The Common Step

The Congress had appointed a day of thanksgiving for the victory in the north, and the army kept it at the Gulph, in the snow, and the commissaries did what they could.

What they could was rice. It came round in the afternoon, in a bucket, with a sergeant to see it fairly shared, and a man with a cup, and a man with a spoon: half a gill of rice to every man, and a spoonful of vinegar on top of it. Eli Wheeler held out his cup for his share, and looked at it, and looked at the man with the spoon, who looked back at him with an expression that said he had been looking back at men all afternoon and was not going to discuss it.

“For the scurvy,” the man said.

“I haven’t got the scurvy.”

“Then it’s working,” said the man, and moved on to Lem Snow, who held out his cup with great ceremony in both hands, like a deacon taking the plate, and said, “Thank you kindly. And a little of the turkey, if you please,” and was told where he might find his turkey.

They ate it sitting on the gun carriage, because the gun carriage was off the snow. There had been a sermon in the morning, from a chaplain who stood on a stump with his breath going up in clouds, about the Lord’s mercies in the north and General Burgoyne’s army delivered into the hands of the faithful, and Eli had stood in the ranks with his feet wrapped in strips of a blanket and tried to feel thankful, and partly had. It was a great thing, what had happened in the north. He knew that. He wished it had happened to them.

At home it would be pies. That was what Thanksgiving was at home, in the Massachusetts Bay, where it came every year at the end of the autumn without waiting for a victory: pies of every kind in rows on the shelf in the back kitchen, and the goose, and his mother with her sleeves pushed up and her face red from the oven, and the long grace, and Nathan kicking him under the table to make him laugh in the middle of it. He ate his rice slowly, a grain at a time, to make it last, and thought about the pies until Lem told him to stop it, because he could see him doing it.

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He was sixteen. He had been a matross in Colonel Crane’s regiment of artillery since the spring.

He had gone home after New York. His time was out on the first of December, and he had walked home with the others through the snow without a musket, because he had thrown his away at Kip’s Bay and been made to pay for it out of his wages. His mother had cried when he came up the lane, which she had not done when he went. His father had looked at him for a long time and asked him nothing, and Eli had been grateful, and had worked the winter on the farm, and had not told anybody about the ditch at Kip’s Bay. In March a captain came out from Boston beating up for the artillery, for three years or the war, with a bounty, and Eli had walked into Boston and signed.

He had told his father that it was for the bounty, which was true. He had not told him the rest of it, which was that he wanted to stand somewhere, once, when the regulars came, and find out whether he would.

The captain had asked him whether he could cipher. He could. He could figure the price of a load of hay in his head before the man had finished telling him the weight, and he could count anything, and always had. The captain had said that a gunner needed his arithmetic, and that if he kept his wits about him he might be a gunner one day, and meanwhile he could be a matross, which meant that he hauled on the drag ropes, and carried the cartridges, and sponged the bore, and did whatever the gunner told him, and ate the dust of the whole army on the march.

At Brandywine he had carried cartridges all day while the guns fired across the creek. Then firing came from behind their right, and a rider shouted, and the Hessians crossed the ford. Eli took the drag rope. They got the gun away up the road in the smoke. He had not let go. It hardly seemed proof that he could stand: the gun had been going the way he would have run. But he had held the rope.

At Germantown they fired for an hour at a stone house because General Knox said they could not leave a fort behind them. Through the fog Eli saw the balls bounce off like apples off a barn. The army went past them, then came back. Nobody could tell him why. The regulars were still at the windows when they left, and he had carried up a great many cartridges to keep them there.

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They marched in on the nineteenth, the day after the rice.

It was only six miles. It took all day. The road went west from the Gulph, through the snow and the frozen mud under it, and the frozen mud was the worst of it, because it had been cut by wheels and trodden by feet and frozen again into ridges as sharp as a harrow, and a great many of the men who walked on it had no shoes. Eli had shoes, or the uppers of them; the soles had gone in November and he had tied what was left on with cord and wrapped the whole of it in blanket. He looked down at the road ahead of him in the afternoon and saw that there was blood on it, here and there, in the prints, not a great deal, and he looked at it for a while and then made himself stop looking, and counted the steps instead.

They came out at the end of it on to a high, bare place above the river, a long hill with woods on it and a valley on one side with a creek in it and the burnt shell of a forge, and that was where they were to stay. There was nothing there. There were the woods, and the snow, and the wind off the river. The General had told the Congress, somebody said, that he would keep the army there for the winter, between the regulars in Philadelphia and the Congress at York, where it could watch the one and cover the other. Nobody asked what it was to live in.

It was to live in huts. The order came round the first night, and Eli, who could not help it, learned it by heart. Each hut was to be fourteen feet by sixteen, the sides and ends and roof of logs, the sides six feet and a half high, with a fireplace of wood lined with clay at the back and the door at the end towards the street. Twelve men to a hut. The huts of each regiment to stand in streets. And the General would give twelve dollars to the party in each regiment that finished its hut in the quickest and most workmanlike manner.

They did not win the twelve dollars. Another party of the regiment did, in the next street, and were insufferable about it. But they had their hut up in nine days, the twelve of them, the gun crew and the crew of the next gun, cutting and hauling the logs from the woods with the snow coming down; and Eli figured the logs before they started, how many to a side and how many for the roof, and was out by four, which Lem said was a disgrace to the artillery. They chinked the walls with clay and moss. They built the chimney, and it smoked, and they pulled it down and built it again, and it smoked less. They built bunks against the walls in tiers, of poles, with straw on them when there was straw. The floor was the hill. And on the first night they slept in it, all twelve of them, with the fire going and the smoke lying along the roof and the wind outside, Eli lay on the top bunk with Lem’s feet beside his head and thought that he had never in his life been anywhere so warm.

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There was no meat at Christmas.

There was no meat for days together, before the huts were up and after, and then there was a little, salt, and then there was none again, and in February there was none for a week. There was flour, mostly, when there was anything. They mixed it with water and baked it on a stone in the ashes, and it came out black on the outside and raw in the middle, and they called it fire cake, and ate it, and were hungry again in an hour. There was no milk. There was no butter. There were no greens, and men’s gums went soft and bled, and Eli remembered the vinegar.

In the evenings the camp sang about it. It began somewhere among the fires, a long way off, one voice and then a dozen, calling out in the dark, No meat! No meat!, and it went from fire to fire until the whole hill was full of it, thousands of men calling out the same two words, slowly, and the woods sending it back. Some of them did it like crows. Some did it like owls. It was the most terrible noise Eli had ever heard, and it was also very funny, and he called it out with the rest, from beside the fire, until his throat hurt. An officer came by one night, a surgeon from one of the Connecticut regiments, with his cloak round him and his face pinched blue, and stopped at their fire and asked them, quite kindly, what they had had for their dinner.

“Fire cake and water, sir,” said Lem.

“And what will you have for your supper?”

“Fire cake and water, sir,” said all twelve of them together, and the surgeon laughed, and then stopped laughing, and went on into the dark without saying anything else.

Men were going naked. That was the thing Eli could not get used to. He had seen men without shoes in New York, but he had not seen men without breeches, standing sentry in the snow in a blanket held together with a skewer, and coming in off sentry with their feet white and dead, and sitting by the fire with them held out, and weeping when the feeling came back. Men had nothing on their backs but a shirt with no sleeves, and nothing in their bellies, and nothing in their pockets either, because they had not been paid since the autumn and the paper they had last been paid in bought less every month. The farmers would not take it. The farmers drove their cattle into Philadelphia by night, by the back roads, and sold them to the King’s army for silver, and went home and slept. A man in the hut said he would shoot one of them the next time he saw it done, and another man said that he would not, and they did not speak to each other for a week.

They said that the General had written to the Congress that there were near three thousand men in the camp who could not do their duty because they were barefoot and naked. Eli did not know whether it was true. He thought, when he looked down the street, that it was not enough.

At the end of January he cut shoes from a raw hide with Nathan’s knife. The old man from the Kennebec showed him how to sew them with the hair inside. They stank. Wet, they stretched; dry, they shrank until he could hardly get them off. He walked in them until April.

Lem watched him struggle with the last fastening that first evening and came off the bunk to help. He was seventeen, a fisherman’s son from Marshfield, and had an opinion about every knot in the army.

“You’ll pull that straight out,” he said.

“It’ll hold.”

Lem took the cord and pulled. It came out.

Eli gave him the shoe. Lem worked on it beside the fire, talking about his father’s boat. He would take Eli out after the war, off the Gurnet, and show him a cod alive.

“You’ll have to hold a rope,” he said. “You’ll like that.”

“I can hold a rope.”

“Aye. So you’ve told us.” Lem gave back the shoe. “Try that now.”

Eli pulled until the cord hurt his fingers. It held. He put the shoe on and held out the other one.

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Lem Snow died in March.

He had been sick since the thaw. The thaw was worse than the snow. It came in the third week of February, and the hill turned to mud, and the mud came into the huts, and the streets between the huts ran with it, and with everything else that twelve thousand men and their horses and the dead horses left lying in the camp could put into it; and men began to sicken who had come through the cold without a cough. They took Lem to the hospital hut on a Tuesday with the putrid fever, and he went away down the street on a litter waving one hand at them, and saying that he would see them all at the Thanksgiving, and they should keep the vinegar for him.

Eli went to see him on the Sunday, and they would not let him in. On the Wednesday a man came to the hut for his things.

They buried him on the slope behind the hospital with nine others, and the ground was soft now, which was something. Eli stood at the end of the line with his hat off and counted the graves on the slope while the chaplain read. He could not help it. He got to a number, and then he stopped, because it was not a number he wanted to know, and he put his hat back on and walked back to the hut and lay on the top bunk with his face to the logs.

Lem had said he would show him a cod alive, off the Gurnet. Eli lay looking at the logs and found that he was trying to picture it, the cod coming up over the side, and could not get past Lem’s hand on the rope.

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The Prussian had come in February, at the end of the month.

The camp had talked of nothing else for a week. He was a baron. He was a general in the King of Prussia’s service, a lieutenant general, somebody said, and had been the great King’s own aide-de-camp, and had come all the way from Europe on purpose to serve the Congress, for nothing, because he had heard of General Washington. He had brought letters from Doctor Franklin. Asa Kendall would have known more about him than anybody and been wrong about half of it; Eli missed Asa, who had gone home to Bedford and his six children, and wished he were there to be wrong.

Eli saw him the first time riding through the camp with General Washington: a stout, red-faced man of about fifty, very upright on a big horse, with a blue coat and a great star on his breast that caught the light, and a greyhound running beside him, and a young Frenchman at his stirrup who did not look any older than Eli himself. The men stopped what they were doing to look at him, and some of them laughed, behind their hands, because he looked like a picture of a general on a tavern sign. He looked back at them as he rode. He did not laugh. He looked at their huts and their mud and their bare legs and their muskets, rusted, with the bayonets gone, and his face did not change at all; and Eli thought, watching him go by, that he had seen that look before, on his father’s face, walking a farm somebody else had let go.

In March he began to drill a company.

It was a hundred men, picked from the regiments of every colony in the camp and added to the General’s own Guard, and he drilled them on the parade ground in the middle of the camp, twice a day, morning and afternoon, and the artillery park was at the edge of the parade, so that Eli could see it all from the guns. He watched from the first morning. Everybody watched, the first morning, to laugh. It was something to do.

The Baron walked into the ranks and took a musket from a man’s hands. He showed them himself. Through the young Frenchman he explained why the elbow must touch the next man’s elbow, why the feet must stand so. Eli had never been told why. The Baron moved their boots with his own and lifted their chins with a finger. He shouted in German, then French; the Frenchman shouted after him in English. When they got it wrong he swore, until the Frenchman could not keep up. At last he turned to an aide, spread his hands, and made him laugh aloud. The men heard afterwards that he had begged the aide to swear at them in English. He had run out.

The Prussian exercise, the men called it, and they stopped laughing in the second week. Eli did not know exactly when. He only knew that one morning he looked up from the gun he was cleaning and the hundred men were marching across the parade in a column, all of them putting down their left feet at the same moment, so that the sound of it came across the ground to him like one thing and not a hundred, and he put down his rag and watched them until the sergeant told him to pick it up.

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The step was the thing. Everything else came from the step.

The common step was seventy-five to the minute, each step two feet. Eli checked it by counting. The quick step was a hundred and twenty. If each man went the same distance in the same time, a column could wheel into line without losing anyone. The inside men must shorten their steps; the outside men lengthen them. He followed one man’s boots through the turn, then another’s, until he could see how it worked.

At Kip’s Bay his legs had gone before he had decided anything. He still could not remember a moment when he might have made them stay. Now he watched men repeat the same movements until they could do them without waiting for an order. He wanted to try it with the crew.

He began to practise. He did it behind the hut, at first, where nobody could see, pacing out two feet at a time along a mark in the mud and counting under his breath. Then the old man from the Kennebec saw him and asked him what in the name of God he was doing, and he showed him; and the next evening there were three of them behind the hut, and then the whole crew, stepping off together and wheeling round the woodpile, with the sergeant standing at the corner of the hut telling them they were mad, and counting for them, because he could not help it either.

By April the Baron’s drill had gone out from his hundred to the brigades, and the brigades were on the parade all day, every day, in all weathers, column into line and line into column, and the officers had learned it, and the sergeants, and the camp was full of the sound of men counting. The guns had to go with the brigades, and keep their place, so the guns learned it too, in their fashion, with drag ropes. Eli found that he was good at it. The captain said so. He said that Wheeler kept the step like a clock, and Eli went red, and did not care who saw it.

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On a morning at the end of April the General came out to watch.

They knew he was coming because the Baron was there before anybody, walking up and down in front of the brigade with his hands behind his back, and the young Frenchman behind him, and the greyhound behind the young Frenchman. Then the General rode on to the parade with his officers and stopped his horse at the edge of it, by the guns, so near that Eli could have reached out and touched the horse’s flank. He was the same man. He was very tall, and very still, and his face was a great deal older than it had been on the road above Kip’s Bay. He sat his horse and looked at the brigade, and he did not look at Eli at all, and Eli was glad.

The drums beat. The brigade went off across the parade in column, at the common step, and the guns went with it, on the flank, and Eli had his hands on the drag rope with the crew round him and the mud sucking at his hide shoes, and he counted. Seventy-five to the minute. Two feet to the step. Somewhere behind him the drums, and in front the backs of the men in the column, and all of them putting down their feet together so that the ground shook with it, very slightly, as it had shaken in the ditch at Kip’s Bay when the ships fired, except that this time they were making it shake themselves.

At the end of the parade the column wheeled into line.

He had seen the hundred do it. He had never been in it. The whole brigade swung round like a gate on a post, the inside men marking time and the outside men stepping out, long, and the line came round across the parade, and straightened, and stopped, with every man in it in his place, and the guns in theirs, unlimbered, run forward, pointing at nothing, at the woods, at Philadelphia. It took less than a minute. Nobody shouted. Nobody ran. Eli stood by the gun with the rammer in his hand, breathing hard, and found that his eyes had filled up, for no reason that he could have told anybody, and he looked straight to his front, at the woods, until they cleared.

When he looked round the General had turned his horse and was going away, slowly, at a walk, with his officers behind him. He did not say anything. But the Baron, standing at the end of the line, had taken off his hat, and was holding it in his hand against his chest, and was smiling all over his red face, as if he were at a wedding.

That night in the hut they talked about peace. There were papers in the camp, from Philadelphia, that said the King’s ministers were going to offer the Congress everything it had asked for, or nearly, and send gentlemen over to treat; and there were men in the hut who said that it would be over by the summer, and men who said that it would never be over, and the old man from the Kennebec, who said that it did not matter either way, since they would none of them be paid. Eli lay on the top bunk and listened, and did not know what he thought, any more than he had known in New York.

But he knew one thing that he had not known in New York. He lay in the dark with the fire going down, and counted, under his breath, the way a man counts sheep: seventy-five, and two feet, and seventy-five. It was not to find out who was missing, as he had counted the line on the hill at Harlem. It was so as to know, when the time came, where to put his feet.