Victory at Yorktown: A Novel (34 page)

That comment, from any other man, would have drawn a rebuke of stony silence, but from Dan, who all knew had been the general’s comrade in battle since youth, with Dan acting as the elder, in spite of rank, triggered soft laughter.

He knew he was boxed in and would lose all dignity if he tried to argue the point. Besides, Dan was right. This was a night action, which tended to disintegrate into confusion, and his place was here, behind the lines. All knowing his location if in need of orders, or if a decision had to be made to send more troops in, the thousands of men behind him concealed and waiting out the night in the marshes.

He silently was counting off the seconds. Rochambeau’s timepiece was even finer than his, varying only a minute or two a day, and the two had compared watches and set them together at the evening staff meeting.

He counted off the last seconds out loud, unable to conceal his excitement any longer, turned, and looked at Knox, who insisted upon performing the duty himself.

“Send it up,” he announced.

Knox, grinning, stepped away from the knot of officers, and taking a lit cigar from his mouth, walked up to three metal tubes stuck vertically into the ground, and bent over at the waist.

“That sight alone should terrify the enemy if they was awatching right now,” Morgan chuckled and Washington could barely suppress a laugh. Poor Henry Knox, at over three hundred pounds, was used to being the object of joking. How he kept his weight even at Valley Forge was a source of wonder, conversation, and humor, which the poor man had always tried to endure with good will.

“Just get a little downwind from me next time you say that,” Knox retorted, and now there was laughter.

He touched the lit cigar to a fuse protruding from the base of the metal tube, then quickly stepped to the second and third tubes and did the same.

“Stand back,” he announced, moving hurriedly even for one of his bulk.

A rocket snapped heavenward from the first tube, followed a few seconds later by the second and third. The damp light breeze wafting in from off the bay drifted the smoke around Washington, a smell he actually loved, that of burnt gunpowder. The rockets soared heavenward then burst one after the other, three reds.

All turned to look north and seconds later three more rockets, from the French line, burst in reply.

“Go!” Washington shouted as if the hunt was finally on, which in a way it was.

Dan, grinning like a schoolboy let out on a vacation, looked to his general, saluted, then dashed off into the shadows.

“I know you wish to go with him, my general,” and Washington turned to see Lafayette by his side.

“Yes, indeed,” he replied with a smile, “but that old buzzard is right and I must stay, damn it. My place has to be here.”

“There will be action enough in the days ahead,” Lafayette offered.

Washington sighed.

“It is one thing to go into a fight, it is, as you have learned, young sir, entirely another to give the orders but then stand back behind the line.”

“It is your plan, your battle, and will eventually be your victory, sir.”

Washington tried to chuckle and put his hand on Lafayette’s shoulder in a fatherly gesture of thanks.

“My plan for years,” he whispered, “or should I say my dream. Thank God for our allies over there,” and he nodded toward the French position, “your countrymen.

“This is it, gentlemen,” he announced, looking around at those gathered by his side. “After so many years we have come to this moment, this beginning of the end I pray. You have all done your duty superbly well these last six weeks. My compliments to all of you, for without you and our allies…”

His voice trailed off. There was nothing else to be said. They dreamed of this moment with as much fervor as he had across the years. It had begun and now all he could do would be to wait and see what came next.

He was never one for waiting, but six years had taught him much. Patience, as his plans were at last set in motion, was one of the hardest virtues he had been forced to learn.

A veteran of six years of this war, and seven in the last, he knew how often even the best of plans went astray. Dear God, after so much agony and suffering by so many, please let this one work.

“Skirmishers forward,” the command was whispered along the line of battle even before the rockets had snuffed out, and Peter Wellsley felt a thrill run down his spine. Gone was the “game” that he had been tasked with for far too long. He was still officially on the headquarters staff of the general, but was now something of a man without a mission since New Jersey was hundreds of miles to their rear. He had offered what services he could to his Virginia counterpart, who had of course politely accepted, but Peter had not heard a word from him since. He most likely would have reacted the same way. Each man had his own way of doing things, his own organization, and did not need a counterpart of equal rank who might prove to be a second-guesser and nothing but trouble.

Hanging about headquarters, he was delighted when old Dan Morgan actually recognized and remembered him as one of the “brave lads” who had guided the army at Trenton and took over command of a regiment of militia at Monmouth. Seeing him unemployed he invited him to join “in the fun,” and, of course, Peter gladly accepted.

It had taken more than ten days since their arrival at Williamsburg to get ready for this moment. Hundreds of tons of siege equipment and supplies had to be off-loaded from French ships and put in position. Unlike the Americans’ arrival at Valley Forge with only fifty good axes at hand for the entire army, the French truly did think of everything. All the equipment necessary for a prolonged siege had been delivered: sharp doubled-bladed axes, this time by the hundreds, shovels, picks, small two-wheeled carts that could be pulled by a couple of men, wheelbarrows, all the tools for a siege that, more than anything else, was about digging. Half a million rations were on hand, enough to feed the armies for the next month and a half, either salted and preserved or still on the hoof, purchased from farms fifty miles around with French money. Enough ball ammunition so that every infantryman had twenty-four fresh rounds in his cartridge box and a hundred more laid up in dry bunkers and barrels filled with a hundred thousand musket and pistol flints. Most crucial of all, however, was artillery. Nearly a hundred pieces, from the light field four- and six-pounders hauled the long distance by Knox, who would be damned if he ever left a gun behind, up to heavy long-barreled twenty-four pounders and the massive sixteen-inch-bore mortars, which would not be brought forward until the siege lines had been dug to within killing range, for not even the French had a limitless supply of shot, shell, and powder for these, the most destructive guns deployed in land in this war.

Now the army Washington had brought down from New York had reunited with their comrades whom Greene and Lafayette had deployed here more than a year ago. The Continental line numbered nearly eight thousand strong, backed up by more than three thousand militia who had come swarming in.

Even for Peter, who had grown inured to so many of the horrors of this war, the sights that greeted the army as they arrived in this theater of war had shocked him and triggered rage throughout the ranks. Cornwallis, apparently anticipating this outcome, had ordered the scorching of the earth as they pulled back in upon Yorktown. It was no longer just the looting of barns for supplies. Hundreds of farms had been wiped clean from the earth, everything destroyed. He could not believe that Cornwallis himself had grown so hard and bitter in this fight, but some under his command surely had. Dozens of civilians had been executed, left dead by the smoldering ruins of their homes, and in one horrific case a pregnant woman was found dead, her baby disemboweled with a note scratched on the wall that this “bastard will never grow up to be a Rebel.”

Outraged, Washington had sent Hamilton himself through the lines under a flag of truce to file a vehement protest and Cornwallis replied that if the culprits were found, they would be publicly hanged within sight of the American army. Everyone was still waiting for that hanging and the mood among more than a few was so bitter that orders had to be passed repeatedly that the rules of war would be obeyed, enemy prisoners and wounded treated humanely.

If there had been some insane purpose to that obscenity it had surely turned against the British as word of the atrocity spread across the countryside. The ranks of volunteer militia had swelled as a result, the same as they had when a similar incident had happened just before the Battle of Saratoga.

The skirmishers, light infantrymen mixed in with detachments of Morgan’s rightly feared long riflemen, set out from the edge of the marsh to which Washington had moved all his infantry, Americans on the right flank, according to Rochambeau the position of honor on any battlefield and that he insisted Washington and his men were to have. Close to eight thousand French, their numbers increased by the regiments transported by Barre, were deploying out to the left. It was a battlefront several miles wide that had waited out the damp chilled night. The building of fires was forbidden, with the silence broken only where some Virginia boys had kicked up a nest of wild pigs and decided to give chase for their breakfast. The commotion had not caused the outer line of British pickets, half a mile away, to bestir themselves.

Peter stayed close to Dan Morgan, figuring at least he could fall back on his old role of courier if need be. Beside Dan was a curious character who had taken a liking to Peter, calling him lad, even though Peter was officially a lieutenant colonel, and the old man addressing him was a private. It did not bother him in the slightest. Old Mose was very much a legend. Peter had even read about him before the war. Taken by the Shawnee in the Ohio country, he had faced death by torture, a favorite ritual that if properly done could take several days of hell. If one broke or begged for mercy, the man was handed over with contempt to the women of the tribe, who were truly to be feared.

They had burned most of the flesh off of Mose’s feet and his response was unrelenting taunting back with suggestions, including scalping him while still alive, even offering to perform the act upon himself if they would give him a knife.

His tormentors had quickly shifted from hatred to outright admiration, spared the man, and adopted him into their tribe, where he lived with them for more than a year while his feet gradually healed. Then one night, in the dead of winter, he just simply walked off, leading his somewhat startled and less than amused adopted family on a weeklong chase clear back to Fort Pitt. After the hostilities of that war had passed, Mose was eventually an honored guest with his old family, and would frequently drop in for extended visits. He was treated with awe as the man who, though his feet were little better than charred stubs, had outrun them for nearly two hundred miles. Bent now with age, shuffling like a wounded bear, he was a constant companion of Dan’s. No one would ever dare to say it to Dan’s face but in recent years his vision had begun to fail him, but it was said that Old Mose could still spot a flea riding on the back of a horsefly a hundred yards off and shoot the flea off without even nicking the fly.

Peter felt honored to be in their company this day. A crescent moon marked the eastern horizon off to his right, the sky shifting from darkness to indigo, then to the first streaks of deep red and gold. They drifted around the ruins of a farmstead that once must have been prosperous, but all of it gone except for charred timbers and broken-down fences. There was the sickening stench of a dead ox, bloated and having burst open after a week in the Virginia heat, causing even some of Dan’s hardened men to gag and curse under their breath at the senseless waste of it all.

The British picket line was now less than a quarter mile off, at least their campfires were that distant. It was fair to assume that they should at least have some men out forward and that was who Dan and the light infantry were now hunting.

At last it was Mose who stopped, putting up his hand, the signal silently passing down the line, the skirmishers halting. Peter could see him point; he himself saw nothing, just shadows. All stood silent as Mose shouldered his rifle and took careful aim, his finger at last brushing against the trigger.

The flash of the powder in the pan of the rifle was startling, blinding Peter for a second. He had, as if still a green militiaman, been looking straight at Mose, rather than averting his head, or at least closing and covering one eye. The sharp crack of the rifle thundered, echoing across the open plain, greeted a few seconds later by a startled cry of pain.

It had begun!

Within seconds rifles and muskets began to crackle up and down the long open formation, and, finally, after some obvious confusion on the far side of the open pasture, a scattering of return fire, no balls hitting, but one did hum by between Peter and Old Mose, who was reloading his rifle.

“Shouting like a stuck pig he is, must have just winged him,” the old man announced.

“Come on Dan, let’s go see what we bagged!”

Dan motioned for the line to press forward. In the few intervening minutes the light had risen enough to reveal British light infantry, standing up in the high pasture grass, some firing off a quick shot, others turning and just running.

A wild taunting cry rose up from the riflemen, bone chilling, like the sound of wolves on the scent of blood, as they dodged forward, some pausing to fire a round, others just pressing in on the chase. The entire encampment line of the British pickets was now astir and obviously confused by this sudden onslaught. They were definitely not heavy infantry, who would have formed into volley line for this kind of fight, but instead were deploying out as skirmishers in open order. Most were already giving ground, abandoning their position as they fired and retreated.

Mose angled off to the right, Peter following him. Someone was sitting up in the grass, cursing, clutching his right arm at the elbow. The soldier, not much more than a boy, looked up at them wide-eyed and began to fumble for his musket. Peter leveled his pistol and cocked it.