Never Sink

The galleys went down the Delaware in three divisions, with the bands playing in the flatboats between them, and Sir Henry Clinton sat in the centre one, the Hussar, between the two Howes, with ladies in front of him and the whole of Philadelphia on the wharves, and thought that he had never in his life been so exactly in the wrong place.

It was Sir William’s day. Everybody knew it. The officers had subscribed for it, three thousand guineas and more, to give their general a farewell such as no general had ever been given; and Captain André of General Grey’s staff, who drew, and wrote verses, and could make a regiment of grenadiers believe in a tournament, had designed the whole of it: the regatta, and the landing at the old Wharton house below the town, and the two triumphal arches, and the knights of the Blended Rose and the Burning Mountain in silk and satin on horseback, tilting for the favour of young ladies in Turkish dress; and the ball after, and the fireworks after that, and supper at midnight, and dancing until it was light. They called it the Mischianza. André had found the word somewhere. It meant a medley.

Clinton sat in the galley with his hat on his knee and watched the town go by. He had been in Philadelphia ten days. He had the King’s commission as commander-in-chief in his pocket, and Sir William had the King’s leave to go home, and in a week the one would be on his way to England and the other would have the army; and between them in the galley, very upright, with his heavy dark face turned to the crowds, Lord Howe raised his hat to the wharves as they passed, and the wharves cheered him.

The wharves were full of loyal Philadelphians. The ladies in the galley were loyal Philadelphians, the daughters of the best families in the city, chosen by André for their faces and their fathers. In the tilting at the Wharton house, the knights would break their lances in honour of Miss Chew and Miss Redman and a dozen others, and their fathers would sit on the benches in the sun and applaud.

He had not told any of them. He was not permitted to. In his dispatch case, in the house in Market Street that had been Mr Richard Penn’s before the war and Sir William’s all winter, and was about to be his, there were two sets of instructions from the King, which a frigate had brought out from England a few days after he landed; and they said that if France came into the war, he was to give up Philadelphia.

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He had read them three times on the night they came, and then a fourth, sitting up with a candle in a strange house, as he read everything; and then he had written a memorandum of them for himself, in his own hand, as he did of everything, because he had found in twenty years of soldiering that the only papers a man could rely on afterwards were the ones he had written himself. He never burned a paper. It was the one habit his friends had given up trying to cure.

The instructions were dated the eighth and twenty-first of March. They were signed by the King and countersigned by Lord Dartmouth, and they were perfectly clear. If France came into the war, and it was now thought certain that she would by the summer, he was to evacuate Philadelphia and carry the army to New York. He was to detach five thousand men from it at once for an attack on the French island of St Lucia, and three thousand more for the Floridas. And what was left was to hold New York and Rhode Island and do what it could, which, with the army reduced by eight thousand men, would be nothing.

Then at the end of May a packet had come in, with the news that a French squadron of twelve sail of the line had gone out of Toulon in the middle of April, under the Comte d’Estaing, with sealed orders and no declared destination; and with the London papers, which were sure that it was America; and he had taken out the memorandum again, and read it, and understood that France had come in, whatever anybody had declared, and that the thing was now his to do.

He had fought under Ferdinand, been wounded at Friedberg, and served under Howe in America for three years. In councils he was heard politely and seldom followed. He had asked to resign three times. When uneasy he grew stiff; men took it for pride and stopped telling him things. He could usually learn more of the enemy’s arrangements than of the officers next door.

His wife had been dead for six years. Harriet. She had died in the August of seventy-two, after the last of the children, and he had shut himself up for a month and then gone back to the army, because it was the only thing in the world he knew how to do; and the children were in England with her sisters, and he wrote to them, and they wrote back in round careful hands about their ponies. He did not talk about Harriet. He did not talk about very much. He wrote it all down instead, in memoranda that nobody would read, and was perfectly aware that there was something wrong with a man who did that, and did it anyway.

The galley came in to the landing below the Wharton house, and the bands played, and the grenadiers presented arms, and Sir William went up the lawn between the lines of them with Lord Howe beside him, smiling, while the town of Philadelphia applauded the general who had taken it, and the general who was about to give it back walked behind them and smiled too.

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Sir William sailed on the twenty-fourth.

Clinton went down with him to the wharf. A great many officers came, more than were needed, and some of them wept, openly, in their best coats, as Sir William went along the line shaking hands; and old Knyphausen, the Hessian, who had fought in more wars than most of the officers had read about, began a compliment in his careful English and could not finish it, and stood with his mouth working and his hat in his hand, and Sir William took his hand and held it until he could. Then Lord Howe received his brother into his barge, and they went down the river together to the fleet, and Clinton stood on the wharf until the barge was out of sight, and turned round, and found the whole of the army’s staff looking at him.

He did not know what they wanted him to say. He said that he would see the adjutant general at nine in the morning, and went home.

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The King’s commissioners arrived on the sixth of June, and nobody had told them either.

They came up the river in the Trident after seven weeks at sea, Lord Carlisle and Mr Eden and Governor Johnstone, with their secretary, Dr Ferguson, who was a professor of moral philosophy, and their forty-one articles, and their wives, some of them, and their servants, and the fullest powers the Crown had ever given anybody to make peace; and they came ashore at the wharf to find the transports in the river loading baggage and the army packing, and the loyal families of Philadelphia selling their furniture in the street for whatever it would fetch.

Clinton told them that evening, at dinner, because there was no longer any way not to. He watched Lord Carlisle’s face while he did it. Carlisle was thirty, very handsome and very well dressed, a friend of Mr Fox’s and a writer of verses, who had been at the gaming tables most of his life and had come to America, Clinton suspected, to prove to somebody that he could do something else; and he went quite white, and then pink, and said in a carefully level voice that the evacuation of the town would not give them much assistance in their business. Mr Eden said nothing at all for a long time, and then asked to see the instructions. Clinton showed him the dates. Eden looked at them, and then at Clinton, and Clinton understood that Mr Eden had been in the room in London when they were drafted, or near it, and had not been told, and was now working out by whom.

“We are to offer the Congress everything,” said Carlisle, “except the one thing it has asked for. And we are to offer it with the army marching out of the Congress’s own city behind our backs.”

“You are to offer it, my lord,” said Clinton. “I am one of your commission, if you remember. I shall sign whatever you write. I only cannot stay to see it answered.”

He signed it on the ninth. It was a long and handsome letter to the President of the Congress, setting out everything the commissioners were empowered to grant, which was everything except an American Parliament, in language Mr Eden had worked on for a week; and Clinton wrote that night to General Washington asking for a passport for Dr Ferguson to carry it to York. Washington refused it, very civilly, by return. Dr Ferguson rode out to the pickets with his papers and was turned back, and came in again in the dusk looking more like a professor of moral philosophy than ever; and in the end Lord Cathcart took the papers out under a flag and handed them to an American officer at the picket post, like a parcel left at a door.

Congress would treat only after the fleets and armies withdrew. Leaving Philadelphia did not meet that condition. Clinton had three thousand loyalists to embark and an army to march ninety miles with the enemy on its flank. He gave Ferguson’s refused passport to his secretary and asked for the embarkation returns.

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The loyalists went by sea.

There was no room for them anywhere else. Clinton had looked at the numbers on the first night and seen that it could not be done by water, not the army and its horses and its guns and its wagons and three thousand civilians as well, in the transports he had; and so the army would march, across the Jerseys, and everything that could not march would go down the river in the ships. The baggage, the stores, the merchants’ goods, the sick. And the friends of government, as the dispatches called them, with whatever they could carry: the families who had danced at the Mischianza, and the families who had not been asked, and the men who had come into the King’s lines in the autumn and taken the oath and held offices under the occupation, and could not now stay to be thanked for it by the Congress.

Mr Galloway went on board in the last days. Clinton saw him go: a heavy, clever, unhappy man who had been Speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly and had written to every rebel he had ever known to invite him to come in, and had been answered by none of them. His wife was staying, to keep the house. He went up the side of the transport without looking back at the town, and Clinton thought that he had seldom seen a man who had been more right about so many things, and less use to anybody.

And there were the others.

They had come into the lines all winter, as they had at Boston and at New York, without being asked and without being promised anything: men and women and children who had walked away from farms in Chester County and the Lower Counties and the Jerseys, where they had been somebody’s property, and come into the King’s city because the King’s army was there. Nobody had told them to come. No proclamation had been issued; the King had never proclaimed anybody a rebel, and so had never offered anybody’s slaves their freedom for deserting him, and would not. They had come anyway, by the hundred, and the army had taken the men as labourers and the women as cooks and washerwomen, and paid them a little, sometimes, and asked nobody’s leave; and now the army was going, and they were standing at the edge of the baggage park on the morning before the march, with their bundles, waiting to see what it would do.

Clinton rode past them on his way to the river. He knew what the law said. The law said that every one of them belonged to somebody, and that the somebody would be at the gate of the city by noon tomorrow with a paper to prove it. He had raised a company of pioneers from such men two years ago, and fed and clothed and paid them, and he had never been able to promise any of them anything either.

A woman with a child on her hip stepped out in front of his horse, and his orderly cursed her and reached for the bridle, and she did not move. She asked him, in a low voice, whether they might come.

He looked at her for a moment. He thought of all the things he was not empowered to say.

“Fall in behind the artillery wagons,” he said. “Keep up. If you fall behind, I cannot send back for you.”

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They marched out at three in the morning on the eighteenth of June, and the city was empty behind them by daylight.

The troops crossed at Gloucester Point in the flatboats, regiment after regiment, in the grey light, and the wagons crossed above them at Cooper’s Ferry; and by ten the army was on the road for Haddonfield, and Clinton sat his horse on the Jersey shore and looked back across the river at Philadelphia, with its steeples and its brick and its State House, where the Congress, he supposed, would be sitting again within a fortnight, and had a moment, quite unexpectedly, of something very like relief. He had never wanted the place. Nobody had ever been able to tell him what it was for.

Then it was the march, and he did not think about anything else for ten days.

It was the heat that he remembered afterwards. Not the enemy; the enemy was always somewhere, on the flanks, in the woods, a few hundred men at a time, felling trees across the road and breaking down the bridges and firing from the hedges and going away. It was the heat. It came on in the second day and did not lift, a wet, heavy, breathless heat out of a white sky, in which the men marched in their woollen coats and their packs, sixty pounds to a man, along sand roads with no shade, and fell down at the side of the road and could not be got up. The bridges were all down. The pioneers rebuilt them, at every creek, in the sun, and the army stood in the road and waited, and the wagons stood behind it, and the column of baggage stretched back along the single road through the woods for twelve miles, every wheeled carriage the army owned and every bat-horse and every camp woman and every child, and at the end of it, behind the artillery wagons, keeping up, the people from the edge of the baggage park.

The Germans deserted. Several hundred of them went in the first week, by night, into the woods, to the farms of the German settlers in Pennsylvania and the Jerseys, who would hide them and marry them to their daughters. Clinton could not blame them. He would have gone himself, he thought, on some days, if he had had anywhere to go.

At Allentown, on the twenty-fourth, he came to the place where the road divided. One way went north to the Raritan and Staten Island; the other went east, through Freehold, to the sea at Sandy Hook, where the fleet could take them off. He had to choose. Washington was somewhere to the north, between him and the Raritan, with an army that had wintered at Valley Forge and come out of it, the intelligence said, drilled. Clinton sat up half the night with the maps and the reports, and wrote a memorandum, and chose the sea.

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The rebels came at his rear on the twenty-eighth, a Sunday, at about ten in the morning, on the plain beyond the court house at Monmouth.

He had let Knyphausen go on ahead at daybreak with the baggage, the whole twelve miles of it, on the road to Middletown; and he had followed with the second division, the best of the army, at about eight, so that the baggage should have the army between it and Washington. That was the whole of his plan. It was the only plan there was. He had known since Philadelphia that Washington would try for the baggage, because it was what he would have tried for himself, and it was what any general would try for who could not hope to beat the King’s army in the field and wanted to hurt it.

So when the cannon began on his rear, he was not surprised. He was glad. He sat his horse at the top of the slope above the plain, with the heat coming up off the ground in waves so that the far woods swam, and looked at the rebel columns coming out of the trees on to the plain behind his rearguard, several thousand of them, and understood that he had the chance of something. They were in the open. They had come too far, too fast, after a rearguard they thought was running. If he turned on them now, with the grenadiers and the Guards, he could drive them back on to Washington’s main body in confusion, and perhaps break both.

He turned on them.

He sent the dragoons in first, the 16th, and watched them go across the plain in the heat and the dust and hit the rebel horse and put it back on its infantry; and then he brought the grenadiers and the Guards round and sent them in, and the rebel advance broke. He saw it break. It went back across the plain, regiment after regiment, not running, exactly, but going, the way an army goes when nobody has told it what else to do; and the grenadiers went after it in the full heat of the day, the two battalions and the Guards, and pushed it back a mile, and two miles, through farms and orchards and across a stream and up the far side. He went with them. He could not afterwards have said why. He found himself at the head of a squadron of dragoons, with his sword out, charging an American battery across an open field like a cornet of nineteen, with Rawdon shouting at him from somewhere behind; and he knew while he was doing it that it was the wrong thing for the commander-in-chief of the King’s army in America to be doing, and that Kemble would put it in his journal, and he did it anyway, because for ten minutes in the heat at Monmouth he was not a shy man who wrote memoranda but a soldier with a sword in his hand, which was the only thing he had ever been sure that he was.

Then they came over the rise, and Washington’s army was there.

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It was drawn up on a ridge on the far side of a marshy hollow, the whole of it, in line, with its guns on a hill on its flank; and it was standing.

He had seen the rebel army many times. He had seen it at Long Island, where it ran, and at Kip’s Bay, where it ran faster; he had heard about the Brandywine and Germantown, where it had come on bravely in columns and gone back in a mob. He had never seen it do this. It stood on its ridge in the heat in a long straight line, with its colours, and waited for him; and when the grenadiers went down into the hollow and up the far side at it, the line fired, by platoons, in order, and loaded again, and fired again, as if it had been doing it all its life. The guns on the hill on its flank opened on the grenadiers’ column from the side, and they were well laid and very well served, shot after shot, so that he could see through his glass the crews working at them in the smoke like men threshing; and he thought, with a sort of cold surprise, that he had not known the rebels had gunners like that.

Monckton was killed at the hedge in front of the American centre, leading the second battalion of grenadiers, and they could not even bring his body off. The grenadiers went at the hedge again and could not carry it. And all the time the heat went on, and men who had not been touched by anything fell down in the ranks with their faces purple and their eyes rolled up and did not get up again, and the water carts were miles back with the baggage, and there was no shade anywhere on the whole of that plain.

Towards evening he called it off. The two armies lay on either side of the hollow until dark and cannonaded each other, without much harm, while the sun went down; and at about midnight, very quietly, without drums, the King’s army got up off the ground and marched away along the Middletown road after its baggage, and left its fires burning behind it.

They counted the next day. Sixty-five killed by the enemy, a hundred and seventy wounded, sixty-four missing. And fifty-nine dead of the heat: men who had marched and fought all day in their wool and their packs in that heat and simply stopped, and been found afterwards lying under hedges with no mark on them. He wrote that figure down himself, at Middletown, in his own hand, on the list. He had lost nearly as many men to the sun as to Washington.

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They came up on to the heights above the Navesink on the first of July, which Kemble wrote in his journal as Never Sink; and there they waited while the sailors laid a bridge of boats across the gap to Sandy Hook, and early on the fifth the whole army went over it, in about two hours, with the fleet lying off the Hook to take them in, and the baggage behind them, and the people from the edge of the baggage park behind the baggage, keeping up.

He had stood on the heights every evening while the bridge was making, and looked at the sea.

He had been looking at it for a week, on and off, whenever the road came near enough. The French squadron was out. Everybody knew that. Twelve sail of the line from Toulon, with d’Estaing, who had once been a soldier and was said to hate the English more than most sailors did; and if it had come to the Delaware a week sooner it would have caught the transports with the loyalists in the river, and if it came to the Hook now it would catch the army on the beach with Lord Howe’s few ships of the line to defend it. He had thought about that every night of the march. He had made a memorandum of it.

It did not come. The sea was empty to the horizon every evening, flat and grey and enormous, with the sun going down into the Jerseys behind him; and on the fifth the boats went out from the Hook to the transports and came back and went out again, all day, and nothing appeared. He did not know where the French had gone. Nobody in America knew. He thought that he would very likely find out from a London newspaper, three months late, as he found out most things.

In New York he reported the evacuation, the route and his decision to turn on the attack. I was convinced that our baggage was their object. He described the fatigue and heat: our circumstances obliged us to make a vigorous exertion. Monckton’s loss was much to be lamented. He left out his own charge and the American gunners. He could not find a place for either in the account his minister required.

At the bottom of the dispatch there was a return of the troops embarked, and a return of the wounded, and a return of the stores; and there was no return of the people who had followed the artillery wagons from Philadelphia and kept up, because nobody had asked him for one, and there was no column in any form at the War Office in which they could have been put. He had had them counted anyway, at the Hook, on his own account. He put the figure in his memorandum book, with the date, and nothing else, and locked it in the drawer with the others, where he kept the papers he never burned.