died crying out for life. They didn't throw life away.

One of the officers, marching in advance, turns, shouts a command. The field of bayonets sweeps to a horizontal position. The laughing boys break into a run …

I cry out: “Now—now—give them hell!”

The Pennsylvania farmers rise up—naked, mud-streaked figures. Their wide-bore muskets belch fire. The hedgerow and the wall burn with a sheet of fire. A blasting, crackling sheet of fire that mingles with the screaming of men. The red line of Royal Fusiliers is a tangled mass of screaming, dying men. Their laughing voices are hoarse with the agony of death. They claw at their bellies and retch blood. They stumble, try to run. Their line is broken, shattered. They give back and back, distorted broken figures through the smoke. Or they crawl forward to the wall where the Pennsylvania farmers brain them with clubbed muskets.

I scream: “Load—load again! Stay behind the wall and load again! Stay behind the wall! Load again! Dry your flints!”

I hear Wayne's voice, as from far off: “Reload—prepare to fire!”

The smoke lifts. They are standing out there on the field, beyond the wreckage of shattered bodies. Their officers form them into ranks. The drummer, half his drum shattered, beats a dull roll. Their courage is beyond reason, beyond life. They form calmly, and again they are on parade. One of their officers walks towards us, stepping backwards until he is no more than thirty yards from the stone wall. He addresses his men in clipped English tones, his voice trembling between rage and pride.

We hear his words clearly: “—peasantry—do men of blood turn their backs?”

They come toward us again. The sun is burning down. We run sweat. I can see how our men are sweating. There is no moisture left in their dry, lean bodies, yet they sweat.

I beat them down under the wall. “Don't look—don't look. No man show his face!”

They are on parade, forcing themselves to smile. They swing their feet and kick up the dust. They laugh. They are glorious, but we have seen death that is not glorious—too much.

Their officer walks ahead of them until he is within ten yards of the wall. Then he stands there, his sword at salute, looking at me and smiling his contempt I don't hate him. I feel a thrill of savage pleasure in that—in the fact that I am beyond hate. He is part of what must go. I know only that, that he must go. He and all his contempt of life and suffering must go. Their insane, stupid courage must be destroyed. They must be taught that life is good, not to be laughed at.

They advance as before—thirty paces, twenty, fifteen. Their bayonets flash for harvest and they dash toward us.

I cry again: “Now—now!”

The farmers rise up, and the fire rages through the Fusiliers. They go down as before, men screaming in the contorted agony of death. But the Pennsylvanians can't be held now. They've seen what they have never seen before—British regulars shattered to pieces by their fire, on the open field.

They are over the wall, playing Steuben's game. They drive forward with their bayonets, slashing, thrusting, destroying with all the pent-up fury of the winter months of hell. They are hell now—all the slow, kindling hate in them let loose. These are the men who took their city, who kept them in the snow, starving.

I am with them. Life doesn't matter. Death doesn't matter. Nothing matters but that we should clear them out of our path. Destroy them. They were sent to destroy us. They laughed at us. They laughed at country bumpkins hiding behind stone walls. They laughed at a rabble without uniform. They laughed at naked men, filthy, emaciated. Their laughter still burns in us.

I drive my bayonet into a fleeing man, tear it free and leap past him. I am a machine to kill—ice inside. I am no longer a man. I have discovered Jacob.

We stand, panting. Bloody, grimed spectres. We have destroyed the Royal British Fusiliers. We have destroyed the picked troops of Europe, wiped them out in hand-to-hand battle. They are strewn over the rocky field, dead, dying—the blood of England wetting the ground of America. There is an America born out of blood and out of death. They are our blood—but no longer us. A world is ours, made here, made out of a winter of hell and the blood of the Fusiliers.

For a moment we stand that way, weary, victors on a field of battle. We look around us and wonder at what we have done. We are not soldiers. Maybe it comes to most of us then—that we are not soldiers, that we have done this thing once. Forget. A cool place to lie down and sleep. A long sleep to forget. A long, long, sleep.

Wayne is riding among us, calling for a retreat. I stare at him dully. Some of the men drop where they stand, their bodies tried beyond endurance. We look at Wayne. Haven't we done enough—held them?

The British army is advancing. We stare at that great horde of men moving down on us, and shake our heads. We are a few hundred men in the path of an army. They come in long lines of green and red, Hessians to the front, bayonets set. A field of bayonets. We try to retreat. We stumble out of the way. I call the men to follow me, call my body to run. My feet move slowly, as in a dream. I fall once—pick myself up. The musket fire is a raging blast in our ears. Nothing can live in that, nothing can exist. It is an eternity before we reach the stone wall, climb over it. I look round, and half the men are gone. Somewhere back there—with the Fusiliers. Dying in a moment that encompasses all the sorrow of winter.

The musket fire of the advancing British seems to sweep the world clean—clean of life. We try to run, twist, get out of that musketfire. We reach the brook, and the men fall flat into it, soak their heads, gulp the water.

It's like a wave of life, the water. I gulp it in, feel it run through my body. I stand up and order the men to go ahead. Ice inside of me. I walk through the water and give commands calmly, coolly, as if this moment the world were not going mad. The men file past. Greene's regiments are lying ahead of us, waiting behind their entrenchments. Waiting.