A Girl Called Samson (48)

General orders were issued for the army to prepare for movement at a moment’s notice, and many of us thought an attack on New York was imminent. The capture of New York, occupied by the best troops in the British arsenal and fortified by both land and water, would be a fatal, war-ending blow to England, and the discussion in the huts abounded as to when and how it would be accomplished.

In mid-September, General Paterson’s entire brigade was sent marching toward New York. We crossed the Hudson at King’s Bridge, and proceeded down the river, marching to the drum and fife, making a show of our numbers and our strength, and met up with a division of French in full regalia, their uniforms white and trimmed in green. We proceeded all the way to the enemy’s post at Morrisania without challenge, but it appeared to be abandoned.

“They have retreated to New York in preparation for our attack,” Captain Webb told us, and when the morning came, we were on the move again, breaking away from the bulk of the army on a foraging expedition and camping in woods near the enemy’s lines, hoping to draw them out, but all was quiet. The next day we were moving again, passing through points hitherto held by the British, unimpeded.

We marched through Princeton, moving past the huge stone edifice that had once been filled with students, not soldiers. The many windows watched our progress with weary disinterest, and the weather vane atop the cupola was perfectly still. The grounds were littered with the detritus of battle, and the buildings were blackened, marked by the years of occupation by both armies. I counted the windows and longed to explore, even as we moved past and continued on to Trenton.

By the time we reached Philadelphia, it was apparent we’d been part of a grand scheme. We moved through the streets at the front of a two-mile-long parade of liveried officers, marching soldiers, mounted guns, ammunition carriages, and wagons piled with tents and provisions. The procession kicked up a cloud of dust so great I couldn’t see the crowds that came to cheer us on, but I could hear them, and the French flags draped from the highest windows and waving along the route told the story.

Thirty-six French vessels had arrived in Chesapeake Bay. Count de Grasse, the French admiral, had blockaded Yorktown, which was occupied by the British. In anticipation of his arrival, Washington had been slowly moving his armies southward while engaging in tactics of deception designed to make the British believe New York was the true target.

The deception had proved successful.

Emboldened by de Grasse’s fleet and seizing the opportunity to surround the enemy, General Washington ordered a rapid march of all his forces to Virginia.

We crossed rivers—sometimes aboard boats and sometimes on bridges—and saw flourishing villages and shuttered towns. We gave one such place a wide berth after hearing that disease had ravaged the population.

None of us fell ill from smallpox, but many of us became sick aboard the boat that carried us down the Elk River, so great was the tossing and lurching of the vessel loaded down with soldiers.

I had always enjoyed a hearty constitution; Phineas claimed it was my temper.

“No ailment would dare,” he said. But though I’d never suffered from sickness of any sort, I succumbed to the tossing of the boat, as did most of my comrades.

We were caught in a gale that pushed us forward and didn’t relent until we reached the harbor near Jamestown, Virginia, where we disembarked and camped. We had traveled over four hundred miles, most of it on foot at a punishing speed, but I would have rather marched it all again than be tossed about in that vessel. I could not stand without the world tipping and my legs trembling, and nothing remained in my stomach for a full day. But the worst was yet to come.

Lines were drawn, impassioned speeches given by every officer to his men, and we pushed forward about two miles outside Yorktown where we were joined by the three thousand French ground troops delivered by de Grasse. The digging of trenches and forming of batteries commenced, all while under an unrelenting British barrage.

My well of miseries continued to accumulate, my list of horrors, my assortment of unimaginables, but I am convinced, after living through them all, that hell could not be worse than weeks under constant cannonade.

It was not a skirmish or a glancing attack by a handful of dragoons. It was not even like the terrible night in Tarrytown. It was the culmination of six years of war.

That such horror can be beautiful is hard to imagine, but it was. Light and sound collided against the firmament like shooting stars and swooping dragons with flaming breath and fiery tails. Perhaps it was the quaking of both earth and sky and the contrast of being more alive and nearer to death than I had ever been. I was living the Book of Revelation, and I could not avert my eyes.

Great sheets of screaming fire rained down and boiled up in columns of smoke and dust coating the air and fraying our nerves until I grew numb and deaf to the boom and crackle and worked in a mindless stupor. We slept with fascines and entrenching tools in our hands and muskets strapped to our backs, catching naps propped against our earthen walls. Food—often no more than biscuits and dried salt pork—was delivered twice a day along with handcarts laden with water jugs to refill our canteens.

I used the temporary latrines maybe once a day, and always in the darkest hours of the night, but nobody bathed and nobody slept and nobody paid me any mind, except the general, who rode back and forth on the line, encouraging the men. I’d seen him from afar, riding his horse, which I had learned was called Lenox, and conferring with Kosciuszko, who was supervising the batteries being built. It was not until the early hours of October 10, when we had completed our first parallel and began a cannonade of our own, that he approached and called my name. We were all indistinguishable from each other, our faces and regimentals coated in the paste of sweat and soil, and I didn’t know how he recognized me.