The Left Behinds and the iPhone That Saved George Washington (23 page)

“Have you … accomplished … what needed to be done?”

“We have not, Captain Hamilton.”

“You have
not
?”

“No. Not yet.”

“Then what is the danger?”

“General Washington’s person. He must be protected at all times. We are going to scout ahead and make certain the path is safe, even if only fifty yards at a time.”

“How … how would anyone else know the path we take?”

“That’s a very good question. My guess is that our friend has been somehow
informed
. Don’t ask me how.”

“Informed? Of what?”

“Of the path we’re taking.”

“How could he know that?” Captain Hamilton asks. “We hardly know it ourselves.”

“Like I said, don’t ask me how. And I don’t think we’ll go wrong if we assume the worst.”

He nods, and presses forward with his men. But then we are halted.

At the head of the line our leaders consult, orders are given, the word gets passed down, unit to unit, militia to militia. Half of us are going to the right, along River Road, under the command of General John Sullivan.

And half of us will go to the left, along Pennington Road, under the command of General Greene. Accompanying General Greene will be General Washington, General Henry Knox, who commands the cannons, Captain Alexander Hamilton, and all five of us.

I
T
’
S GOING TO TAKE
us about four and a half hours to walk Pennington Road to Trenton.

It takes us maybe four and a half minutes to start arguing among ourselves again.

The horses are to blame. The mare and the chestnut shorty. Since there are only two of them and five of us, who rides when and with whom is the issue.

“We’ll tire the horses,” Bev says. “It should only be one rider at time. We can take turns.”

Daniel concurs, and so does Brandon.

I don’t. Seeing as how I don’t know how to ride a horse, what it would mean for me is all walk, no ride.

I get outvoted. Three to one, with one abstention—Elizabeth. She says she’ll walk, and won’t ride alone.
I think she can. I don’t think she wants to. Maybe she doesn’t think it proper for a twelve-year-old girl to ride a horse alone, but Bev, of course, doesn’t care what anyone thinks—she’s riding.

So the next four and a half hours are only the worst time of my entire life. What makes it doubly worse is that Elizabeth walks besides me the entire time and doesn’t complain at all.

Bev and Brandon and Daniel work out a rotation system, so two ride while one walks. When they walk with us they’re way more cheerful than me, which doesn’t help either.

At least I have sneakers. And socks. I think of that soldier I saw in MacDougall’s New York Regiment who had nothing but rags wrapped twice around, with his black toes sticking out.

We can’t just hunker down and endure the cold, the sleet, the snow, and the gale-force winds as best we can—no, we have to be on one hundred percent full
alert
. Which means keeping our heads up, our eyes wide, and our ears open.

Kramm could be anywhere. In a tree. Behind a bush or a shed. He would just need to step out, line up Washington, and fire.

But we see no sign of him, and the farther we go, the more I think: not here.
Not on this road. It will happen someplace else
.

Do you know how long four and a half hours is? Along
a crummy road in the dead of night in the middle of winter during a raging storm?

I bet you do not. And let me ask you this: when’s the last time anyone you know walked from Pennington, New Jersey, to Trenton, New Jersey? It’s nine miles.

No one walks that far any more, just to get from point A to point B. No one.

And these guys—our fellow winter patriots—have walked all the way from New York.

Washington rides, all the officers ride, but the men?

The men walk.

One lousy foot in front of the other.

With or without shoes.

And after the first or the second or the third hour I feel myself beginning to falter. I don’t know how much longer I can hold up before I drop to the ground and let the entire Continental Army walk right over me.

But I don’t. Elizabeth keeps me going, and so does Bev when it’s her turn to walk. They don’t give me
encouragement
, exactly—but the thought of pitching face-first into the snow in front of either one of them is just enough motivation to keep me going.

At some point it goes from being pitch-black to being not pitch-black to being somewhat not dark to being somewhat not too dark at all. If my brain were working properly, I’d recognize it as the dawn of a new day.

I can see stuff like trees, the road we’re on, the soldiers, the sky.

The wind is still blowing, but a little less crazily, and the snow has stopped falling.

Then our parade is halted.

“My brave fellows,” I hear someone say, and recognize the voice: General George Washington, commander in chief of the Continental Army of these United States.

“My brave fellows,” General Washington says. And then he points his ungloved hand at a small sentry house down below.

Captain Hamilton and another officer ride stealthily down the hill, silently dismount from their horses, and draw their swords.

What happens next is a blur, a blur of blurs. We hear shouts and a scattering of chairs and tables. Then from the back of the house Hessians start running out, screaming at the top their lungs: “
Der Fiend! Der Fiend! Heraus! Heraus!
” Which means, “The enemy! The enemy! Out! Out!”

General Washington has heard enough. “Forward, men!” he yells. “Attack!”

A
ND THUS THE
B
ATTLE OF
T
RENTON
, whether or not I personally happen to be ready for it—which I’m not—begins.

Below us is the village of Trenton—not much more than a bunch of small wood houses—and at the beginning we don’t see any Hessians. General Greene gets the men lined up, and General Knox, who commands the artillery, gets the cannons in place. General Washington sits atop his white steed, and if he’s happy about how things are working out, he doesn’t show it.

It’s about eight o’clock in the morning. The Hessians are inside; whether they’re sleeping one off or eating ham and eggs, it doesn’t matter—they are not
outside
. They are not armed, ready, and
deployed
.

Rejoining us from River Road are General Sullivan’s men. They line up on the high ground they’re holding, though it’s not as high as ours. You might not notice General Sullivan’s men—if you’re a Hessian, that is. You might stumble out, look up, and see, dead ahead, men and cannons. You’d be worried about that, all right, but at least you could see where the danger was.

And while you were looking straight ahead, you might just get cut to pieces by Sullivan’s men to your left.

Which is exactly how it plays out.

General Washington nods, General Knox yells fire, and the cannons blow. Clouds of smoke pour from the cannons after each shot.

The noise alerts the Hessians, who come running into the street, armed, half-dressed, screaming, and mad.

We shoot at them from up top, and as they make their way forward, General Sullivan’s men mow ’em down from the side.

It’s a deadly crossfire. Smoke from the cannons and the muskets and rifles starts to obscure the battlefield, but we can see Hessians getting killed right in front of us, blood spattering. The Hessians aren’t panicking, exactly, but they aren’t counterattacking either. Their officers are yelling at them, trying to set up formations, but we’ve brought too much to bear. And General Knox keeps the cannons firing away.

Brandon and Daniel have joined in. Somehow they found a musket, and since Daniel knows how to load
and fire the thing, they take turns. At this point, no one’s shooting back.

Elizabeth and Bev have attached themselves to Captain Hamilton’s cannon brigade and are passing cannonballs up the line.

I attach myself to a regiment of Virginians, and one of the soldiers thrusts a musket at me. “This one’s too wet to fire,” he says. “But the blade be true, boy, the blade be true!”

Then General Washington starts shouting above the din, “To the orchard, boys! To the orchard!” He jerks his head to the left. “I need men to follow me to the orchard!”

Every man in the Virginia regiment turns at once and starts running to the left.

Then we hear our general yell: “Charge, boys, charge with everything you’ve got!”

S
OME OF THE
H
ESSIANS
are now firing back. And in the orchard, which is about fifty yards to our left, they’re even trying to set up cannons of their own. Three officers on horseback are shouting at the men in German. “
Macht schnell, macht schnell!
” I hear, which means “Hurry it up!”

But General Washington isn’t going to give them a second. He rides over to the orchard, where we still have the high ground, and orders us to
charge
.

Not
fire
.

Charge
.

Meaning, with our bayonets. With a great roar, we charge. Of course, I’m in the very last row. I’m not saying I’m afraid or anything. I just think the real soldiers ought to go first, you know?

There’s maybe two hundred, three hundred of us, and we swarm down the high ground and into the Hessians. We charge, screaming like banshees, our muskets thrusting before us, and then something very remarkable happens.

Half the Hessians break ranks and
run
.

One of their officers, the one who seems to be in command, starts
screaming
at them, but then he gets shot in the stomach himself, probably by one of our sharpshooting riflemen, who love to pick off officers. The guy lets out a great
ooooof
and slumps on his horse. Two of his comrades rush to help him, but all the others keep running away.

The Virginians track down the fleeing Hessians, and use the bayonets as they were designed. It isn’t pretty. The Hessians scream as cold steel is rammed through them.

Then General Washington, who is wading into the fray himself, has his horse, his great white steed, shot out from under him. He hardly skips a beat, though—his horse goes down, but he barely touches ground before he finds another horse and gets right on it. General Washington shouts orders, there is massive confusion, fireworks, cannon booms, musket shots, screams, Hessian officers yelling and Hessian soldiers running, and I am about one-half absolutely terrified and one-half desperate to find a Hessian myself. I think a cannonball from one of General Knox’s artillery pieces whizzes by a few inches above our heads—
something
does, that’s for sure—and then I see, out of the corner of my eye, something truly awful: a severed left arm. With a sword still in its fingers.

And then, nearly as fast as it started, it comes to an end.

The Hessian officer who had been shot in the stomach turns out to be their leader, a Colonel Johann Rall. Who is going to die, I know, in about two hours. I know this because I’ve read the history books; everyone else knows it from the looks of the man’s pale, bloodless face. He’s helped off his horse by two of his comrades and carried away.

The remaining Hessians wave white flags, General Washington holds up his hand, and just like that, all fighting ceases.

Smoke from the cannons and muskets drifts away, and the streets of Trenton are strewn now with rubble and bodies.

Brandon can’t quite process this development. “Is that it?” Brandon asks. “It’s over already?” His eyes are bulging, buggy. He’s got the musket in his hands, bayonet attached—I think he was getting ready to charge himself.

“It’s over, Brandon,” I say. “We won.”

“We won?”

“Of course we won. The Battle of Trenton, the Revolutionary War? Yes, Brandon. We wind up winning.”

“I know that, dude. But, it only took like what—a half hour? Forty-five minutes?”

“Sometimes that’s all it does take.”

Brandon sighs and closes his eyes. “Man,” he says. “I thought for sure I was going to be shot right in the head.
It was really scary. I kept thinking,
Am I going to get it now? Or now? Or now?
”

I nod at his bayonet, which only has snow on it. “So I guess you didn’t have to use it,” I say.

“No,” he says. “But I was ready to.”

“For a cause,” I say. “Freedom.”

“If you say so,” says Brandon. He glances over the battlefield, where the injured Hessians are being helped by their brethren. “What was their cause?”

“I don’t think they have one,” I say. “They’re professional soldiers, and go where they’re sent. Look where it got ’em.”

Brandon nods. “I just thought I’d be a little—you know—happier. Now that it’s over.”

“I’m happy,” Daniel says, who’s come to join us. “They’re invaders. They don’t belong in our country. I’ll be even happier when we rid ourselves of all of them, Hessians and British.”

Brandon puts his hand on Daniel’s shoulder. “That’s your fight, bro. All power to you. But us? Can we get out of here now, Mel? Can we go back to school?”

“How we going to do that, Brandon? There’s that loose end, remember?”

“Oh, man. I forgot about that.”

But I haven’t. As a matter of fact, I’m starting to get a very weird feeling.

That something else is going to happen.

I just didn’t think it was going to happen at the exact moment of Washington’s greatest victory.

I
TURN AROUND
. A
T THE
top of the meadow, General George Washington is surveying the battlefield. He sits on his new horse. This must be a proud, and profound, moment for him. The Continental Army has not lost a single man. The Hessians have surrendered themselves and their position. If Washington survives, he’ll lead this ragged army all the way to the defeat of the British Army, which is merely the world’s most fearsome fighting force.

Notice I use the word
if
.