The Crossing (2 page)

The Americans threw down their guns and tried to surrender, but the Hessians would not let them. They and the British regiments had the smell of blood, and they killed until sheer exhaustion put an end to it. The screams of pain and terror from the dying Americans were so loud and awful that finally the blood-crazed English and Hessian officers came to their senses and stopped the slaughter and began the taking of prisoners.

But in the woods where the riflemen were trapped lay over six hundred American corpses unburied, unclaimed; how many exactly no one knows, for many of the riflemen were not on any official regimental roster, and for years afterward the place was known as the “wood of horror.” Travelers spoke of the dreadful stink that emanated from the woods, and a whole mythology of ghostly terror tales arose concerning that bloody battlefield.

As far as the entrenchments on Brooklyn Heights were concerned, there too the British refused to behave as the Americans had decided that they would. Instead of launching a frontal attack upon the Americans, they began to unload the big guns from the ships of the line, so that they might blow the American position to pieces.

General Washington did not wait for this to happen. Shattered by the defeat, hundreds of his men and officers dead, hundreds more wounded and a great part of his Brooklyn army in the hands of the British as prisoners of war, he immediately ordered Colonel Glover to bring the men back to Manhattan. A strong wind from the north kept the British warships out of the East River, and if the military exercise in Brooklyn was wanting, the retreat was masterly. It was the first retreat from a lost battlefield by a man who would soon be known sardonically as the great master of military retreat.

[3]

THE COCKINESS PASSED, and a new mood, fear, pervaded the Americans. There were eyewitness stories, some of them invented and some of them real, and they were of three types. In one, the Hessian skewered the Yankee to a tree, and there he hung like a bug pinned on a board, the bayonet through his chest, screaming while he died. In the second, the Hessian stuck the Yankee lad through the genitals and drove the bayonet up into his guts, and in the third story, the Hessian stabbed the fleeing Yankee in the back. All three were sufficiently terrifying. A German regiment of farmboys from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, had taken to calling the Hessians
“Die Jäger der Hölle”
(the foresters from hell), even though there was only one Jäger regiment among the many Hessian regiments that fought the Americans in Brooklyn. The Hessians were as good as any soldiers in Europe. But now they were magnified out of all proportion to reality and turned into objects of consuming terror.

A crack Rhode Island rifle regiment of two hundred men disappeared one night, and then during the following few days, over four thousand Massachusetts and Connecticut men deserted and disappeared from the camp. It was a panic so uncontrollable that for a few days, General Washington came to believe that his army was beyond hope or redemption. A whole regiment of riflemen from South Carolina, who had grumbled incessantly that the war would be over before they saw an Englishman in the sights of their rifles, picked up and marched out of camp, north to a ferry across the Hudson and then back home. Even the threat of cannon facing them did not stop them, and young Henry Knox, in command of the artillery, lacked the stomach to give an order for Americans to fire on Americans.

The plain truth was that the morale of the riflemen had been shattered. It was almost impossible to fix a bayonet onto the end of one of the long, slender Pennsylvania rifles—certainly beyond the skill of the metalworkers available in New York—and without a bayonet, these soldiers lacked the will to face the enemy. Washington had looked upon his thousands of riflemen as a sort of secret weapon, superb marksmen who would cut down the redcoats before the attacking British could ever approach to bayonet distance. But the reality had proved quite different. The tall, swaggering, buckskin-clad bullies, with their fringed shirts and their carved powderhorns, were beyond training. They drank too much, quarreled incessantly and looked upon any sort of discipline as a direct threat to their honor, as they put it. Loudmouthed, foul-tongued as many of them were, they posed a constant threat to the entire structure of the new army. After the slaughter on Brooklyn Heights, they boasted no longer. Within two weeks, half of the riflemen had deserted, fleeing the camp by night for the most part—nor were they ever again to be a decisive factor in the American Revolution, although some regiments, the Bennington Rifles of Vermont and a number of Pennsylvania and Virginia regiments, performed bravely throughout the war.

[4]

IN THE COLD, bitter reality of defeat and death, an army was born, and this is the story of their borning and of the agony that went with it—and how awful in those birth pangs was the realization of what war is and what happens to men who fight. Most of the army was very young, but in the weeks that followed the 22nd of August in 1776, their youth passed away. They became old with the aging that only the intimate knowledge of death brings. They learned that when a soldier retreats before an invader in his own land, he leaves a little bit of himself behind every step of the way. His retreat is thus limited and conditioned by death, and it has a point of no return.

In our story, this point was the Delaware River, the natural boundary between the two rich colonies of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and it is this river that is specific in the crossing; and ours is the story of how the skinny fox hunter from Virginia and his frightened men crossed it twice.

[5]

A WORD MUST BE SAID here about the table of organization of this Army of the Revolution led by Washington. Beginning at the bottom, there were the companies, and they were put together in a dozen different ways. Many of them were of Minutemen or Committeemen, who had been drilling on their village greens for months before the hostilities started. The drilling was fun and socially pleasant, but it did not make them into soldiers. Others were religious companies: Methodists or Presbyterians or Baptists. There were fewer of these. Then there were the lodges, Masonic companies, fellowship companies, trade companies such as fuller and cooper and ropewalker and bookbinder and many others, and then the class companies of rich men and their youngsters in beautiful tailored uniforms and, of course, there were the regular militia companies for defense against the red men and bandits and outlaws.

A number of companies, geographically connected, as in town or county or colony, were logged together as regiments. Most of the companies were commanded by captains, who were usually assisted by one or two or five lieutenants. The number of lieutenants depended upon the size of the company—from forty to a hundred men at the beginning—and also upon how many young officers could afford saddle horses and tailored uniforms. The regiment—and all of this applies only to the first months of the war—would consist of from two to ten companies. It was commanded by a colonel, a man whose command derived from prior military experience, or from his wealth, or from his position in the community or from his education, for these were a people dedicated to education and deeply impressed by it.

Two or five or ten regiments—again depending upon size—would be logged together as a brigade, and this would be under the command of a brigadier or brigadier general. These general officers who commanded the brigades of General Washington's army were as unusual a group of men as this continent ever saw associated in a single effort—doctors, lawyers, merchants, college professors, teachers, professional soldiers who had left the British army to fight with the Americans, planters, builders, saintly men, drunkards, scoundrels, cheats, liars—but in their great majority men of high purpose and integrity. In other words, they were precisely the kind of collection of men such a situation as the American Revolution would produce.

Over the brigadiers was the commander in chief, who was directly responsible to the Congress of the Colonies.

[6]

HE ALSO FEET RESPONSIBLE to his brigadiers. A week after the defeat in Brooklyn, he called them together to talk about whether they should try to defend New York City and Manhattan Island against the British fleet and army or whether they should retreat and take up their position in a better place. As always, his general staff was divided; and as was often the case, the division was between those who had been trained in foreign military establishments and those who were volunteer soldiers out of American civilian life. The professionals looked down upon the Americans, both as soldiers and as colonials.

General Roche de Fermoy led the trend of professional opinion in the belief that New York City could be held. This was boastful and impractical, but Fermoy still commanded a Pennsylvania rifle regiment that had been untouched by Brooklyn Heights. He insisted that the British soldiers could be picked off if they were to leave their great warships and attempt a landing. There was considerable sourness about riflemen in battle, and such civilian general officers as Nathanael Greene and William Alexander had the deepest respect for the huge ships of the line that had anchored in the Upper Bay and in the Hudson River. Like Washington, they were involved in a venture upon which they had staked life and family, and they were desperately eager not to be caught in a trap.

The result of the argument among the general officers was that the commander in chief allowed himself to be pressed into a ridiculous compromise, and against all his better judgment. In time, he would trust only himself because there was no alternative. But now he was still the amiable amateur, trying to please everyone. And even though he had told those closest to him that he believed the city could not be held, and even though he knew the danger of risking his cause on an island when the British controlled the water, he allowed himself to be talked into dividing his army. Five thousand men were retained for the defense of New York City and Manhattan Island, and nine thousand were sent to build a fortified position at the little village of Kingsbridge in the Bronx. Two thousand more were stationed in the northern part of Manhattan.

Sixteen thousand in all. Eight days before, he had commanded over twenty thousand men. The attrition was terrifying, and he and his officers knew that it had only begun.

Another week, and the British made their second move. They sailed their great warships into Kip's Bay, and began a thunderous cannonade of the beach, while the British regulars and marines were carried ashore by landing boats. Anticipating the move by watching the progress of the ships, Washington had stationed riflemen on the shore to pick off the British soldiers in the landing boats. But when the cannonading began, the riflemen panicked. It was simply too close to the memories of Brooklyn Heights, and the riflemen threw down their guns and ran away. Washington and Nathanael Greene charged down on the fleeing men, screaming and swearing and threatening them—and eventually they caused some line of battle to be formed. But it was too late. New York City was lost.

The American army fled on the double, and Washington organized them into a line of defense across the whole of Manhattan Island about seven miles to the north, just beyond the deep valley of Harlem, which was then called the Hollow Way.

Entrenched on Harlem Heights above the Hollow Way, Washington and his generals took heart. This was the strongest position they had held since the Battle of Bunker Hill, and since they commanded every road north through Manhattan, the British would have to march against them and sweep them out of the way.

But General Howe was past the stage of marching against hilltops where the Americans crouched in ditches. After a brief testing of the defenses, he embarked his army in the warships and sailed up the Sound to Westchester. Now he was behind the Americans, and their defense of Manhattan Island became meaningless.

The Americans had built a strong fort on the high ridge of northern Manhattan, facing the Hudson River, and they had named it Fort Washington, in honor of their commander in chief. The Americans now moved there, while Washington himself rode into Westchester to meet the British landing party. At the Battle of White Plains, in October, the Continental troops once again failed to halt the British advance.

Washington crossed over to New Jersey, hoping they could hold Fort Washington in Manhattan. But again, the British refused to march head on into an American trap, and they brought up to Fort Washington a great concentration of heavy cannon. Then, for hours, they poured artillery fire into the earthworks until they were leveled. When the cannon smoke cleared, the American defenders saw a column of Scottish Highlanders, advancing behind their skirling pipes with bayonets fixed, and on either side of them, the dreaded Hessians. The Hessians were led by Colonel Rahl, a fearless officer whom we will meet again. He was recognized, and his name added to the general terror.

In a sense, Fort Washington collapsed under its own pervading fear. The Americans holding the outer earthworks expected an attack on the fairly level landward side. But Colonel Rahl had led his Hessians up the steep, brush-covered rocks that dropped down to the Hudson River on the west side of the fort. When they appeared at the earthworks with naked bayonets, the Americans abandoned their positions and fled to the main redoubt for protection. Suddenly, the central redoubt was a mass of panic-stricken soldiers who had neither the wit nor the desire to turn and face the enemy and fight.

Hundreds of other Americans broke out of the fort, leaped past the earthworks and tumbled head over heels down the rocky slope to the Hudson. Some managed to cross the river and join the American army on the other side, but those were only a handful. Most of those who escaped hid in the thickets on the Manhattan shore, north to the Isham Heights, where a great and magnificent forest of tulip trees surrounded an old Indian village, a shelter as lonely and untouched as one could find. They hid in this forest and subsequently made their way north and homeward, deserting, as so many others were doing.