Читать книгу Rabble in Arms: A Chronicle of Arundel and the Burgoyne Invasion - Kenneth Roberts - Страница 22

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Even after the passage of years there are nights when I start from my sleep, drenched with perspiration, because of dreaming darkly that I am on the Richelieu, once more, toiling until my muscles crack to reach the double goal that hangs like an unattainable mirage before me—for not only was I possessed, like all the others, to reach a place where we would no longer be at the mercy of the British, but I knew I could have no peace until I had again made inquiries at the Château de St. Auge.

What with the heat and the weakness of the men and the weight of the clumsy bateaux, we made slow progress against the river; but slow as we were, we crept like a flock of giant waterbugs past the even slower schooners; for the wind, dropping with the sun, had left them nearly helpless. Any one could see with half an eye that the headway of these vessels would soon cease, and that unless something should be done about them, they must inevitably fall into the hands of the British.

Fortunately there seemed to be no end to the Canadian twilight; and Sullivan, slipping among us in a canoe, made a selection of bateaux—a hundred of them, and among them mine. We transferred our sick into other bateaux; and the well, all but the oarsmen, went ashore to make their way upstream afoot. Then back we pulled to the schooners; and far into that sultry simmering night we worked at shifting boxes and barrels, powder and shot, guns and gun carriages, sick and well, from their decks and holds into the bateaux.

It is hard enough, God knows, for strong and healthy men, well-fed, to lower heavy weights from a large vessel into a small boat in the bright light of day without accident. For hungry, weak men to do such work in darkness is not possible—or so I thought until the determination to escape the British became a passion in these men’s minds.

I worked with one ear cocked up, expecting every moment to hear that a cannon had fallen through the bottom of a bateau, or that a barrel had burst itself on the heads of those who stood waiting for it with upstretched arms; but for hours these ragged, sweating spectres fumbled safely at their labours, making profane jests about the fat king whose troops were at our heels; and one by one the bateaux, deep in the water, dropped away from the larger vessels and pulled slowly upstream again.

When we were done, there was nothing left in the schooners. We took off their sails, even, and stripped them of their cordage; and at last we set fire to them, so that the final bateaux to cast off were lighted on their way by the flames that poured from the hatches.

The dawn had come, we thought, for in the light of the blazing schooners we could see the apple trees, white with blossoms, staring out at us from either bank; and robins waked to trill their quivering morning melodies. Even so the dawn seemed overdue, for the work we had done was such as should have taken us a dozen nights of toil. Yet it was not dawn, but only midnight, and before dawn had come we had tied rags around our hands and the rags were bloody.

We rowed all night through a sultriness that pressed upon us like hot wool, and all through the blazing heat of the day that followed. It is fifty miles from Sorel to Chambly, against a swift current; and for hours on end each stroke we took with our clumsy oars seemed the last that could be endured. Still we took one more, and then one more: always one more stroke, with our arms and backs like hot lead; and inch by inch we lumbered on, another inch farther from the British: another inch closer to Chambly—another inch closer to the rapids, beyond which the vessels of the British could not pass.

Toward dusk a wall of black cloud came up in the west—a wall from which emerged a steady distant rumble, an angry smothered roar, with only such breaks as a growling animal might make to catch its breath.

The growling was growing louder when we came to the broad pool at the foot of Chambly rapids, and to the throng of bateaux that wallowed uneasily in the swirling, dirty, foam-streaked water, waiting to go up. They were a sad flotilla in the sickly shadow of the coming storm, and the men in them, both sick and well, were strangely silent—perhaps because, like me, their muscles trembled with fatigue and they were too spent for speech.

While we waited, the black wall in the west towered up over us and seemed to burst. The whole sky blazed. Thunder pounded at our ears and heads like padded hammers, while the rain had the solidity of falling lakes. There was an inhuman yet personal intensity to this storm, as if the devil had sent a legion of water-witches to torment us. There was no slackening of the rain; the stabbing of lightning was incessant, and it was to the unremittent crashing of close thunder that we were drummed on our way over Chambly rapids.

Before that night it had been thought no bateau could be taken through them; for they were a sloping wall of raging, tumbling, yellowish water—a wall whose upper end is as far above its lower as the masthead of a stout vessel lies above its keel. Where there are ledges and boulders in the stream, the water slips over them like strong brown glass, seemingly without motion; but having passed the obstruction, it bursts into a jaundiced rage and hurls itself upward in angry spouts, as if to leap back over the rock that hindered its descent. Thus the sloping wall of the rapids is like a beaten desperate army, tumbling down from heights it cannot scale; and it was up those heights that we must go, with all our bateaux and supplies and ammunition.

There could be no failure; for if we failed, we would have no means of escape, and would be doomed to wander, without arms or food or shelter, in the trackless wilderness to the south.

How we did it I scarcely know; but it was done. With fingers bloody and clumsy from our rowing, we lashed ropes to the bateaux, bow and stern and amidships; and as many as could do so laid hold of the ropes, without regard for rank or military observances. Ordinarily, that is to say, no love was lost between the Pennsylvanians and the New England troops, and I have known times when Pennsylvanians would see Massachusetts men in hell before they would lift a finger to help them. But here at Chambly rapids there was no thought of differences; and once, while I dragged, groaning, at a rope with raw hands that seemed to clutch hot nettles, the man who grunted and puffed beside me was General Sullivan.

The men on shore hauled; and in each bateau, men with poles strained to hold it from the rocky bank; while in the rapids, waist deep in the surging flood and clinging to the gunwales, went other men. Inch by inch they worked forward, half supported by the bateau and half supporting it. The heavy great boat lay tilted upward in the churning, thrusting torrent, straining and rearing like a restive horse; and inch by inch it climbed that wall of water—a wall that leaped at us and showed white fangs in the crackling flashes of lightning; then hid for a moment in impenetrable dark before leaping at us once more.

The pole of a bateauman would often slip; and its wielder, plunging over the side, would go down through foam and over boulders, to be fished out, choking and gagging, by those below.

Those who waded would lose their footing, swing backward against the legs of their fellows, and whirl away, half-submerged, until they floundered, bruised and nearly drowned, among the boats that waited in the pool. The bateau would hesitate and lurch; there would be a strangled chorus of shouts from those who laboured with it. Once more it would move upward almost imperceptibly, quivering and fighting in the lightning’s glare.

There was agony, even, in watching the painful slow ascent of these unwilling bateaux, held by main strength on that sloping wall of water at an angle as unnatural as it was impossible; for with each one that went up, we said to ourselves a score of times that it could go no farther—that it must topple backward and whirl down among us, sinking others before it sunk itself. Yet every last one of them went up, and over the brink at last into the smooth stretch of water that flows through the plain in front of the clumsy square stone fort.

... It was a strange sight, that plain, when we had hoisted our bateau up the rapids and dragged its nose ashore, our legs trembling and our muscles throbbing from the violence of our endeavours.

It had the look, in the blue flashes that seared our aching eyes, of a battlefield; for human figures covered the treeless space before the black fort that glistened in the rain. They sprawled grotesquely in the mud; and with each blaze of lightning we saw them stabbed by a thousand watery darts. Rivulets ran over and around them; but they lay like sodden corpses, conscious of nothing. Here and there a body moved; struggled to its knees and crawled a little: rose to its feet, even, to stagger blindly and then sink again.

Groups of men came slowly into the plain from down the stream, or clambered like clumsy demons over the river-bank. They groped and stumbled numbly: then sank down among the prostrate figures, or dragged themselves away towards St. John’s. It was not an army: there were no officers: no sentinels—nothing but human cattle, palsied from exhaustion; sick with disease, hunger and despair.

The night before I had drunk a cup of paste, made from a little flour mixed with the water of the Richelieu. Since then there had been nothing to eat. I picked my way towards the fort through the recumbent bodies of these miserable skeletons, wondering whether Hazen had obeyed the orders I had brought him from Arnold—the orders to send all supplies and sick to St. John’s. If he was so quick at disobeying orders, it might be there were still supplies remaining in the fort. I could have eaten anything. The walls of my stomach seemed to grind together, and to squeak in the grinding. I must have food, I knew, to stop this grinding; to put strength back in my knees.

I tried to remember when it was I had come here and spoken with Hazen and his officers. A week or more ago, I thought at first: ten days perhaps. No: it was less: six days—five days. Then it came to me that it was only two days before. Two days! I stood and stared at the drawbridge that spanned the ditch before the fort; it was down, and the lightning showed me that the heavy gates stood open, unguarded by any sentry.

Behind me I heard the chupping of a horse’s hoofs in the mud of the plain, and almost at once the rider’s voice shouting, “Aren’t there any officers in this army? Where’s the general?”

The voice was strange and cracked with excitement; but the vivid flashes let me see that the rider was Captain Wilkinson.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I just got here.”

“Look!” Wilkinson said, “hold my horse, will you? He’ll be cut off—Arnold’ll be cut off—by Heaven, sir, when did you start—this is damnable—when did you leave Sorel?”

“Two nights ago,” I told him, glad I had figured out the time.

Wilkinson groaned, hoisted a leg over his saddle and slid stiffly to the ground. “Why in God’s name didn’t Sullivan let us know?” he asked, all his military forms forgotten. “Why didn’t he tell Arnold? We only got word this afternoon! This afternoon, two days late! By God, sir, this man is trying to ruin us! The British—the British—why, they’ll capture Arnold if I can’t get five hundred men to cover his retreat! Where in God’s name can I get five hundred men out of this rabble?”

“Let’s have the reins,” I said. “Tell it to somebody inside the fort.”

Wilkinson rushed across the drawbridge and disappeared through the yawning gateway. The horse, a clumsy cart-horse, hung its head almost to its knees and slumbered. I felt in the saddlebags for food, but found only a greasy fragment of paper that had been wrapped around salt pork. I chewed it until it grew pulpy and trickled down my throat. It seemed to put strength in my knees, but not much. I could have eaten a whole pig. I looked hard at Wilkinson’s steed and wondered if I could eat a whole horse. I decided I could, if it was not an old one.

When Wilkinson came out again, he seemed to have recovered his semblance of calmness. “They’re there,” he said. “Sullivan and Hazen and Maxwell and St. Clair. They say De Woedtke’s supposed to have been put in command of the rear. D’you know anything about him?”

“No,” I said, “I don’t, but if you’re going looking for him, look for a place where rum can be bought, because that’s where he’ll be.”

For the sole time during our acquaintanceship, Wilkinson looked at me with something like approval. “It’s quite possible,” he said. “Where’s your musket and pack?”

“St. John’s,” I told him.

“In my opinion,” he said, breathing heavily, “you’ll do well to go there and get them. Those gentlemen inside didn’t even want to believe me when I told them how close the British were to Montreal. You’re liable to be wasted if you stay around them much longer.”

He stared at me owlishly, then scrambled into the saddle and went chupping off in the direction of the rapids.

Presumably I was still at General Sullivan’s disposal, and waiting to be given a message from him to be carried to General Arnold; but under the circumstances, it seemed to me that to bother my head further about such a message were to transform a military formality into a symptom of insanity.

It was twelve miles from Chambly to St. John’s, I knew. My desire for food vanished. If I walked all night, I told myself, and if the monstrous thunderstorm that had crackled and crashed overhead for four long hours would last a little longer to light me on my way, I might still reach the Château de St. Auge by morning—and it might be before Marie de Sabrevois and her niece had vanished from my sight for ever.