The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [68]
Sgt. Thomas McCarty had his own woes. He told men he met that on December 13, the hut he had been sleeping in burned to the ground and he had lost all of his clothing in the fire. Then a week later, the men in his regiment had been forced to sleep on the ground and awoke buried in two inches of snow that had fallen during the night.3 There were mortifying tales, too, that enlisted men had heard. Sgt. Elisha Bostwick, who had survived the New York battles, told the men that his friend had been shot in the thigh and was too badly hurt to retreat with them; he was left to be taken as a prisoner. While leaving the field, they saw a British soldier grab his friend’s musket. He used the butt of it and “broke and pounded his skull to pieces” and then looted him. Another British soldier murdered a second wounded American left for, Bostwick sneered, “British clemency.”4
No one had a more vivid memory of English brutality than Bostwick. The twenty-seven-year-old Connecticut soldier stayed with the army despite a severe fever that had rendered him helpless for nearly two months during the spring. Still sick, he fought the best he could but had been badly shaken by the battles in New York. His regiment was hit with cannon fire early in the battle of White Plains. He wrote that “[cannon] ball first took the head of Smith, a very stout man, and dashed it open. Then it took off Chilson’s arm which was amputated. It then took Taylor across the bowels. It then struck Sergeant Garrete of our company on the hip and took off the point of the hip bone. Smith and Taylor were left on the spot. Sergeant Garrete was carried off but died the same day. What a sight that was to see within a [short] distance, those men with their legs and arms and guns and pack all in a heap.”5
The breath of the men froze in the air that afternoon as the soldiers talked among themselves. One of their officers moved in front of them and opened a pamphlet that he had carried in his hand. It was one of the dozens of copies of Thomas Paine’s The American Crisis that General Washington had suggested be read to the men by their leaders before they boarded the boats to cross the turbulent Delaware.
The general knew from John Honeyman, a friendly local farmer who had been selling food to the Hessians—and spying for the Americans while doing so—that the Hessians planned a holiday feast on Christmas Day. They would eat too much. He knew, too, that their commander, Colonel Johann Rall, liked to drink and play cards in the evening and enjoyed sleeping late in the morning, often not rising before 9 a.m. and then not bathing and dressing until 10 a.m.
The Continental Army soldiers stood in formation as the boats were lined up in the water for the departure. To preserve secrecy, they had not been told about the Christmas Day strike until they arrived at the parade ground. They did not fear the weather or the Hessians. Many deserters had given up all hope in the Revolution and gone home, but those who remained trusted George Washington. He had driven the British out of Boston and managed to get those soldiers that survived the Redcoat onslaught at Long Island out of Brooklyn Heights via a daring, secretive, late-night escape in boats across the East River to Manhattan. The men still with him, those who had not fled after the New York debacle, would follow him where he would lead them. “We loved him,” said one after