Love & War (Alex & Eliza #2)(27)
Like his soldiers, Alex struck a carefree, even comical tone. Unlike them, however, there was no pretense in his fa?ade. Though he knew the action he was about to undertake was extremely dangerous, and that some of his men, and quite possibly himself, would be killed, he felt no fear. He had promised Eliza he would return to her side, and he meant to keep his promise. As far away as he was from her, she was ever in his thoughts and in his heart.
True, he had sought a command because it would help his reputation and further his career, especially if he chose to pursue politics as more than hobby or a purely intellectual pastime. What he hadn’t been able to admit, even to himself, was that he craved the battlefield, the chance to put his life on the line for something he believed in, and, yes, to take the lives of people who opposed those values.
When he had served under General Washington at Monmouth, he plunged into the fray like an enlisted infantryman rather than take advantage of an officer’s prerogative to give orders from afar. In this, he followed Washington’s example, but he continued to fight even after the enemy had been routed, risking death time and again as he hunted down fleeing soldiers, until, at last, his horse was shot from him and he narrowly avoided being crushed by the collapsing animal.
He could feel that same battle-lust growing in him now. A few hours ago, he and his soldiers had completed digging the forward trench of the American position—a backbreaking task that took four hundred–plus soldiers the entire day. Alex’s unit was comprised of men who understood the engineering needed to fight a battle: sappers who could cut a path through forest and brush with speed, and miners who knew the craft needed to dig a well-made trench.
It was impossible to know what the British troops were up to behind the twenty-foot walls of their palisade, but no cannon balls had come flying over the spiked timber poles of their fort walls as yet. Alex had grabbed a shovel and worked with the rest of his men, in part to inspire camaraderie (he could not use the word without grimacing at the memory of Lafayette’s attempt to wrest his command from him), in part because he could not bear the idleness of waiting.
The work was exhausting but his mind had continued to race about chaotically, and as soon as the trench was completed, he led his men in a macabre dance just outside the range of British rifle fire to taunt the enemy with their accomplishment. Drummers beat their skins and pipers blew shrill scales through their reeds, as bone-weary soldiers danced their way into fatigue and out the other side.
He needed to get their minds off the coming action, and off death itself. For ten minutes, they cavorted as though at a barn dance, laughing, jigging, and whooping like, yes, lunatics escaped from an asylum, and though they may well have then looked like the most undisciplined bunch of soldiers ever to don a uniform, now were they calm where before they had been jittery. They sat in little groups of threes and fours, chewing on jerky or hardtack and sharing flasks with brotherly solidarity, their eyes alert even as their limbs were relaxed. They looked ready to charge forward at a moment’s notice.
Afterward, when Alex had jumped back into the ditch, he found a scowling Laurens waiting for him. Laurens’s presence wasn’t a surprise. Alex had requested that his friend be assigned to his unit as one of his three battalion leaders. Laurens had been delayed in his arrival, though, and this was the first Alex had seen him all day.
“Laurens!” he exclaimed. He extended his hand, but his friend ignored it.
“Have you taken leave of your senses?” Laurens demanded.
Alex pulled up short. He stood up straight and squared his unbuttoned jacket on his shoulders as best he could. “Excuse me, Colonel Laurens?” he said in the most imperious voice he could summon in his breathless state. “Have you something to ask me?”
“Have you taken leave of your senses?” Laurens repeated, before throwing in a sneering “Sir.”
Laurens’s eyes flickered to the men who were jumping down from their dancing into the trench, and Alex knew just what he meant. “You refer to the current bacchanal?”
“Assuredly so. Dancing like coyotes whose fur is on fire in full view of the enemy.”
“I assure you that my men were well out of reach of the British, and should they have fired their cannon we would have—”
“Hang the British!” Laurens interrupted him. “Do you want to be stripped of your command before you’ve even taken the field?”
Alex’s eyes went wide. For the first time, he realized just how foolish his actions must have looked to an outsider. Yet he knew, too, that it had been the right thing to do. His men were tired and, though they would never admit it, frightened as well. To storm a twenty-foot palisade with nothing but bayonets, axes, and ladders was as risky a venture as war provided, and some of his men would surely die.
Laurens leaned in close now. His face had softened, as if he had read the thoughts that had raced through Alex’s head. “Listen to me, sir,” he said. “I have served in the infantry, and I have led it as well. I know the emotions that are coursing through your men right now. This is a momentous night. If we are victorious here, we may well establish unequivocally the freedom and independence of these thirteen states—not colonies but states—and the nation they comprise. But to accomplish that, your men need the brilliant and composed Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Hamilton, not the fierce, fearless, but, dare I say, sometimes foolhardy boy who has made his own way in the world since he was barely into his teens.”