A Girl Called Samson (49)

I tried to salute, but was unable to uncurl my fingers from the shovel. A rush of blood and water pooled in my palm as I managed to pry the handle free. General Paterson climbed from his horse and crouched by the entrenchment, beckoning me forward.

“You have been here every day since we arrived. I assume your arm is healed.”

“Yes, sir. Long healed. Thanks to you. And I prefer to stay busy, General, sir.”

“Show me your hands, lad.”

“I am fine, sir.”

He frowned at me, and I frowned back, but I did not show him my hands. It would mean a trip to the hospital tent, and if I stopped working, I didn’t trust that I would be able to start again. Action was my only antidote to fear.

“You do have a fearsome gaze, Shurtliff.”

I grinned at that. He remembered.

He studied me for a moment, as though there was more he wanted to say. “Godspeed, Private.”

“Godspeed, General.”

He rose, climbed back on his horse, and continued on, and I stopped for a moment to watch him go. I did not see him again until I was called up for a different kind of duty.

It was determined that a pair of enemy redoubts about three hundred yards in front of the main works would have to be taken in order for our artillery to move within range. Two advance columns of light infantry, French on the right, Americans on the left, were assigned to storm the defenses. My unit was among them.

My hands were so blistered I could not straighten my fingers or make a fist, and I cut a strip off the bottom of my shirt, wrapped my hands, and spent the hours leading up to the advance making peace with my maker, convinced that I could not possibly survive such a mission. I’d been lucky once. I did not expect to be so fortunate again.

General Paterson addressed the men along with General Lafayette, who had been tasked with planning the strike.

“I have no talent for pretty words,” Paterson said, though I would disagree. “But we stand on the precipice of a glorious ending. Let’s finish it. And let’s go home.”

The men around me shook their muskets and raised their voices, bellowing for themselves and for each other, and I wondered how many times General Paterson had been in such a position, how many times he’d marshaled his troops and looked into the eyes of boys who would not live to see another day . . . or even another hour. And I wondered how many of the men around me had regularly cheated death and come back again, knowing full well that it kept score. And as at Tarrytown, I was greatly humbled.

The night was so dark we walked with our hands to the shoulder of the man in front of us for almost a mile, creeping to the appointed spot where we worked in silence, doing our best to tunnel the earth without a sound.

We retreated before daylight and heard the moment the British saw our progress as a constant firing commenced, but we were well away. Shells from the opposing lines crossed each other in the sky, falling and winnowing out the earth. What damage they did in the town, I did not know, but I’d seen a horse be blown in half, his head and tail rising into the sky before his blood sprayed the trenches for fifty feet in all directions, peppering the ground like a sudden hail. A captain from the Seventh Massachusetts Regiment was tossed into the air as well, mercifully dead before he came back down.

At dark, our columns were formed. A colonel named Alexander Hamilton led the charge, and we attacked in waves, told to use only our bayonets to avoid making a sound. I could no more fight in my condition than fly, and I simply ran forward when instructed, expecting to be hewn down with every step.

Instead, the British fell back after the second wave, abandoning their positions and fleeing under the assault. Our lines closed, connecting the redoubts, and our cannons and mortars launched attack. I had sustained a hole through my hat, and the lapel of my coat hung by a thread, caught by the tip of a random bayonet, but I was still standing, my bayonet unbloodied, and the redoubt had been captured with very little loss of life.

My ears rang for days afterward and my stomach rejected its contents from my extreme fatigue, but somehow I’d survived again.



October 19, 1781

Dear Elizabeth,

I have seen two armies made up of thousands of men clash on the field of battle. We use the words “glorious” to describe victory and “terrible” to describe defeat, but such words are wholly insufficient to capture what I witnessed. The world shook, tossed about in a relentless squall, and I have still not gotten my sea legs. I saw it all, heard it all, and felt it all, yet I lack the skill to fully relay the experience.

After the capture of the two redoubts and two days of devastating bombardment, Lord Cornwallis sent out a flag and requested a cessation of hostilities. Hours later he surrendered, though he sent his surrogate, General O’Hara, to the ceremony in his stead, pleading illness. I thought that cowardly. Seven thousand British soldiers, as ragged as we, marched out to the cadence of drums and ceded their weapons, piling them high with lowered heads, before they were ushered away in slow and solemn step. They did not get to send someone in their place. Nor did the men from either side who fell on the battlefield.

General Washington was straight and fine on his pale horse, but it was General Benjamin Lincoln, second-in-command, who rode forward and accepted the articles of capitulation. The French officers stood to one side, the Americans to the other. General Paterson was among them, dashing in his gold epaulets and sash, and you would have been proud.