The Glorious Cause - Jeff Shaara [152]
While Howe and many of the British officers seemed to bask in the glow of the giddy attention from their new hosts, Cornwallis had focused on housing his men, and it had not escaped him that so many of the fine homes that were available to the army had simply been abandoned by their owners.
He knew better than to mention the matter to Howe, that from the first campaigns into New Jersey, both Howe and the ministry in London had been cavalier in their expectations that so many colonists were still loyal to the crown. For so many months, throughout every campaign the British had launched onto the soil of New Jersey, and now Pennsylvania, Howe and Germain had always believed that a vast army of loyalists would emerge from their tormented hiding places and flock to the army, would provide much-needed troop strength that Howe required to crush Washington’s rebels. Instead, the Tories had been strangely silent, and beyond the occasional show of a British flag, placed hastily in a shopwindow, or some farmer who might offer a wagonload of supplies, these same loyalists had shown very little inclination to actually fight for their cause. If Howe was dismayed by the indifference of the citizens, he hid it well, continued to issue the calls to arms, as though he still believed there were vast pockets of loyalist sympathy, that great throngs of men would still gather to take up the king’s muskets as well as his flag. Lord Germain had accepted Howe’s vision with certainty, had even used those expectations as the excuse to put off Howe’s unending pleas for reinforcements, the troops who Cornwallis knew would be needed if the British were to make a quick end to the war. While some smaller units of fresh soldiers had arrived from England, they had proven to be more of an inconvenience than a blessing.
It was typical for recruits to create problems of discipline, but over the past few months, the poor quality of the new troops seemed to point to an even greater problem. Howe paid little heed to the new units, was too focused on his own strategies to make introductions to unfamiliar junior officers. But Cornwallis recognized quickly that the men who marched from the ships now were a different breed of soldier. The ministry was obviously scouring the prisons, and entire companies of men carried criminal records. Others seemed to have no history at all, their officers admitting that the recruitment drives had been such a failure, that men were being swept up into the service straight from their wretched homes in the filthy streets of the British cities. Despite all of Howe’s optimism that an army might yet emerge from the colonial countryside, the message coming from England was that under the king’s very nose, the war was becoming more and more unpopular.
It was still a mystery to him where so many of the men of Philadelphia had gone. Even if the Tories were unwilling to offer more than words to His Majesty’s cause, Cornwallis could not fathom that so many capable men from the colonial capital would accept a role in the army of the rebellion. As he made his rounds through the camps of his men, visits to the officers under his command, he studied the abandoned homes, wondering if their leaving the city might have nothing to do with loyalty to one cause or another. Perhaps the men of Philadelphia were too accustomed to the soft and pleasant life of America’s largest community to serve any cause at all. Perhaps they had simply disappeared into the countryside, and once the war had concluded, they would return to their homes and their families, prepared to serve whichever government awaited them. Regardless, the women who remained weren’t revealing anything, beyond a not-so-subtle ability to charm the officers who were occupying their homes.
He knew many of his officers were taking full advantage of the hospitality, and he would not