Victory at Yorktown: A Novel (36 page)

“Our boys,” Rochambeau had said when mounting up beside Washington and speaking in English, “we must look out for them, and when this is done, send them back safe to their mothers.”

Washington could only nod in agreement. He had written far too many letters to mothers and wives in this war.

“He is humiliated today, but I guess, fifty years hence, he will proudly tell his grandchildren how his mount stopped a bullet meant for me and a proper portrait will be commissioned to memorialize the moment,” and the two chuckled at the thought of it.

The skirmishing ahead was brisk, the range having spread out somewhat as Hessian Jaegers, their riflemen, came into the line, causing the musket men with their short-range weapons to pull back and let the professionals duel it out. All the time, Dan Morgan would keep the pressure up, his men getting up to sprint a few dozen yards closer in, and all the time the enemy line kept retiring back when the pressure truly told.

Washington thought, and Rochambeau agreed, that their counterpart, Lord Cornwallis, was on the far side, a mile or so away, telescope raised, observing the fight, this opening skirmish, just as they were.

The day was growing hot, and he had sent word back to his heavy infantry to settle into the high grass, and to send runners back to keep fetching more water from what his own surgeon had said was a safe source of spring water on the far side of the marshes. If the British were suffering from the flux, as young Colonel Wellsley had reported to him earlier in the morning, it could be dangerous. In a matter of a few days it could take half of his army, so carefully gathered from New York and as far as France, out of the fight and kill thousands. He had hesitated to expose the army to the bad humors and vapors of the marsh the night before, and prayed the exposure was short enough that flux and ague would not strike them down. He was now glad to be free of those deadly elements, and under a hot sun that would evaporate such influences from their bodies.

He had actually hoped that this display of his main battleline, the combined forces of heavy infantry of the Continental line and the elite regiments of France, might actually provoke Cornwallis into an all or nothing duel, out in the open. It was all but a direct taunt, and if this were an earlier age, he would have sent a gallant young knight forward with his gauntlet and a note of challenge to a fair fight under a noonday sun, in the sight of God to settle the matter today. The victor would host the defeated, if both were still alive, for dinner.

Yet this was a modern age, of modern war. Cornwallis was outnumbered. Now surely his young aides were carefully scanning his lines, noting regimental flags and counting numbers. That was deliberate on his part, to show that opening hand. Because any veteran on their side could count as well, and whereas a month ago they would have fought with some advantage of numbers on their side against Lafayette and von Steuben, now they could see they were surely outnumbered, and any hope of a stand-up, breakout fight would be a desperate gamble. He knew soldiers, and he knew that as the British infantry sat around their evening campfires, the officers off in their tents eating the best of rations as they always did, while they chewed on rancid salt pork and hard bread, they would whisper among themselves as to the odds of living out this fight.

The fight had pushed forward. The French and his own engineering officers had already gone forward, taking sightings, scanning the ground, and he finally passed the word back for his men to form up and resume the slow but steady advance. Another couple of hundred yards forward, another halt, no complaining from the lines. Though the day was decidedly warm, and they had been ready for an all-out fight since dawn, it was now well past noon and they could sense the British would not oblige by coming out of their trenches and redoubts, so the tension in them unwound like a clock spring winding down. With the next halt, and with orders to hold ranks but sit down, many of them just simply laid out in the grass, ate their cold rations of soft bread, a true luxury, coming from French bakers no less, and slabs of cold beef, pork, or mutton, prepared the night before by French cooks and handed out just before dawn. It was a rare meal for the American infantry, and filled them with praise for their allies.

More than a few had, of course, managed to fill their canteens with strong brew, but only half a dozen or so men had to be arrested and taken to the rear for drunkenness. Most had downed just enough, along with the good food, and the apparent prospect that they would not be in a fight this day, to just quietly go to sleep. He sent word back, as well, to just let the men relax. It was a day good for their morale as long as they behaved and those who were drunk remained quiet.

As they settled into this position there were flashes and puffs of smoke from several of the British redoubts, the range obviously too far, the balls striking hundreds of yards short, bouncing lazily, striking a second and third time and then just tumbling through the grass and rolling to a stop. Several hundred yards short. One lad, filled with bravado, broke from the ranks of the main line and dashed forward. As an officer cursed him soundly, the lad raced up right into the edge of the skirmish line, looking around for a moment in the tall grass, and then holding the eighteen-pound solid shot aloft like a trophy, he paraded back with it. Washington looked over at him sternly, but the boy just grinned, obviously a bit feebleminded. As he rejoined his regiment, he was greeted with a rousing cheer, even as his officer delivered a solid kick to his backside, which resulted in yet more cheers.

Rochambeau laughed good-naturedly and Washington finally relented and smiled as well.

Why did they fire, he wondered? Did they deliberately put a lighter charge in the guns to try to lure him into what could be killing range, No, he decided against that. Though far more used to the capabilities of four-, six-, and twelve-pounders, the largest guns his army used in the field, he could sense even their long eighteens and twenty-four pounders were just about at maximum range. If not, as the besieged with limited supplies on hand, they would not waste powder and ball on harassing fire with little chance of doing serious damage. They would be waiting until their enemy was, indeed, close.

Rochambeau was apparently debating that same issue with one of his engineering officers, who was pointing out the redoubts that had fired upon them and then handing up a hand-drawn map pegged to a wooden board, which the French general examined, nodded, and handed to Washington.

“General,” Rochambeau announced, as Washington looked at the map, “my chief of engineers humbly suggests an advance of two hundred more paces, with a partial refusal of our left.”

He nodded agreement. The skirmish line ahead had driven their Jaegers back, a few casualties limped to the rear, and near a low bramble of bushes a dead Hessian was sprawled, shot between the eyes. He gazed at the man for a moment, wondering, as he often did, what terrible fate had led this man into a war that was none of his business and why he would continue to fight in it. This was now the ending of it. Would his family ever know of his fate?

“Shall we continue, mon Général?”

He did not reply, just nudged his mount to a slow trot, Billy Lee, of course, out forward chatting amiably with several of Rochambeau’s young officers. He wondered if either understood a word of the other.

The lines were rousted up, those who had fallen asleep rubbing their eyes. A few, who had actually passed out from the sun and too much corn liquor or rum, were being hoisted up by loyal comrades so they would not face arrest, and the vast array of over fifteen thousand men moved forward another two hundred paces as suggested.

A few more cannon shots, one of the balls actually rolling the last few hundred yards into the ranks, a veteran yanking back an obvious green recruit, who cried he wanted to catch it and tried to step in front and crouched down. Such stupidity had killed or taken off the leg or arm of more than one man, not realizing that though rolling slowly, even a six-pound shot could still crush a limb or, if it bounced up, cave a man’s head in like a rotten pumpkin.

They were now atop a low rise of ground, not much, barely a dozen feet higher than the surrounding pasturelands and cornfields that had been razed by the retreating British. Yet a dozen feet often made all the difference in a battle when it came to clear fields of fire, and a slight downward slope gave tremendous advantage to defense, if they were trained properly to aim low, at the knees, and von Steuben had ceaselessly drilled that into his men ever since Valley Forge.

“Good ground this, sir,”

Turning he saw Knox and with him, the man who had done so much to transform his army into a professional fighting force, von Steuben, by his side. Both of them were smiling, talking to each other, von Steuben saying something in German while pointing at the British works and obviously delighted.

“What say you, gentlemen?” Washington asked with a smile.

“Ya, dis be good ground, sir,” von Steuben announced, to which Knox agreed, laughing with the thought that they were within extreme range of the heavier guns but let them fire away and waste their powder and ball.

He looked over at Rochambeau, who addressed something to von Steuben in French, the two of them laughing in agreement, von Steuben coming over to the side of the French general, saluting him formally and then extending his hand that Rochambeau warmly took.

“You know they faced off against each other in some battle in the Seven Years War,” Knox whispered. “Our baron says he thrashed Rochambeau’s regiment, but I doubt if he is saying that now.”

Apparently there had been some reference to it as the two talked hurriedly, with Rochambeau pointing out a nearby regiment of his army. Von Steuben saluted again, bowed, and then galloped off toward that regiment, and Washington wondered if his old comrade had been a bit too heavily into the schnapps and there was a moment of worry. Alliances had fallen apart in the past over the most trivial of incidents or supposed insults. Rochambeau, however, just watched the old German with a smiling gaze as von Steuben rode up before the regiment. He was too far away to be heard, but it was obvious he was delivering some kind of short speech, then dismounted, bowed low, went up to their regimental standard, saluted it, took a corner of the flag in his hand, and reverently kissed it.

There was no orchestrated three cheers that greeted his gesture. It was a spontaneous roar, hats going in the air, men holding their muskets up over their heads, officers racing up to embrace von Steuben warmly, the colonel of the regiment actually offering to help him remount. Von Steuben, grinning broadly, trotted back toward Washington, looking a bit ridiculous, his face covered with powder and rouge from the kisses of so many French officers, tears streaming down his face. As word spread down the line of French regiments, the cheering picked up, his name echoing and reechoing across the open field.

Men of the Continental line, all of them holding the eccentric German in highest regard, began to cheer him as well as he rode past them, hat off, held high in the air in salute.

“War certainly does make strange bedfellows at times,” Knox whispered, chuckling with delight.

“Dis is good ground!” von Steuben announced, “and with our gallant and noble allies we start here to thrash them bastards good and proper. Ja?”

Washington looked over at Rochambeau who was obviously honored and delighted by the noble gesture of a former foe.

“He is right. Here is where we begin.”

Washington turned to look back at his staff.

“Order the men forward to this ridge,” he paused, “if we can call it that. Order all men to stack arms except for a guard detail from each regiment. Bring up the entrenching tools. This is where we begin the siege of Yorktown.”

*   *   *

Lord Cornwallis lowered his telescope. He had been observing Washington, Rochambeau, and now some display by their officers that had triggered cheering so loud that the sound of it reached even to his own lines.

He turned to survey the outer works, so laboriously built by his men, and the hundreds of African slaves that had been rounded up from nearby plantations and promised their freedom in exchange for work. Once the works had been completed, however, he simply bade them to leave, not wishing to expend rations on them now that the backbreaking work had been completed.

When laid out he had expected, at most, to be facing an equal number of foes. This overt display of their numbers, which without doubt was a ruse with far more still concealed, had, indeed, unnerved him. It was true that proper defenses were a force multiplier that gave a fourfold advantage, but one had to have men to hold those defenses. Leave one spot weak, if your opponent perceives it, he focuses all his strength there, and then your line is pierced, your entire force in jeopardy when forced to flee to the fall-back position. In such a rout, for that is what it could turn into, the defender’s army could be entirely overrun.

“This will not do,” Cornwallis said aloud, turning to look back at his staff.

They were silent. They had been watching this slow, but steady, advance toward them for hours. Initially they had welcomed it. Perhaps their foes, filled with bravado, would dare to launch an all-out frontal assault by day’s end, which would certainly prove to be the bloodiest day of the war. The numbers would again be even and the morale of Washington and the damn French shattered. Some even voiced out loud that after one such attack ending in failure, surely the two sides of this alliance forged in hell would turn upon each other with recriminations, each blaming the other, and by day’s end the French would be off the line in a fit of pique, march back to their fleet, and sail away.

It was evident now no such foolhardy attempt was being contemplated. The troops by the thousands on the far side of the field were preparing to dig in, while behind them, wagons were already coming up with lumber and tools, and behind them the causeways across the marshy low ground between Yorktown and Williamsburg were pushing forward at a rapid pace. This was not an attack; it was preparation of a siege line. It would be completed by tomorrow. They would then start to dig their traverses closer and closer.