The Proud and the Free (15 page)

But you, Jamie Stuart, I said to myself, are a man, and they have given you the trust of a man.

That, too, is a damned lie, I said to myself, as. I marched on.…

When we halted for our midday meal, two of the guard brought us a deserter who had stolen a chicken from a widow woman in the neighborhood. I mention this, because this was an incident that became known in many places, and when more than usual lies were told of us, sometimes someone might say, And what of the chicken of the Widow Brennen? So it became the case of the chicken of the Widow Brennen, and of fame too; for of all the chickens and hogs and lambs that had been stolen in the Jerseys in the course of the war, this was the only one that became a symbol of something.

The looter was Dennis Finnigan of the 3rd regiment, a man who was full of tales and with a talent for setting one of his comrades against another; a great one for talk of rising, he had run away when the rising actually came, as some two or three hundred men did, going over to the officers or going into the woods and the back lanes to watch their own skins. Already, he was something apart from the rest of us, bearded, dirty, frightened and cursing the fact that two men of the Line should drag him along for doing what any Pennsylvania soldier would have done had the opportunity come his way. He twisted and struggled and swore, and the two guards had practically to carry him, and behind them came the Widow Brennen, a mild and anxious little woman who was bewildered by this great turmoil she had raised, and would have stolen off and dropped the whole matter had we not insisted that she remain.

Then and there, the Committee of Sergeants convened themselves as a court-martial. The road was sunken in that place, between two stone walls, with an apple orchard on either side and a big stone barn making a backdrop for where we set our stage. We of the Committee seated ourselves upon the wall, and the men of the Line packed into the sunken road, and children climbed the apple trees and hung over us, and the people of the neighborhood pressed in to find places where they could listen and watch. The farmer who owned the place and his friends climbed into the big open loft of the barn, and our own women and children stood on top of the baggage wagons.

The guards told their story, briefly and to the point: They had heard someone scream, and they met Finnigan running with the chicken.

The Widow Brennen held the chicken now, a bedraggled little bird, and she said, I have my chicken, so let him go. I hold no grudge against him. The man was hungry –

And what are ye, dragging me around in this damned way? cried Finnigan. Are ye so damned virtuous now?

There are two counts, said Billy Bowzar. You have deserted from the Line and you have looted from the people.

Are ye the law now – you that are mutineers? What if I stole a thousand pieces of gold! I need no thief to read me the morals of me own thieving!

There was a roar from the men, and they surged toward him and would have taken him and done badly with him, if it weren't for the guards holding them back. We waited for silence, and then Bowzar went on:

The morals of your thieving are something for you to ponder, Dennis Finnigan – we don't stand alongside of you. When we cast out the gentry, we became like the people. We are not bandits. If we take one ear of corn out of a field, we have nothing left, nothing – and then we are truly bereft.

There was a whole and absolute silence now; you could hear the breathing of those packed men; you could hear the wind in the leafless trees; you could hear the beating of your own heart, too, as I did, as Finnigan did the way he stood there staring open-mouthed at the Committee. And Billy Bowzar sat on a rock of the stone wall, a little man, smaller now that his beard was shaven, swinging his feet and contemplating them seriously and troubledly. His square face, his snub nose, his broad full mouth all reflected the inner conflict and doubt that beset him. When he spoke, he chose each word carefully and slowly, and marked them out with his hand, saying:

You make a great mistake, Finnigan, if you think of us as thieves. I think you are not much good as a man, and I don't give a damn what you think, but it is a mistake all the same; and the people all around here and back where we were encamped made no such error. We are a mighty force, for we are good soldiers and hard men, and I would lay the Line against any troops on earth, be they equal man to man or five times our number, and we could fight anywhere in heaven or hell or in between, and sometimes it seems that we have too, God forgiving me, for I mean no blasphemy. But what kind of force would we be if the people were against us? Just look around you, my lad, and tell we where all these folk have grown from – since all the winter days we marched this land and saw no soul are fresh in my memory. And how did they know that what we did was right? It is a staggering thing we did, to rise up and cast out the gentry who led us so long – and not to become bandits or thieves or animals to blunder the fields, but to hold our ranks and to make a better discipline than the gentry ever forced out of us. And this is what the people knew, before we ever knew it ourselves. Even before we rose, they knew it, and they came to Mt. Kemble with food, so that we should not march away hungry – and this morning they came to our bivouac and embraced us. Do you hear! They embraced us! How was that? We are the dirty, outland foreign brigades, and even our officers are afraid of us and paint us as devils, but the people are not afraid, and that is why we will not take a blade of grass out of their fields or a grain of wheat from their bins. We are no rabble; we are their army and their shield, and you brought disgrace on us and you deserted when we faced the gentry. So what do you say to that?

I did no worse than you did, muttered Finnigan.

Worse ye did, God damn ye! cried Connell. If ye looted, that was one thing, but ye crawled away into the darkness when the little drummer lads stood and beat their drums and faced the gentry!

Ye got no right to punish me! Ye got no right to whip me!

Bowzar looked from face to face and so did Finnigan, but there was no hope to be found in the Committee.

We are going to hang you, said Jack Maloney.

Jesus Christ, have ye gone mad?

The Widow Brennen fell to the ground and lay there sobbing as if her heart had broken, and here and there a man expelled his breath like a windy sigh of pain, but there was no other sound except the high-pitched screaming words of Finnigan:

Then what are ye hanging me for? For me poor belly that hungered? Four years I served in the Line, and did I run away when we battled? Is me hunger different from yer own hunger? Is a chicken exchange for a man's life? For Christ's sake, what are ye hanging me for?

For betraying yer own comrades, said Sean O'Toole.

And did ye hang Emil Horst who tried to fire a cannon at ye?

He was loyal to the officers, but what in hell were you loyal to?

Ye are not going to hang me! Ye cannot hang me! Me old mother in Ireland would know, and she'd die of the shame of a son who went to hell on the gallows! Ye look at me like I was a dirty traitor, but I swear to you by the holy Mother of God that I never betrayed you! Ye must not hang me! Four years I walked in this Line, and took with ye the bad and the good, and ye are not going to take my life away from me for a chicken – ah, Christ, Christ …

He put his face in his hands and wept, and here and there through the crowd a woman wept too, and the Committee sat like stone.

But after a long moment, the Nayger Holt said, Let him live. We that strong, we can let him live, and I never going to sleep if I see a man hanged by my hand. Make him go away, and we can spit in the dirt where he walks.

Billy Bowzar looked at me, and I nodded. Let him go, said Scottsboro slowly. I seen many a man hanged, but we don't need to hang men for crimes the gentry only whipped us for. Let him go.

Let him go, said Levy, and Jack Maloney nodded too. No whips, no canes, let him go. And Abner Williams said, Let him go.… And let him go far away from us, said Bora Kabanka.

So the press of people opened and Finnigan walked through, his head hanging, still weeping, and he climbed the stone wall and went away across the fields.

Then the trumpets blew, and we put on our knapsacks and marched away.

This was the chicken of the Widow Brennen, and while it is not much in the telling, it was much indeed to us and to all the folk in the countryside. It became something apart from the details of what happened, something that wholly transcended the simple fact that a chicken was stolen, and that the rank and file of the Line had dealt justice to thief and plaintiff. For no one who witnessed that strange and brief court-martial was not influenced in some way, and the men who marched away from that resting place were not the same as when they came there. And even to this day when I write, among the whole welter of lies and bitterness and awful accusations, it is still remembered that on this matter the Line was just.

Yet we were just on other matters too, and day in and day out the Committee met to pass on the slightest infraction of our General Orders; and if the truth is known, no army of that sort marched in America before then – or since then either.

But I must take up the tale of how we left our resting place and marched on toward Princeton. For the first time since the earliest days of the war, there marched along the Jersey highways an army that was light in heart and ready in spirit; for all of our doubts and fears, we marched as though we were returning victorious from some decisive battle. All morning and all afternoon the skirling of the pipes mixed with the drums and the fifes, and over and above it we sang every song we knew. With all good heart, we sang the Yankee song,
Come out, ye Continentalers, we're going for to go, To fight the redcoat enemy, so plaguy cute, you know.
And then our fifes picked up,
Why came ye to our shores, across the briny water? Why came ye to our shores, like bullocks to the slaughter?
But soon we had enough of Yankee songs, and all up and down the Line the regiments began to sing a strange and wild melody, the old Scottish air which was sung, they say, by the clansmen in the long past when they marched south against the false kings of England, and which was called by us “The Song of Revolution,” but by others “The Song of the Foreign Brigades,” for only we of the Line sang it. It is a low and moody song, mounting and savage and bitter:

And his fate is now sealed and his power is shaken,

As the people at last from their slumber awaken!

For their blood has run freely on green grass sod,

And no power now rules them save that of their God!

Death to the tyrant, torture and shame!

Death to the tyrant, faggot and flame!

Thus it was that we marched through the Jerseys and let our voices sound, so that the people would know that the Pennsylvania Line was coming; and as I said, in all that time, we saw no officer – and when we came to one of the manor houses of a patroon or a squire, the windows were barred and shuttered; the stock was driven away and the fields were empty.

Yet that day, too, it began to dawn upon us that men did not march without going somewhere, and again and again it was thrown at me:

Where are we off to, Jamie?

Where is our destination?

What is the Committee thinking? Where are the officers? What are they up to? Where are the other Lines? Where is the British enemy?

It was only curious now and only inquiring, for the men were still flushed with the ease of the revolt and with the rare sense of being their own masters, and with the knowledge that each and every one of them could become a part of the general flux of committees that we spoke of setting up. Also, the march was southward toward the Pennsylvania border, and that was as good a way to go as any other, and they were led by good men whom they had trusted before – but whom they worshiped with a singular reverence now that the revolt had come off so well and cleanly. Still, they had to, have answers; so I took my place with the Committee, between Billy Bowzar and Jack Maloney, and told them:

The men are asking where we're off to?

Are they, Jamie? And is there a man in the Line who doesn't know every lane and bypath in the Jerseys?

That's tomorrow, and what comes the day after tomorrow?

And what do you think, Jamie? asked Billy Bowzar.

I've had no time to think. I've been on with the Citizen-soldier Guard since my waking hour – and that damned music takes the sense out of my head.

The music's good for the men, said Maloney. What are they saying and thinking?

This and that and everything. Some of them think that we should march straight into Philadelphia and put our demands to the Congress.

As if the Congress did not know that we are a bitter and angry file of men?

They might know it better if we stood on their doorstep.

And then what, Jamie? asked Billy Bowzar, as much to himself as to me. Do we take back our officers for the promises of Congress? Or if we get no satisfaction, do we take over the power of the Congress? Then we fight the country, eh, Jamie? And we fight the British enemy, and the country fights us and the enemy – and what will the people say, Jamie? And what of the men who enlisted for three years and served for five? Do we let them go away, Jamie? And then where do the foreign brigades recruit from?

If I knew the answers —

If
we
knew them, Jamie …

We walked on then for a time in silence, and then I said, Then why did we rise up?

Have you forgotten, Jamie?

Christ, no! But you have forgotten, it seems to me!

Go slow, go slow, laddie, said Jack Maloney; we've been eating our hearts out with this.

I say again, why did we rise up?

Because it was intolerable to remain the way we were, answered Jack Maloney.

But this is madness, I insisted, and the more you turn it in circles, the more insane it becomes. We have cast out our officers; the men are with us; we have the best line of troops in all this continent – and we are citizen-soldiers who have felt the whip enough to know better than to pick it up ourselves. All the dreams and hopes of men who were fed on dirt and scum for a thousand years add up to this. And when I ask you two where we are going, you can only tell me that you don't know!