The Rebels: The Kent Family Chronicles (33 page)

Next to Philip was Lucas Cowper. Although he had a deaf ear for music, he tried to improvise the marching airs anyway—whistling them off key. Philip stared up at the housepeaks and the clearing sky, singularly uninspired. No doubt it was partly due to the long, worrisome silence out of Cambridge. Surely Anne would have written if anything had gone wrong—

The singing and the cheers didn’t help his mood either. A dedicated enemy lurked to the south. His job—every man’s job—was to obey orders and destroy that enemy. Philip was sure Gil would be all dash and zeal on a prancing horse somewhere up with Washington. He was glad his friend couldn’t see him, or the rest of his company, as they struggled to keep time with the Massachusetts drummers and fifers.

Marching immediately behind Philip and Cowper were Mayo Adams and Royal Rothman, the latter looking extremely nervous. But no more than ex-schoolmaster Pettibone just ahead. Pettibone gazed wistfully at the faces of the young girls cheering themselves hoarse on either side of Chestnut. He was no doubt wishing one of them was his dear Patsy.

Only Cowper, whistling in his monotone, seemed phlegmatically content. And of course Breen, staggering next to Pettibone. Breen was drunk.

The older man had somehow wheedled an extra ration of rum which he had proudly poured into his canteen before the march began. Now he found it necessary to slake his thirst frequently—no unusual sight among the soldiers. But Breen’s step grew more erratic by the moment. Finally, swearing under his breath, Captain Webb dropped back and ordered Pettibone to hold Breen up.

Breen gladly accepted the support, doffing his filthy hat to the captain. His sprig of green fell off and was trampled.

Breen paid no attention, putting his hat back on, then extending his canteen to Webb. The captain slapped it down, colored when he saw people on the sidewalk point. He about-faced, returned stiffly to the head of the company. All jollity, Breen made an obscene gesture and continued to loll with his arm over the shoulders of the scowling schoolteacher.

Philip wasn’t amused. It seemed bitterly clear again that a victorious army would never rise from such a disorganized collection of hooligans, malingerers and sometime-patriots yearning for home. Yet if there was ever a day when an army in the true sense was needed, that day had arrived.

The complainers were right. Twigs worn on the order of the commanding general weren’t enough to work the miracle.

Some of the men started a new song:

“Over the hills with heart we go,

“To fight the proud insulting foe
—
”

“Kent?”

The voice brought Philip’s head around even as he tried to keep in step with the drums. Mayo Adams gave him a coarse wink. His eyes glittered like polished stones in the August sun.

“You doin’ all right, Kent?”

“I’m doing fine, thanks.”

“Well, good, good. Just don’t want you to forget I’m right behind you, boy. Right behind you every step.”

“Our country calls and we’ll obey—

“Over the hills and far away!”

“J
EHOSHAPHAT, PHILIP—LOOK
there in the ditch!”

Staggering along the road among the hundreds of men fleeing through the early autumn dusk toward Chester Creek, Philip wiped sweat from his eyes and followed Lucas Cowper’s pointing hand. Of the men from his mess, Cowper was the only one he’d seen since the full retreat began an hour ago.

Now he saw another. Pettibone, lying on the slope of the roadside ditch, a bloodied hole shot through the left side of his chest.

The schoolmaster had apparently come this far when the lines broke, only to drop and die. Through the dust and smoke billowing over the road, the last, almost horizontal beams of September sunlight pierced here and there; sufficient light for Philip to have a swift, harrowing glimpse of a fat green fly landing on Pettibone’s lip. The fly crawled over Pettibone’s lower teeth and into his mouth.

“Somebody’s got to let his poor wife know,” Cowper said, shaken.

Philip tugged Cowper’s arm. “Later. Come on! Staring won’t help him—or us.” He had to shout to be heard above the noise.

All around them, men limped or ran through the mellow evening. Cursed or complained as they dragged themselves along, slowed by wounds or the plain disgust and bitterness of defeat. Cowper surrendered to the pull of Philip’s hand. The two returned to the center of the road. Behind them, musketry rattled.

For most of the day the American center had held Chad’s Ford on the east side of Brandywine Creek, against the fire of Knyphausen’s entrenched Hessians. Then, late in the afternoon, red jackets began appearing on the wooded hills to their rear, northward, where the right wing was stretched out in a long defense line. The bulk of the British army, mysteriously absent from the field for hours, had somehow gotten around behind the American positions. Three divisions under Cornwallis streamed down the hillsides to attack.

General Sullivan’s brigades vainly tried to hold them back. Knyphausen’s Hessians moved at last, eastward, to ford the Brandywine. From that hour, when the sun was already starting down, the outcome was certain. The Americans had been prepared for an assault from the west, not for a two-pronged attack from both front and rear. Around Philip and Lucas Cowper was the terrible result—a retreat more clamorous and confused than the one at Breed’s Hill. A retreat that might prove even more devastating than the steady withdrawal of Washington’s troops at Long Island and New York—

Philip knew the battle was lost. Cowper knew it. So did all the other men on the road. Fright and humiliation showed on every face.

As the light kept fading, Philip thought he saw the shapes of soldiers moving among the trees on his left, about a hundred yards north of the road. More Americans retreating, he assumed.

He was so tired, each step almost required a conscious act of will. His shoulder ached from returning Hessian fire with the Brown Bess. He’d had no food since early morning. At three, he’d drained the last tepid water from his canteen.

“Where in Christ are we supposed to be going?” he yelled at Cowper, above a din of hoofs and wheels coming up behind.

“We’re to cross Chester Creek, that’s what Webb said.”

“Then what?”

“I don’t know, maybe they’ll tell us at the creek—”

“Clear away, clear away!”
men shouted. Hastily Philip pushed Cowper to the shoulder. The heads of charging horses loomed, great silhouettes against the sunset light piercing the smoke. At full gallop, the horses dragged a pair of jouncing howitzers.

The men nearby broke for both sides of the road. The horses and wheeled guns thundered past. Above all, it was necessary to prevent the capture of artillery. Men were expendable.

Back on the road, yearning for just one good breath in the smoke and dust, Philip grabbed at a skinny soldier loping toward the east:

“Who are you? What unit?”

“Pinter’s Marylanders—”

“Is the whole line broken?” Cowper shouted.

“Damn right it is. Howe’s liable to whip us all the way back to Philadelphia—”

Then the Marylander was gone, dodging and darting around less speedy soldiers. The man was plainly determined to save his own skin. Maybe he had more brains than the rest of them, Philip thought. More brains than any of the spectral pairs and trios stumbling east in the lowering gloom, too worn out or hurt or disheartened to run.

More artillery roared through. Horse-drawn field cannon this time. One soldier failed to heed the shouted warnings and fell in the path of the slashing hoofs. Sourness rose in Philip’s throat as the horses, then the iron-tired wheels, kept straight on over the flailing victim, muffling his shrieks, leaving him twitching in the road, all blood and broken bones.

Cowper kept looking back. Philip jerked his arm again:

“Damn it, Lucas, you can’t stop to help every man who’s hurt or you’ll wind up the same way yourself.”

Resigned, Cowper resumed the shambling pace. And despite the seeming callousness of his words, Philip was just as sick over the carnage as the young farmer was. It seemed to him that those in command—Washington, the staff, even his friend Gil who was supposedly on the field today—must have trained themselves never to view a battle in terms of individuals, only in terms of units, tactics, strategy. If they ever looked at the soldiers one by one—looked at the Pettibones lying dead in the ditches—they could never remain strong enough to issue orders for the next battle. Their hearts would break with despair.

Bitter fury welled up in Philip then. Fury born of the chaos and his exhaustion; fury over the human loss and the scandalous defeat—

Why hadn’t someone caught the surprise flanking movement of Cornwallis? Was Washington asleep? Or was he simply the bungler he was so often accused of being?

Letting his emotions blur his already failing alertness, Philip wasn’t ready for the unexpected crackle of musket-fire that raked the road from the left. Men yelled, dove for the ditches. Philip and Cowper crouched down, fumbling to load their weapons. The men drifting through the trees north of the road had right-flanked suddenly. They weren’t American stragglers at all. Philip glimpsed florid faces, mitre-shaped hats—

A jaeger company. Hessians who had thrust forward parallel to the retreat route and were now turning to attack.

Running for the ditch with powder trailing from his horn, Lucas Cowper’s legs suddenly gave out. Only an instant later did Philip realize what had happened. The young Massachusetts fanner had been hit.

Cowper pitched head first into the ditch, musket fallen, horn fallen, bellowing in pain as blood poured from the place where a Hessian ball had shattered his upper left arm.

The Hessians were kneeling among the trees nearest the road, firing their rifles with precision. Philip jumped into the ditch, ducked as a ball hissed by, completed the loading of his Brown Bess without conscious thought. He raised it into position, shot, absorbed the slam of the stockplate against his already bruised shoulder, squinted through the failing light. A blond-haired German boy slumped against the trunk where he’d been kneeling. Philip hoped it was his ball that had opened a gushing hole in the boy’s throat.

Cowper was moaning. Philip took a moment to look at the wound. He saw grisly muscle and bone showing through the blackened rent in Cowper’s sleeve. The Hessians began advancing toward the ditch, where no more than a dozen men had taken cover to fight off the attack. The last of the September light glared on the steel of German bayonets.

On the road, Philip could still hear many more men running. He knew what they were thinking. Why risk your life in a skirmish that couldn’t possibly change the day’s outcome—?

“Into the ditch! Turn them back!
Blast you for a pack of yellow dogs
—
!”

Struggling to re-load, Philip twisted his head to see who had shouted. An officer who had evidently come up from the west dismounted and pulled his saber. Whacking back and forth with the flat of the blade, the officer drove men into position to defend the ditch.

The officer was young; in his thirties. He wore a dingy assortment of clothing. A soiled dark red coat; a sweat-blackened cravat; limp, frowsy lace on his tricorn. He might have been good-looking, except for the wrath that disfigured his features.

He smacked heads, backsides, thighs, succeeded in forcing ten or twelve more soldiers to the ditch. Philip got off another shot but saw no direct result. The Hessian company was advancing through tall weeds across a long, ragged front.

The American officer leaped into the ditch near Philip, one of his boots accidentally slamming Lucas Cowper’s right leg. Disgusted with the man’s almost maniacal bravado—some promotion-hungry subaltern, undoubtedly—Philip turned on him:

“The man’s wounded, you damn idiot!”

“Then he can’t turn back the jaegers. But you can. Charge ’em with me!”

In other circumstances Philip might have struck the officer. But there was no time. Bent over, the man ran along the ditch, shoved the crouching Americans up over the lip toward the Hessians. When he’d gotten half a dozen of them started, he jumped out of the ditch himself, a grin of bestial glee on his face.

My God, he’s serious!
Philip thought, caught between an impulse to follow and another that urged him to tend to the fallen Cowper, who was weeping in delirious pain.

A yard or so out from the ditch, the young officer turned back:

“Are you all weaklings?
Come on!”

He ducked as if instinct had warned him of a ball from the Hessian rifles—he was facing toward the road—then spun and went storming toward the mercenaries. He uttered such a bloodthirsty howl that Philip’s spine crawled. The officer was either a complete madman or entirely without fear.

But here and there along the ditch, a few more men climbed out to follow the half dozen others. The Hessians immediately stopped their forward march, knelt to re-load
—

Philip hadn’t had time yet. But he had his bayonet in place. He watched the officer an instant longer. Out in front of all the others, the man was actually charging right toward the Hessians, ducking and dodging as the German rifles cracked and flashed.

Miraculously, the officer avoided being hit. He brandished his sword and kept up that worldless screeming that brought all of the Americans out of the ditch at last—Philip among them. The first ranks of Hessians started scuttling back toward the trees.

Across a front fifty or sixty yards long, two dozen Americans followed the officer in his crazed charge. A Hessian stumbled. The officer sabered him through the chest. A cheer went up from the Americans. Suddenly Philip caught the mood of savagery, found himself running as fast as he could, just like the others—

The Hessians—perhaps thirty in the company—completely abandoned any pretense of orderly formation, retreating from the wave of attackers who began howling like the officer. Philip sped through the tall weeds between the ditch and the trees. Almost all the mercenaries had already melted back into the forest.