Love & War (Alex & Eliza #2)(30)
The subsequent two minutes were the longest of his life. As the clock ticked its final seconds, he raised his axe high above his head. Again, the sense of tensing bodies and focused attention rippled across the arrayed men. His watch ticked past the 120-second mark.
“Charge!” he screamed, then turned and ran toward the enemy’s walls.
The next minutes were a blur. Alex had a vision of himself as from the British palisade, racing forward with his hatchet held above him. Behind him he heard a great roar as nearly four hundred soldiers let out a blood-curdling cry and surged after him. The thud of their boots—even Corporal Fromm’s worn-out ones—shook the ground beneath his feet. Rather than throw him off balance, though, they propelled him forward like a swimmer on a wave being hurtled toward shore.
In the ghostly light of the partial moon, a shadowy wall appeared in front of him. In three more steps, he could see it clearly enough to tell that it was the British abatis. The enemy soldiers had cut thousands of branches and slim trunks from nearby forests and orchards, leaving the twigs and leaves attached at one end but sharpening the thicker part into evil-looking points. The branches were netted together and weighed down with rocks so that a spike-fronted wall nearly five feet tall faced the advancing soldiers. Anyone who ran headlong into them would be impaled in a dozen different places. Anyone who stopped to pull the wall apart faced being picked off by enemy rifles.
But Major Fish’s sappers had done their work. A pale void opened up in the prickly wall, no more than five feet wide, but large enough so that three men could run through abreast. The confluence was still dangerous, but safer than attempting to try to scale the timber wall piecemeal.
The enemy will concentrate their fire on the breaches, Alex thought.
As if an answer, Alex heard the familiar pop of a rifle from about a hundred feet away, and one of the sappers fell to the ground. Alex didn’t pause to see if the man were dead or capable of being saved. Helping one man risked losing a dozen, a hundred others. He leapt the body of his fallen compatriot and continued to race forward, joined now by the sappers, who had dropped their saws and pulled out axes. Together with the horde of soldiers behind them, they ran toward the next obstacle, the twenty-foot-tall wall of the palisade itself. The palisade was made of the tree trunks from which the pikes had been sheared. Some were a foot thick and more, tightly bound together with hempen rope and smeared with pitch besides, to make them all but unclimbable.
This was the most dangerous part of the mission. The only way into the British fort was through the palisade. Literally. With axes. It would take at least ten minutes to cut through the walls, during which every American soldier would be a sitting target for British soldiers firing down from the walls. Men would die. There was no getting around it. But there was no other way.
Alex reached the wall first, his axe still shaking over his head. He glanced up the wall and saw a pale face looking down at him over the long snout of a rifle. He threw himself to the side as a cloud of smoke burst from the rifle and heard the whizz of a musket ball fly past his ear even before he heard the report of the weapon. He rolled on the ground but was up immediately, shaking his axe at the face above him, knowing it would be half a minute and more before the man could reload his gun. He drove the axe into the timber wall of the fort, biting a chunk of wood from it and leaving a pale cut behind, then waved the axe at the soldier above him.
“The next cut is in your skull, you British blackguard!”
It was all theater, of course, both to frighten the enemy and rouse his own men. Having struck the symbolic first blow, he handed off his axe to the first Continental soldier who came within reach.
“Sappers, get those ladders in place!” he called to four teams of men, each of whom carried a twenty-five-foot ladder. The purpose of the ladders wasn’t to get the men into the fort, just to apply extra pressure on the British defenders, and draw their fire. The sappers leaned the ladders against the walls and fearlessly began scaling them. As expected, the British concentrated their guns on the ladders, lest the sappers take the upper tier of the wall and all but assure that the Continental forces would break through.
“Rear line, fall in!” Alex called. “Take out those defenders! Protect our boys on the wall!”
A predetermined group of twenty men fell to a knee behind the advancing soldiers and trained their rifles on the top of the palisade. They fired in rounds, five men shooting, then reloading while the next five fired and the next and the next, keeping a steady round of bullets flying at the wall. It was unlikely that they would hit the British soldiers, who were protected behind the spike top of the palisade, but their fire kept the enemy jumping about, making it harder for them to take aim at the sappers scaling the ladders.
At the same time, nearly fifty Continental soldiers armed with axes began hacking at the base of the walls. There were so many blades flashing in the moonlight that it seemed as if a swarm of fireflies had appeared out of thin air. The rain of repetitive blows against the timber walls sounded like a flock of maniacal woodpeckers. Wood chips flew through the air like sawdust. It seemed like the trunks would collapse in seconds. But wood is wood, and not even bloodlust can make it disappear. The blades continued to flash, but the wood held. There was nothing to do but wait until the wall fell.
On the near ladder, the first sapper reached the top of the wall. His rifle was at his shoulder in an instant, and he fired. Then, with the agility of a monkey, he swung about to the underside of the ladder and swung himself to the ground, allowing the next soldier to charge for the top.