To Try Men's Souls - George Washington 1 (26 page)

He caught the gaze of the colonel of his lead brigade, Stephens’s Virginia Brigade, though on this night it was led by the second in command, Colonel Charles Scott. He had chosen this unit deliberately. They were tough, seasoned, and——an important factor in his mind——Virginians. Though he had struggled to weave the fabric of this army from thirteen different states, at a moment like this he felt most comfortable that fellow Virginians were leading the way.

“You may begin the advance,” he said to Scott, who stood expectant, trembling, as if with excitement, though obviously from the frightful cold.

Scott drew his sword and raised it in salute.

“Virginia! Virginia!” His voice was high-pitched, nearly lost in the thunder of the storm. “Forward march!”

The column lurched forward.

As it did so he drew out his pocket watch again, flicking open the lid. It was twenty minutes past three.

“We’re moving!”

“Thank God,” Jonathan gasped.

The hours before the fire had lulled him into a strange, nearly dreamlike state, as he slowly turned and turned again, warming one side of his body while the other side froze . . . and all the time his feet were going from anguished pain to numbness.

When the call had come that it was time to form ranks, he had been snapped out of his near-comatose state, but then found he couldn’t move. It had taken the joint efforts of his friend Peter and one of the corporals from the headquarters unit to help dress him. It was humiliating, Peter talking to him almost as if he were a child as he knelt down and helped pull his trousers on.

The hours his clothes had been laid out to dry had not done them much good. At least they were not soaking wet, but within a minute or so after he had struggled back into pants, shirt, and jacket, what warmth that had been imparted by the fire had fled, and the filthy rags clung again to him with the same clammy feel.

Holding up the two wet rags he had used as foot wraps, he realized that, after but a few dozen steps, they would be soaked clean through again, and in a hundred yards weighed down with mud. He tossed them aside. Marching barefoot would be better.

Slinging on his haversack, he fumbled inside it for a moment, making sure his Bible and the copy of Paine were secured, the oilskin
wrappings having saved them from destruction when he fell into the river. Next his backpack and blanket cape went on, and then musket. He left his cartridge box behind, the ammunition inside useless from the dunking. When the time came, he could always borrow a few rounds from Peter.

The first few steps away from the fire were agony. Peter reached out to offer a hand.

“Can you walk?” Peter asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Your legs. They’re all swollen from the cold.”

Jonathan said nothing, but was glad to have his friend to lean on. Gasping for air, lungs burning, he made it up to the roadway. It was packed with troops, and he was forced to move along the side. Though his feet were numb he suddenly felt sharp stabs of pain as he stumbled over rocks and gravel. If not for Peter he would have gone sprawling. He hit one rock hard, knees buckling as he tripped, legs moving on their own without any ability on his part to control them.

It was hard to see where they were supposed to be. The troops on the road were an undistinguishable mass of huddled men, looking like lumps of stone covered with snow and ice.

“Jersey!”

Peter looked up. It was the sergeant calling to them. The two staggered back onto the road, for a moment the congealing and freezing mud beneath Jonathan’s feet a balm to the sharp shooting pains. He wondered if, stumbling over the rock, he had broken a toe.

They stood silent for a moment, nothing happening, the only sound the wind howling through the trees, the tinkling fall of ice from the branches tumbling down on them.

The shadows ahead of them began to move forward, the sergeant of the detachment calling out for the company to march. Jonathan shuffled forward. If a toe was broken, at least for the moment it did not feel too bad. The road ahead had been churned to slop, but he still had to lean on Peter to steady himself.

For the first few hundred yards, the road moving along the east bank of the river followed the contour of the Delaware. He passed between two bonfires set to either side of the road which then turned right . . . straight up a long slope through the woods.

Then he felt as if he were in hell. The wet soothing mud gave way to hard, rocky ground, deeply rutted in places, ruts impossible to see as they tripped and staggered up the slope.

Any semblance of marching order broke down within a hundred yards, the ground so slippery in places that Peter gave up on the road, moving into the edge of the woods, grabbing hold of branches for bracing with one hand, and pulling Jonathan along with the other. Already a man was down, sitting against a tree, cursing.

“God damn arm. Broke my damn arm . . .”

Jonathan could barely see the man in the darkness, the storm was blowing full into his face, blinding him. He tucked his chin down low into his chest, hanging on to Peter, legs wooden, still barely functioning, as he willed himself forward one step at a time.

Pain was returning to his feet. Farther up the slope, which had been openly exposed to the full fury of the storm for hours, the ice was heaped an inch or more thick in places, jagged and as sharp as knives.

Peter slipped and fell, bringing Jonathan down with him, the two tumbling together with a clattering of muskets. Lying there panting for breath, Jonathan pulled himself back up.

“I can make it,” he gasped. “Come on.”

Letting go of Peter he reached to the next tree, pulling himself forward. The men to either side of him were strangers. The accents sounded like Virginia, but then the headquarters guard were Virginians as well. These men were carrying muskets. Most of the headquarters guard were cavalry, dismounted for this march, armed with sabers and pistols.

“Peter?”

“Here.”

He looked back, his friend a shadow coming up beside him. He
reached out and grasped Peter’s hand. Not because he wanted to admit that he still needed bracing, though he was regaining some feeling in his legs due to the exertion, but because at this moment, pushing up a slope in the face of a gale, heading into some dark unknown, he needed to feel the touch of someone, anyone.

He felt foolish for a moment as Peter grabbed his hand and squeezed it tight, the two standing there for a moment, Jonathan gasping for breath.

“Come on,” Peter hissed, but before letting go of Jonathan he squeezed his hand again.

If ever he felt love for another man it was at this moment, Jonathan realized. If Peter can make this climb, then I can, too. I must.

He started forward, gaining another few dozen yards until a man in front of them slipped and fell so heavily that he slid backward into them, nearly bowling them over.

They helped him to his feet.

“I swear to God Almighty,” the man gasped. “If anyone ever talks to me again about my duty and loving my country . . .”

There was almost a rueful chuckle.

“I’ll shoot the son of a bitch. Thanks, boys.” Regaining his footing, he continued on.

The clouds above nearly parted for a moment, the feeble light spreading across the slope leading up from the Delaware. Grabbing hold of a tree, Jonathan turned to look back.

Behind him the woods to either side of the road were swarming with hunched-over men, leaning into the storm, struggling for footing, climbing upward, slipping, falling, getting back up again, gaining a few more yards. It seemed as if the forest itself had come alive, as though hundreds of stumps of trees of man size were coming to life and were now doggedly clawing their way forward.

He could barely see an artillery team coming onto the road. The horses had been shod with cleats that gave them some purchase, cracking through the ice to gain footing on the ground below, but
still the going for them was slow, labored. Artillerymen leaned into the wheels of their pieces, slipping and sliding as they pushed the one-ton monsters up the long hill.

“Press on, men! Come on! Press on, men!”

He recognized the voice, looked up. It was the General, moving back down the middle of the road, his white horse standing out, ghostlike, in the moonlight, followed by his ever-present servant.

The General looked toward him and Peter.

“Come on, boys. You can do it. Press on! Press on! Just a few hundred more yards to the top!”

The General turned, his horse nearly losing footing for a moment, until his hooves cracked through the ice. The General, apparently without effort, remained mounted as the horse pawed for footing, gained it, then broke into a slow trot back up the slope.

The General’s servant looked directly at Jonathan.

“The road flattens out at the top,” he said. “You with the headquarters company?”

Jonathan nodded.

“Then, sir, you better move. They’re already up there.”

The clouds closed back over the moon, and seconds later all were enveloped again in a burst of snow and sleet. The servant and his General were lost to view.

With each step pain shot up from his feet. He could tell they were lacerated, wishing now for the cold numbness of an hour before. With each step he drew in another wheezing breath of frozen air, which cut into his lungs, burning them.

The only way he could sense direction was by the slope itself. Without that, he feared he might very well have staggered off and wandered into the woods until he collapsed and died.

Peter was again by his side, coaxing him along, arm now around his waist.

He found himself dwelling on a thought that he knew his preacher would say bordered on blasphemy. This hill was his own personal Calvary. He wondered if this was how Christ must have felt. But at
least Christ knew what was coming, that in a few more hours the suffering would be over.

He was no longer sure if he was standing or collapsing, only Peter kept him upright.

“Jersey? You the Jersey boys?”

He opened his eyes. It was the company sergeant. Behind him a house, lights in the window.

“That’s us,” Peter gasped.

“Come on, boys, the company’s already heading south. Come on.”

The sergeant pointed the way. The building looked to be a tavern. There was a vague memory for Jonathan of having hiked far up here as a boy, a long Saturday of wandering afield, playing at being Indians with Peter and his brother James, stalking travelers on the road, waiting for the mail stagecoach from New York to Philadelphia to come flying by, its four horses breaking into a run as they crested the slope up from the river, sparks flying from their iron-shod hooves.

Bear Tavern——that was this place. The innkeeper’s wife, Sue Keeler, playfully mimicking fright at the painted “Indians” who were lurking outside waiting to ambush and scalp all within, and then giving them each a mug of cold buttermilk as payment to spare their inn from pillage before sending them on the road back home to Trenton.

An inner voice whispered to him to simply fall out of the column, go to the tavern, and ask the innkeeper’s wife if she remembered him from years past as a painted Indian waiting to pounce and might he have some buttermilk, or better yet hot tea.

He pressed on.

The column of troops, now on level ground, struggled to form into ranks even as their officers pushed them forward. There was no time for a break after the grueling climb. If they stopped here, within minutes they would block the advancing army to a standstill clear back to the river.

One mile . . . they had gained a mile, still eight miles to go. At this
moment it was hard to recollect what was next . . . the ground flat and open ahead for a mile or so . . . but then . . . he remembered . . . there was still Jacob’s Creek to cross.

“Easy going now?” the sergeant announced, looking over at the two. It was more a hopeful question than a statement of fact.

“Yes, easy going,” was all Jonathan could say as they turned south, regaining the companionship of the unit they were assigned to.

At least the storm was at their back, the wind so strong he suddenly had a childlike fantasy that if he just opened his blanket cape and held it outstretched, perhaps it would be a sail that would effortlessly push him along.

The wind was at his back . . . and Jacob’s Creek was ahead.

“Press on! You can’t stop now, boys! Press on!”

For every step his men had taken in the last hour General Washington had ridden a dozen, constantly in motion, moving up and down the strung-out line shuffling through the night.

For Washington it all now had a maddening feel to it, a nightmarelike quality, a terrible dream where one was wading through mud, or deep water, trying to run as something horrifying approached or was waiting just ahead.

He had ridden back to the tavern again, and with relief saw that Knox had come up from the river at last, indicating that the rear of the column was across and moving. Knox was overseeing the movement of the lead section of guns, as they inched up the long slope from the river, the horses pulling the pieces and limber wagons, blowing out great billows of steaming breath, panting hard against the weight of the guns, ice crunching beneath their feet. Alexander Hamilton was in the lead as the first two guns turned and moved south at a faster pace as the ground gently sloped away, artillerymen trotting alongside the guns, calling for the infantry ahead to clear to either side of the road so that the artillery could take advantage of the slope to move at a trot.

Washington wheeled about and moved ahead of the pieces, riding hard, all the time chanting the same refrain over and over.

“Press on. Clear the way for the artillery. Press on.”

The storm continued to rage, the ground slippery, but on this more gentle downward slope manageable, the land to either side mostly cleared fields, open farmland. The disadvantage was that the open fields were allowing the wind to sweep in, unbroken, but at least lashing into the men’s backs almost as if it were helping to drive his army forward. And then ahead he saw it, a line of trees bisecting the road, knots of men gathered, not moving.