First Salute - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [171]
At Yorktown during the night of October 6, workmen began digging the first Allied parallel facing the enemy. Stretching from the American quarters to the French, the Allied forces were supported by four redoubts, two in each camp, and a battery of guns aimed to “sweep with fire” enemy vessels coming up the river. The defenders’ fire on the work party was desultory, causing two minor casualties.
On October 9, the first American guns at Yorktown opened fire on the British defense works. For the past three days, engineers had been directing artillerymen in the construction of the batteries while night workmen were employed in digging the parallels. Work continued during the day by men from Saint-Simon’s troops, who constructed zigzag communicating trenches to the batteries and built abatis to fortify them. These were palisades of sharpened stakes pounded into the earth, with points up, to prevent attackers from climbing over the parapets. Casualties during the work were slight: one killed and seven wounded, but the toll increased, of officers as well as workmen, as the labor continued.
According to custom, the ceremonial opening of the first parallel of a siege called for troops to occupy the trench, flying flags with fife and drums. The honor was given to a detachment under Colonel Alexander Hamilton, whose appetite for public notice led him to order a useless and wanton display of his troop performing the Manual of Arms on the parapet. So astonished was the enemy by this act of bravado that they thought either it had some ulterior and menacing motive or that the Colonel was mad—and did not fire, sparing Hamilton a deserved lesson. Fifty guns from the Allied lines were now firing. Most were Saint-Simon’s, which de Grasse’s ships had brought down from Baltimore; the others were fieldpieces pulled by manpower down from White Plains under command of General Knox. When urged to wait until he could send them by ship, Washington, remembering how Knox’s guns dragged overland from Ticonderoga had delivered Boston, insisted that they accompany the march. The difficulty of bringing them over rutted roads and unbridged streams slowed the pace, increasing the anxiety that Cornwallis might escape or so strengthen his defenses as to make them impassable. The guns were in place before he did either.
Europeans, from repeated practice, had developed a science and a formal ritual of siege warfare of which Americans on their wide-open continent and in their wooden cities were ignorant. They were soon instructed, in the guttural accents and cheerful profanity of their drill-master and military teacher, Baron von Steuben, the authenticity of whose title—or lack of it—bore no relation to the affection in which he was held. All day convalescents and workers off duty from the regiments fashioned mysterious artifacts called gabions and fascines—earth-filled wicker baskets and bundles of dry sticks used to thicken the earthworks. Trees chopped down throughout the town to clear the field of fire supplied the material. By this time the response of British guns was diminishing, for Cornwallis, recognizing that he was under a real siege, had ordered the conserving of ammunition.
After Cornwallis sustained the opening barrage of gunfire from the Allied batteries in the first parallel, he informed Clinton on October 11 that “nothing but a direct move to York River which includes a successful naval action can save me.” The cannonading that began on October