Book One: The Olive Branch Part Two: The Grievances Characters
Chapter Fifteen
Kip's Bay
Eli Wheeler. Brooklyn, in the Province of New York. Tuesday, 27 August 1776.
Britain next attacked New York with the largest expeditionary force it had yet sent overseas. At Long Island in the summer of 1776 the Continental Army was outflanked and defeated; a night evacuation across the East River, conducted by the Marblehead mariners of John Glover's regiment, preserved the army.
They were in the boats before it was light, and Eli Wheeler, who had never been on water deeper than the millpond, held on to the side with one hand and his musket with the other and tried to look as if he were only holding the musket.
The river was wider than he had believed a river could be. It was black and moving and it smelled of salt and mud and something rotten, and the boat sat so low in it with forty men aboard that he could have put his hand in over the side, if he had let go. On the far side, where they were going, there was a long dark shore with a few lights on it, and behind the shore a ridge of higher ground against the sky. From somewhere beyond the ridge, very faint, came a sound he knew from the hillside above the Lincoln road, a year and four months ago. It was like rain on a roof. It did not stop.
“That’s Long Island,” said Asa Kendall beside him, who knew everything a day before anybody else and was wrong about half of it. “That’s the regulars. They’ve come round.”
Nobody asked him round what. The boat grounded on stones, and a sergeant was shouting at them to get out and form, and Eli got out into water to his knees and found that it was warm, which he had not expected either, and waded up the stones with the rest of them into Brooklyn.
He had been a soldier for five weeks.
The drum had come back to the Common at Lexington in July, a different drum and a different drummer, and a captain from Concord had stood on the meeting-house step and read out a resolve of the General Court for men to go to New York, where the King’s army was expected from Halifax and the Congress’s army was too small to meet it. He had read out the bounty, and the wages, and the term, which was to the first of December, and then he had sat down at a table on the grass with a book and a pen.
Eli had been fourteen at Lexington. He was fifteen now, and big for it, and when the captain looked up at him and asked his age he said sixteen, which was the age for the militia, and the captain looked at him for a moment longer and wrote sixteen.
His father had looked across the supper table and said that the hay would not wait. Nathan was the elder and knew the stock. That seemed to settle it. In the morning Nathan walked to the end of the lane with him and gave him his good knife. “Don’t do anything I’d do.” His mother packed two shirts and a Testament. She stood in the doorway with her hands in her apron. Eli could still see her from the bend, and she had not cried.
It was two hundred miles to New York. They walked it, three hundred of them, through Worcester and Hartford and New Haven and down the long shore road with the sea on the left hand, and at the end of it, from a hill in the Bowery, he had seen the harbour, and the island the King’s army was on, and the King’s ships.
Off Staten Island the masts stood like a wood. Asa said four hundred ships. A Rhode Island man said more. Eli counted until he lost his place at a hundred and something. He had said the King’s name at prayers all his life without seeing anything it meant.
They were put into the line at Brooklyn behind a ditch and a bank of earth with sharpened stakes along the top of it, and told to watch the woods.
There was nothing to see at first. The lines ran across the neck of land from one bay to another, with forts at the corners, and beyond them the ground went up into hills covered with trees, and the noise was all on the other side of the hills. It got louder through the morning, and then it got nearer, and a little before noon the first men came out of the trees.
They were running. They came out of the woods on the left in ones and twos and then in dozens, without hats, some without muskets, some helping others, and they came down the slope and across the fields and up to the ditch and over it, and some of them fell down when they were over it and did not get up for a while. Eli asked one of them what had happened, a man his father’s age with a long cut on his face, and the man looked at him as if he had asked what water was, and said, “They were behind us,” and went on.
The regulars had found a road round the hills which nobody guarded. The men facing the Hessians had heard firing behind them, then seen red coats. Now they all said the same thing: behind us.
The worst of it was on the right.
From where Eli stood he could see down the line to where the ground fell away into a marsh, and a creek, and beyond the creek a stone house by a mill. There were men on the far side of the creek who could not get back. They were trying to cross it, in the marsh, where the tide had come in, wading and then swimming with their muskets held over their heads; and the regulars were firing on them from the higher ground; and some of them got across, and came up out of the mud on the near side black to the chest, and some did not, and went under, and did not come up. Eli watched one man in a hunting shirt get almost to the near bank and stop, and turn round in the water as if he had forgotten something, and go down.
And all the while, at the stone house, there was a fight going on that did not stop. A few hundred men in hunting shirts, the Marylanders, somebody said, had turned round in the middle of the rout and gone back up the slope at the house, where the regulars were, to hold them off the creek while the rest crossed. The smoke went up from the house and cleared, and they went back down, fewer, and formed, and went up again. Eli counted five times. Then he could not see them any more for the smoke, and when it cleared there was nobody going up the hill, and the firing at the stone house had stopped.
Somebody along the line said that General Washington was watching from the fort on the hill behind them and had said, Good God, what brave fellows I must this day lose. Somebody else said that was not what he had said. Nobody knew. Eli thought about the Marylanders afterwards more than about anything else that happened in New York, and never learned the name of a single one of them.
The regulars stopped. The whole army lay between them and a river a mile wide, in a ditch full of men who had run. Eli watched the hills until evening. They lit fires there and began to dig.
It rained for two days.
It rained the way it rains at home in November, cold and straight down and without stopping, and there were no tents in the lines and no fires, and the ditch filled up with water to the knee and then to the thigh, and they stood in it. The powder in their horns turned to paste. The bread turned to paste. They ate raw salt pork with their fingers, standing in the water, and watched the regulars dig.
You could see them doing it. Every morning the line of fresh earth on the hills was a little nearer, coming down the slope towards them in zigzags, the way Eli’s father would have cut a drain across a wet field, without hurrying. The regulars did not need to hurry. Asa Kendall said they meant to dig right up to the ditch and come over it, and that when they did the army would have to fight with the river at its back, and that he had six children in Bedford and would like to see them. He said it twice a day. Nobody told him to stop.
On the second night the order came down the line, in whispers, from man to man, that the regiment was to be ready to move with everything it had, without a sound, and that no man was to speak.
Nobody told them where. Some said they were going to attack. Some said they were being relieved by fresh regiments from New York and sent back across the river to dry out, and that was what the sergeant said when Asa asked him, so it was probably not true. They moved off a little after midnight, in the rain, down a lane between dark houses, so slowly that they were standing still more often than walking, and Eli understood when he smelled the river that they were not going to attack anybody.
The ferry landing was full of men, the whole army, it seemed to him, standing in the dark in long lines going down to the water, and nobody speaking. He had never heard so many men make so little noise. There was the rain, and the river, and the creak of oars, and every so often an officer’s voice, very low, saying, this way, this way, keep closed up; and that was all.
The boats were rowed by fishermen.
He knew it the moment he got into one. They smelled of tar and fish and wet wool, and they wore short jackets and canvas trousers instead of anything like a uniform, and they handled the boat the way his father handled a team, without thinking about it, as if it were part of their arms. They were the Marblehead regiment, somebody whispered, Glover’s, and they had been rowing since dark and would row till it was light, back and forth, a mile each way, with the army in the bottom of the boats like cordwood.
The man at the oar in front of Eli was a black man, older than his father, with grey in his beard, and when Eli, who did not know what to do with himself, half rose to help with something, the man put out a hand without missing his stroke and pushed him down again into the bottom of the boat.
“Sit down, son,” he said, very low. “Sit down and don’t help.”
Eli sat. The rower’s hand had reminded him of Prince Estabrook and the dipper of water. Then the current caught the boat and he gripped the musket again.
They were the last of the regiment across, and it was beginning to be light when they landed, and he looked back.
There was a fog on the river. It had come down out of nowhere in the last hour of the dark, thick and white and wet, and it lay on the water between the two shores so that the Brooklyn side had gone out like a candle. Out of it, as he watched, came the last of the boats, one after another, low in the water, the oars dripping, and men climbed out of them on to the stones below the town and stood about stupidly with their muskets, the way he was standing. It was full day before the fog lifted, and when it did the far shore was empty. The regulars were coming down to the ferry landing on the other side, small and red, and there was nothing there for them.
A man beside him said the General had crossed in the last boat. Eli looked along the stones for him.
The army went to pieces in New York for a fortnight, and he watched it go.
Militia companies went up the post road with their muskets. They said their time was nearly out and their crops needed them. Eli watched more leave each day. A flux put him in the straw in a warehouse for four days. On the fifth he got up, hungry from waking until sleep, as he had never been even when the cellar at home was low.
And there was talk of peace.
Asa said Lord Howe had come to make peace, and was the King’s cousin on the wrong side of the blanket. A man from Sudbury asked why the King had sent four hundred ships to make peace. They argued in the dark for three nights. Eli lay listening. He found that he did not know what he wanted. He wanted to go home. He did not want to go home having run.
He had not run yet. He knew that it did not count, that he had stood behind a ditch on Long Island and watched other men run and other men die and had not been asked to do either. But he had not. He held on to it.
They put the regiment into the ditch at Kip’s Bay on the fourteenth.
It was a shallow ditch along the top of the shore of the East River, three miles up from the town, in a farm country of fields and orchards, with the water below it and Long Island across the water, and it was not much of a ditch. It came up to Eli’s waist. The man who had dug it had dug it for watching the river, not for keeping anybody out.
In the night the ships came up.
He heard them before he saw them, because the night was still: the creak of their rigging and the splash of something going over the side and men’s voices, ordinary voices, talking, quite close. When it was light there were five of them anchored in a line off the shore so near that he could see the faces of the sailors in the rigging and the black mouths of the guns in their sides, open, all along. And on the Long Island shore across the water, at the mouth of a creek, the boats were filling. All morning they filled, flatboats and barges, dozens of them, until the water over there was covered with them, and they were packed with men, and the men were red and blue and green.
It was the Sabbath. Eli thought of that at about ten o’clock, for no reason, and thought that at home they would be going in to meeting, and that Mr Clarke would be praying for the King.
At eleven the ships fired.
He had heard cannon at Lexington, the two field pieces on the hill behind the Common. This was not like that. Five ships fired together, all their guns along one side, from a few hundred yards, into a ditch, and the noise was not a noise; it was a thing that happened to his whole body, as if the air had been struck. The ground came up out of the bank in front of him and fell on him. The bank was gone in places. He was on his face in the bottom of the ditch without knowing how he had got there, with dirt in his mouth and his ears ringing so that he could hear nothing at all, and then they fired again, and again, and he lay with his arms over his head and felt each one through the earth.
When it stopped he put his head up. The boats were in the middle of the river, coming across, all of them at once, the oars going together, and the men in them sitting very straight in their red and blue and green with the sun on their bayonets.
He never knew who ran first. Nobody ever knew. It was like the shot on the Common: he was looking straight at it and did not see it. One moment the ditch was full of men and the next it was full of the backs of men, going up out of it on the land side and across the field, and the sergeant was shouting, and then the sergeant was gone too, and Eli was out of the ditch and running.
He did not decide to. That was what he was most ashamed of afterwards, more than of running: that there had been no moment at all when he chose. His legs had gone, and he had gone with them, and his musket was in his hand and then it was not, and he was running up the field through the stubble with the whole regiment around him and the regiments on either side running too, through an orchard, over a wall, across a lane, with men throwing away their packs and their hats and their muskets and their powder horns as they went, as if the things were on fire. Somebody behind him was screaming. He did not look round.
At the top of the slope there was a road, and on the road there was the General.
He was on a big grey horse, quite alone except for two officers trying to keep up with him, and his hat was gone, and he was riding straight into them. Eli had seen him once before, from a long way off, on a parade in the Fields below the city. He had looked like a man on a coin. He did not look like that now. His face was red and white in patches and his mouth was open, and he was shouting, and he had a cane or a riding switch in his hand, and he was striking with it at the men who ran past him, at their heads, at their shoulders, at an officer who went by him at a run with his sword still in its scabbard, again and again, and the man ran on with his arms up. The General rode at them and they ran round him on both sides like water round a stone. Eli heard him shout something, high and cracked, about whether these were the men he had to defend America with.
He ran round him with the rest. He was near enough to see the General’s eyes. They went over him and through him and did not see him at all, and he was gone past, and he did not stop.
When he looked back from the next rise the General was sitting on his horse in the middle of the empty road, quite still, with his arms at his sides, looking down towards the river, where the red coats were coming up through the orchard, near now, very near. He did not move. One of the officers rode up to him and took hold of his bridle and turned his horse for him, like a groom, and led him away up the road, and he let himself be led.
They came together again in the evening on the heights at the top of the island, above a place called Harlem, what was left of them, and the sergeant, who had come back from somewhere, called the roll.
It was nearly dark. The men stood in a ragged line on the side of a hill among the rocks, without muskets, a good many of them, and without hats, and nobody looked at anybody. Below them the fires of the King’s army were coming out along the island, one after another, all the way down to the town, which was the King’s again.
Eli counted the line before the sergeant began, because he always counted. There were fewer than there had been. Asa Kendall was there, with a cut on his hand and his face grey. The man from Sudbury was not. Some, the sergeant said, had gone on up the road and would come in tomorrow. Some, he did not say.
The sergeant called the names. When he came to Wheeler, Eli said, “Here.”
He stood on the hill because he had run. The men who stayed were not here. Jonas Parker had stayed on the Common, on one knee, trying to load. Eli could see him as plainly now as he could see the fires below. He rubbed at his empty hands.
The chaplain held prayers before they lay down, standing on a rock with his hat in his hand, because it was the Sabbath still and there was nothing else to be done for anybody. He prayed for the Congress, and for the General, and for the men who were not on the hill. Eli bowed his head with the rest and said amen at the end of it, and lay down on the rocks with no blanket and no musket and Nathan’s knife still in his pocket, which he had not thrown away, and did not sleep.