The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [175]
The American and French guns fired from the first set of trenches had been effective, but Washington wanted to move them even closer, to within a few hundred yards of the town. An artillery pounding from that close would inflict so much damage that he believed Cornwallis would give up. The problem was how to get that close. The answer, Rochambeau said, was a second line of trenches.
Those trenches could not be dug, however, because the British maintained two well-defended fortified redoubts, Numbers 9 and 10 on their maps, that ran parallel to the town and guarded the plain close to it. The only way those redoubts could be taken, Washington decided, was by a direct assault. That attack was dangerous because the men would come under artillery and musket fire from British wellentrenched on the fortifications. So he decided to launch another of his famous nighttime surprise attacks. Soldiers would move quietly, using bayonets. They were forbidden to fire their guns. He chose his chief of staff, Alexander Hamilton, to lead the American soldiers, giving Hamilton his long-sought battlefield command, and Colonel Guillaume, Comte de Deux-Ponts, to lead the French.
Washington gave a short speech to the men as they lined up in the darkness for the attacks on the two redoubts, urging them to be fearless, but the soldiers were scared. Captain Olney was assigned to the attack on Number 10, in the battalion led by Colonel Jean Joseph Gimat, Lafayette’s top aide. Olney’s knees shook as he listened to Washington. He wrote that the column marched toward the British positions forlornly. The men were certain that many of them would be killed, especially since they were under orders not to fire their muskets.
When they were close to the British lines near redoubt Number 10, just after 7 p.m., they were spotted and the one hundred twenty British defenders opened up with a musket volley. Olney’s men immediately shouted a loud “huzzah” and heard other cheers along the field. The silence had been broken and there would be no more of it. Gimat ordered Olney’s men and others to use axes to widen gaps between pointed tree branches of the abatis. This decision not only caused the attack to stall, but resulted in many men being shot dead or wounded as they tried to hack their way through the branches. Olney and others, realizing the folly of what they were ordered to do, slipped between the tree branches and scrambled down into the twenty-five-yard-wide ditch behind them and then mounted the parapets of the fortifications. There, in the dark, they encountered a group of defenders, bayonets fixed, who rushed them.
“I had not less than six or eight bayonets pushed at me,” wrote Olney later. “I parried as well as I could with my espontoon [a spear], but they broke off the blade part and their bayonets slid along the handle and scaled my fingers; one bayonet pierced my thigh, another stabbed me in the abdomen just about the hip bone. One fellow fired at me and I thought the ball [hit] my arm.”
Olney fought back in a fury, stabbing one of the Redcoats in the middle of his forehead with his broken espontoon. His men rushed to his side, bayoneting the group of British soldiers who had surrounded and bayoneted their captain. Sergeant Edward Butterick was stabbed in the stomach. Another sergeant was stabbed in the hand. Colonel Gimat was shot and carried off the field. Olney, bleeding badly from his bayonet wounds and the musket ball in his arm, somehow managed to keep leading the men attacking the fort. By then, more than two hundred Americans and Frenchmen were encountering horrific fire as they swarmed through the abatis—the