Читать книгу Rabble in Arms: A Chronicle of Arundel and the Burgoyne Invasion - Kenneth Roberts - Страница 16

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“You came as a scout, but you’re a ship man,” Arnold told me, “and I’ve got a ship man’s job for you. You’re to go back to St. John’s, number the timbers of that vessel on the stocks, and take her to pieces. Then send the timbers to Crown Point.”

The words were scarcely out of his mouth before I began to wonder about Nathaniel: whether it would be better to have him with me in St. John’s where I could keep him under my eye, or whether he’d be better off elsewhere, far removed from Ellen Phipps and other reminders of Marie de Sabrevois.

I might have saved myself the trouble of wondering; for Arnold had his own plans for all of us. “Take Bickford with you,” he added, “and if you need more workmen, requisition any stray soldiers that can’t account for themselves. If they don’t want to work, handle ’em the way you would on shipboard. If anybody tries to make trouble for you, you’ll have to squirm out of it the best you can. I’ll leave the details to you; but whatever happens, get that vessel to Crown Point. Here’s your authority.”

He reached for a sheet of paper and drove his pen across it. The window was palely flushed with a Canadian dawn, and in that light his swarthy face was haggard; but the pen scratched on as briskly as though he were fresh from sleep.

Even as I read my orders, he was instructing Nathaniel and Verrieul to get Canadian clothes for themselves and set off on foot down the St. Lawrence to find out, if possible, whether any troops from England had arrived in the river, and where they were; and in the next breath he was telling Cap Huff and Doc Means to report to Major Scott and help him in the requisitioning of supplies to be used in case of a retreat.

To Nason he said: “See to your men, and come back here at nine o’clock in the morning. Your friend Natanis ought to be back from Caughnawaga by then; and I’ll have something that will keep both of you busy.” With that he winked at Nason, a most ungeneral-like wink. “Take ’em away,” he said. “I’ve got work to do.”

He picked up his pen, flipped a horseshoe from a pile of correspondence, and before we were through the door the quill was scratching across a sheet of paper as though he had merely been diverting himself with us, and now intended to make up for lost time.

... That was how Tom Bickford and I came to find ourselves tramping south beside the shallow rapids of the Richelieu River, bound again for the dreary settlement we had left two days before.

There was no change in St. John’s that I could see, except that the sun was shining; but it seemed to me, somehow, that there was less sadness and desolation to the place than when we had first entered it. I could not account for this feeling until I found myself thinking about the coarseness of the dress that the girl Ellen Phipps had worn; and I realised then that a strange town, contemptible at first sight, will frequently be made to seem downright pleasant by the knowledge that one interesting acquaintance lives there.

At the landing where Nason had brought us ashore there lay two provision barges; and the same dilapidated lieutenants who had met us were overseeing the unloading of a mighty heap of boxes, sacks and barrels. They jumped when I spoke to them; and one of them said “My God! I thought you were De Woedtke! What you want?”

I reminded him of our previous arrival in canoes, and showed him the order Arnold had given me. When he had read it, he stared at me curiously and asked: “Ain’t you the man that owned to having some hard money?”

I said I was, whereupon he took me by the elbow and moved me away from the soldiers who were dumping the provisions ashore. “What you need,” he said mysteriously, “is a pail of beer and a slab of ham, cooked over some hot coals about ten minutes.”

I was lost to know what he was driving at, but saw it would be an inexpensive way to obtain his good will; so the four of us went around to the back door of a dirty tavern that had boards nailed across the windows. From the far bowels of the tavern, when we entered, there came a strange guttural rumble, punctuated with noisy hiccups, almost like distant war-whoops. The lieutenant, whose name was Hersom, made signs at an angry-looking Frenchwoman; and she, having accepted four shillings from me, bit each one suspiciously; then drew four pails of beer and set four slices of ham over an open fire—slices about the thickness of a hatch-cover, and about as juicy.

The rumble came clearer to our ears. It was the rumble of a voice speaking partly in English and partly in German; and not ceasing, apparently, except when its owner paused to drink or to hiccup.

“That’s De Woedtke,” Hersom said. “Somebody in Sorel sent him down here yesterday, with an aide-de-camp, so’t everything would be ready for Sullivan.” He raised his eyebrows at me. “Heard about that? Sullivan’s coming to-morrow. He’ll be at Isle La Motte to-night. Here to-morrow. Four regiments!”

De Woedtke’s voice rumbled on and rumbled on, exploding now and again into a shrill, racking hiccup.

“Yes, that’s him,” Hersom said. “That’s him, telling his aide-de-camp how Frederick the Great used to do it. Got kicked out of Frederick the Great’s army, he did, on account of being the one that told him about the death of a pet nephew. He’s in command of us. Trained under Frederick the Great, he says he was. I don’t know anything about this Frederick the Great; but if De Woedtke’s a sample of those he trained, he never trained anybody to do anything but talk and drink! Anyway, De Woedtke’s a general. Congress made him a general. Prob’ly he began to tell Congress about himself, and they made him a general to shut him up. If you want to do things right, you’d better report to him and tell him you’re planning to take the vessel to pieces.”

“Suppose,” I said, with an ear to the hiccups of this foreign general, “suppose he told me not to do it?”

“Then you couldn’t do it,” Hersom said. “And you needn’t worry about his not wanting you to do it. Our generals are all the same! None of ’em wants you to do anything that any other general wants!”

I chewed at my ham and remembered how Arnold had spoken of those in Canada who found it impossible to obey orders. “In that case,” I told Hersom, “I’ll be damned if I tell him! I’ve got to get that vessel to pieces and loaded on to barges.”

“I just thought I’d tell you,” Hersom said.

When we had finished our ham, Hersom showed us where to find black paint. By nightfall we had numbered every timber on the half-finished vessel.

... We slept beneath her keel, the night being a little foggy, but nothing to cause us trouble; and on the following morning, after we had drawn a piece of sour beef from Hersom for breakfast—a piece that looked and tasted like anchor-rope fresh out of Liverpool Harbour—we went hunting for assistants.

Out beyond the shipyard we found six men sitting around a fire. Their breeches were worse than dilapidated, and they had sailcloth wrapped around their lower legs and feet. Only one of them had a tied queue; it was tied with a snake skin. They looked bristly and dirty, as if they had lived in caves for years.

“Here,” I said, “where you men going?”

They sat silent, peering stupidly at a kettle on the fire.

“All right,” I said. “Since you’re going nowhere, just hurry up with that kettle so you can step over to the shipyard and give us a hand dismantling a vessel.”

One of the men turned and eyed me. “Not us, brother. You got the wrong men! We’re York troops. Our time’s up. We’re going home.”

“Well,” I said, “just give me a hand with this vessel first. General Arnold wants it shipped to Crown Point, where it’ll be some protection to your people down York way.”

“To hell with General Arnold,” the same man said calmly. “It don’t matter a damn to us what he or any other general wants.”

I had it in mind to reach down and get him by the collar, so to haul him up where I could take an unobstructed swing at his ear; and then it occurred to me that these men were, after all, able to account for themselves, whereas Arnold had said to use men who couldn’t.

“Shall we start on ’em, Cap’n Peter?” Tom Bickford asked hopefully.

“No,” I said. “We don’t want to make trouble if we can avoid it.” Then I made another appeal to these York troopers. “Here, this I’m asking you to do is to help your country. Seems as if you’d be willing to do that without any urging.”

“Well, we ain’t,” the spokesman said. “That’s all we heard since we left York: some old woman with a sword and a cocked hat saying, ‘Now, my brave men, forward for your country!’ We ain’t as big fools as we look. Don’t you suppose we knew he didn’t give a damn about anything except getting promoted? We never got no food or powder or pay, excepting paper money that wa’n’t good for nothing but wadding. We never got no decent treatment when we was took sick. What’s more, we ain’t never seen no officers yet that knew what they was talking about—just a pack of he-schoolma’ams, squabbling over which one got into the army first. To hell with it!”

“Look here,” I said, “we can knock that vessel to pieces in no time. There’ll be free beer all round, and I’ll get you a ride to Crown Point on the barge.”

“Beer?” the spokesman asked. “How much beer?”

The others, too, looked interested. “A quarter barrel a day?” one asked.

“Yes.”

“ ’Tain’t enough,” he said instantly. But I saw that this was merely a hopeful form of speech, and that my point was carried, whereupon I ventured to speak somewhat decisively in order to make a good impression at the outset.

“Listen to this,” I said. “You’ll get a quarter barrel, and drink it after work. What’s more, you’ll toe the mark and do as I say, or Tom Bickford and I, we’ll knock your teeth out through your ears.”

They growled and grumbled as they ate their kettleful of stew; but when it was gone they followed us to the shipyard peaceably enough. When, indeed, they had started on the demolition of the skeleton vessel, and had worked up a sweat, they became even amiable, so that I think one of their troubles had been an insufficiency of work, which is enough to make any man discontented with his lot.

... The morning was less than half over when there was distant shouting near the centre of the town. A man ran past us, bawling to some one unseen. Boys, barefooted, appeared from nowhere, with dogs capering and barking alongside, to run yelling after the man.

The whole settlement seemed to ooze people—women and girls; Canadian Frenchmen in bob-tailed summer jackets and battered stove-pipe hats, all with long queues hanging down their backs, and with the customary half-sour, half-doltish look that seemed peculiar to them. On the Iberville side, too, people came out of the farm-houses and moved in little knots along the Richelieu.

The banks, as far as we could see, seemed, in a moment’s time, to be lined with people; and while we stared at them, wondering, there was a babble of voices and scattered shouts. From upstream came a faint sound of drums and fifes.

Two canoes slid into our line of sight, gliding slowly over the Richelieu’s brown surface. They were paddled by Indians, and in each of them sat six grinning soldiers, soldiers in fine blue uniforms with white facings, white belts crossed over their chests, and white vests and breeches. Their muskets slanted outward, three to a side, very neat and military looking.

As the canoes slipped along between the people clustered at the water’s edge, there arose a ragged, welcoming cheer that spread and solidified until the soldiers in blue and white seemed to float on a river of cheering. Behind the first two canoes came another two; then two more, each with six soldiers in it; then a lumbering great bateau, packed solidly with soldiers in blue and white. Bayoneted muskets stood upright between their knees; and above their heads the bayonets glittered like a small forest of steel.

The ringleader of the ragged York troopers, balanced on a plank high in air, glanced down at me contemptuously. “Sullivan’s brigade!” he said, and spat copiously through the vessel’s ribs.

A second bateau, filled with men in blue and white, followed the first, and close behind the second was a third. The men in them laughed and stamped their feet, and in time to the stamping they shouted “QueBEC! QueBEC! QueBEC-BEC-BEC!” From the next bateau came the stirring rattle of drums; and blue-and white-clad fifers shrilled into Yankee Doodle.

Above me one of the York troopers yelled horribly, waving his ragged hat above his head. Unexpectedly the ringleader capered on his plank, bellowing “Sullivan! Sullivan!” in a cracked voice. In a moment all six were shouting and hurrooing, and dropping one by one from their perches.

“By God!” the ringleader bawled, glaring at me furiously, “we’ll show ’em!” He turned and ran like a madman toward the river; and Tom Bickford and I ran after him.

Bateau after bateau came downstream between banks so packed with people that the whole of Canada seemed to have crowded into St. John’s; and the unending welcoming clamour was sweeter, even, than the rolling of the drums. These Canadian French folk, clapping their hands and leaping for joy, were the same ones who had despised and spurned us when we were weak and hungry; so it was clear that they would be happy to join us if they thought we were strong enough to whip the English.

It seemed as though there would never be an end to the bateaux laden with men in blue and white—Anthony Wayne’s regiment, they proudly announced; but there was, and then the river was alive with bateaux bearing soldiers dressed in dark blue with red facings. These were Pennsylvania troops—the First Pennsylvania; and jostling along behind them came bateaux filled with men in brown and buff, and with others in gray trimmed with blue, every man’s musket tipped with a bayonet. Their uniforms were handsome and new, and each soldier’s hair properly clubbed and neatly tied just so. Even their women, who came last of all in the bateaux that carried the baggage, were decked out in bright colours and stylish sunbonnets; and though they were noisy, like most camp women, they were none of them drunk, not that I could see.

Nowhere—not in St. James’s Park even—had I seen regiments better equipped or more soldierly. When they clambered ashore, they formed ranks like veterans and went swinging off to the old British barracks as if they owned Canada; and I, watching them, was filled with pride and confidence.

Over two hundred bateaux were packed along the banks of the Richelieu when this beautiful new brigade was all ashore; and not only were there thousands of men, gay in their regimentals, but the waterfront was ablaze with sentry-fires; and between the fires were piles of stores under guard—cannon, ammunition, provisions: everything that had hitherto been lacking for the success and wellbeing of our people in Canada.

There was only one unpleasant aspect to the business: I found myself wishing that Nathaniel could be with me to see these fine regiments; and it dawned on me that I would never have had such a wish unless, deep in my heart, there still remained dark doubts about him. I told myself that he was safe, since a task had been set for him by Arnold, and he had gone uncomplainingly off on it with Verrieul; and then, remembering how Nason had told Arnold that we were all right, all of us, I still felt doubts, and hated myself for feeling them.

... The six York troopers came back to work when the new regiments had landed, though I had expected never to see them again; and they were in a state of excitement over what they had seen.

“By gravy!” the ringleader said, “if we’d had equipment like that, we’d ’a’ tooken Quebec to pieces and throwed it in the river!”

“That’s what these men ought to do,” I said. “I don’t believe you could find better troops than these, not even in England.”

“They ain’t any better’n we were!” he said defensively. Then his eyes dropped to his frayed and stained garments of breeches, untied at the knees, and his hand fumbled at the dirty growth of whiskers that made his face haggard and fearsome. Later, when I called him and one of his companions to go with me to get the quarter barrel of beer, they had scraped the bristles from their cheeks and tied their breeches, and their hair was combed and clubbed. They seemed to stand straighter, too, and to have less the look of whipped animals.

The change in their appearance was a miracle, almost. I began to feel that war was not so bad; that it might be over before we knew it, so that Nathaniel and I could be starting back for Arundel before summer had set in. It would be pleasant, I thought, to sit in the stuffed chair beside the table in our sitting-room in Arundel, wearing my light blue coat and my cameo pin and a ruffled shirt, and to speak with an air of modesty to callers about the great things we had done in Canada.

So near to over did our troubles seem that I began to figure on my next cruise. When we built a new vessel, I decided, it would be a barquentine instead of a brig; and I would carry Tom Bickford with me as first mate.

Not even the change of wind that brought rain that night, together with clouds of mosquitoes and black flies and midges, could dampen our optimism.

I have no means to tell how terrible these stinging insects of Canada were. In moist weather, when the wind was right, they blanketed the lowland all up and down the Richelieu as fog-particles blanket the sea. Their faint shrill wings made a perpetual whining around us. The midges stung like hot needles; mosquitoes lanced us till our arms ached from brushing them off; but worst of all were the black flies, which crawled beneath our hat bands or inside the collars of our shirts or behind our ears, biting so gently that they were never felt, but so villainously that our blood ran down from the punctures they made. Moreover, whenever they bit, swellings began, and we saw men with eyes swollen shut from the poison of these damnable insects, or necks puffed out larger than their heads, or ears standing out like diseased growths.

Thanks to the hoods of our smocks, and to lying in the smoke of a smudge, we came through the night without being eaten alive. The morning was only half over when a squad of men in blue and white came swinging down the river road. At their head was a brisk young lieutenant who halted them smartly when they were abreast of us; then came up to eye us doubtfully.

“Who’s in charge here?” he asked.

I told him I was.

“Well,” he said, “General Sullivan wants to know what’s being done with these ship timbers.”

“They’re being dismantled on orders,” I said. “On the orders of General Arnold.”

“Well, General Sullivan’s in command here,” the lieutenant said. “He wants it stopped.”

“I take my orders from General Arnold,” I told him mildly.

“You’ll have to go up and talk to General Sullivan,” the lieutenant said.

Seeing there was nothing to do but go, I told Tom Bickford to stay where he was, in spite of hell and high water. Then I went splashing back with the lieutenant and his squad of men.

... Headquarters, in the square stone building of a mill owner, was in a turmoil, smelling of steamy wet clothes, and seething with people waiting to see General Sullivan. Officers blundered through the rooms as if half out of their wits, all of them mud-spattered and swollen with insect bites.

For five hours I stood on one foot and then on the other in the hallway before the general was able to take notice of me; and in that time I heard a world of cursing from impatient young officers over the dreadful conditions that existed everywhere. Even if I had been deaf I would have learned that these new regiments would waste no time in hastening forward to make themselves masters of Quebec; nor could I escape hearing that General Thomas, commanding all the forces in Canada, was lying blind and raving in Chambly, dying of the smallpox, so that it was only a matter of hours before General Sullivan must succeed to the position.

I was taken in to see him at last, and found him a tall, florid man with a tuft of hair sticking out on each side of his face, in front of his ears, so that he looked something like a good-natured wildcat—the sort called a looservee by the Canadians. From the set of his lips I judged him to be stubborn; and it was written all over him that he was determined to be well liked, even though he had to kick people into liking him. It was plain to be seen, too, that he was highly elated by the importance of the position in which he now found himself.

“Who’s this?” he asked, mopping his sweaty red face. “What’s the trouble here?”

The lieutenant spoke for me. “This was the man in charge of those ship timbers, General.”

“Ah, yes!” the general said. “I remember it now. Well, sir: what’s your idea, interfering with ship timbers that we might make into a finished vessel and use for our own purposes?”

I liked nothing about this general—neither his enormous self-satisfaction, nor his genial condescension, nor his cat-like face; but since he was a general and I a captain, I had to be more than civil. “Sir,” I said, “I had orders from General Arnold to send them to Crown Point where they could be used in case of a retreat.”

“A retreat!” the general exclaimed. “In case of a retreat! Don’t you people talk about anything but retreat, for God’s sake? There’s to be no retreat before an enemy no person has seen!” He laughed, and may have thought he seemed jovial when he did so; but to me he seemed like a politician making a speech on a subject he knew little about.

“My orders——” I began; but he stopped me by banging his desk with the flat of his hand.

“I cancel ’em!” he said. “We can’t afford to send ship timbers away from here before we know whether we need ’em or not! That’s why I’m here—to rectify the blunders that have been made—to recover the ground our former troops so shamefully lost! I don’t want the word ‘retreat’ mentioned in this army!”

I knew enough about discipline to keep my mouth shut; and when the general had mopped his red, shiny face once more, he beamed on me as though what he had said was a sort of joke between us. “Here,” he continued, “I take it you’re regularly on scout duty, aren’t you? Well, I’ll put you to doing something more useful than stealing ships! Go around this section and find out what they’re saying—what the Canadians are saying about us: how they feel. That’s valuable! That’s what we need to know! Tell General De Woedtke what you learn, and he’ll tell me.” He coughed importantly. “That’s all!”

I saluted and went out, feeling as though I had been kicked. Once outside, I stole a glance at the lieutenant to see whether he considered the general’s orders as foolish as they seemed to me. Apparently he didn’t, and had no further interest in me or my affairs, so I saluted him even more civilly than I had saluted the general, and made myself scarce.

We had more beer that night, Tom Bickford and I and the York troopers; and by the time it was half gone we had agreed that Sullivan’s orders applied to no one but myself, and that the rest of them were free to do what Arnold wanted done.

“He ain’t got no control over us!” the ringleader of the York troopers declared virtuously. “You let him get a dozen rods out of town on the road to Sorel, and we’ll have these timbers aboard a bateau before you could kiss a duck!”

As for investigating the feelings of the French, I already knew how the French felt, and so did every one else with any sense. And when it came to reporting those feelings to the drunken sot De Woedtke, I knew there was no need to tell De Woedtke anything, because he wouldn’t remember whether I had or not. The only thing for me to do was to keep out of sight as much as possible, so that I might not be subject to discipline, or to more of Sullivan’s orders.

So the matter was arranged to every one’s satisfaction: even to mine; for as I gave Tom Bickford beer-money against the days to come, I thought, as I had thought several times before, that my new orders, foolish though they were, would at least give me an opportunity to see whether there was anything I could do for the girl Ellen Phipps.