The Glorious Cause - Jeff Shaara [249]
For two years he had survived, had stopped wondering why, his mind stripped clean by the unending horrors. He had one piece of good fortune, his chains were fastened to the bulkhead near one of the high portholes. If he had the strength to pull himself upright, he could see the sunsets, like so many blazing torches settling low over the city, and he had learned to savor every moment, every piece of the fading light. For many months his mind had held away the fear, but time was the enemy, too many nights and too many awful sounds. Now, the darkness brought the madness, the voices and cries holding him frozen, his exhausted mind giving way to the numbing fear, his eyes fighting to see the beasts who made such sounds. At first he had suffered the darkness knowing that the sounds came only from the men whose chains tortured their wounds, or whose sickness had poisoned their sanity. But after two years, his fragile hold on his own sanity had loosened, the voices of the suffering men inseparable from the voices now rising in his own mind.
With each dawn, the demons grew quiet, and the sounds became the voices of the men, so many so close to him, the slow agony of sick minds praying for death. He would not succumb, would pull himself up to the porthole, escape to the peaceful river. On the clear mornings, the river would come alive with the bits of reflection, the sunlight tickling the surface. He had long imagined escape, a dream made real for this one moment, the rising sunlight pulling him out away from the ship like some blessed wave, carrying him over to the city, beyond, his home in New Jersey. But there had been no escape, even for the men who had slipped their chains, bolts ripped from the rotting decks beneath them. Some found the strength to fight, would strike out at the soldiers who brought them food. It was a desperate foolishness that brought bayonets into the hatches, the guards firing randomly into the mass of prisoners. Worse, it took away the food, and for a day or more, nothing would come.
He had learned the skills of the survivor, knew when to reach for the food, knew that many of the men around him were too weak to make the effort. The food would come in scattered heaps, raw, sour pork, hard bread crusted with mold, flour cakes infested with vermin a starving man learned to ignore. For many weeks, he had been charitable, had offered bits of his food to the men nearest him, the men who were too weak to reach for their own. But those men were long gone now, and his generosity was a memory. It was another part of the horror, that each new dawn would find so many more who had not survived the night, who would be dragged up through the hatches by cursing soldiers, corpses to be buried in the soft mud of the riverbank.
It had been the same this morning, the food already eaten, his gut in a hot turmoil, the putrid odors of new sickness rolling through the crowded deck. He had pulled himself up again, stared at the river, the homes along the far shore, had felt the flecks of sunlight opening up the small dark places in his own mind.
He did not know much of Clinton, whether one of the grand mansions was the British headquarters. He knew little of Monmouth or Brandywine, and nothing of Valley Forge. He had heard some rumors of Burgoyne’s defeat, loudly denied by the guards. If there was a war at all now, he would know only by the talk of the prisoners, the new men to take the place of so many now buried. For a while, they would have the strength, would speak of their capture, some fight in some place that had no meaning. But soon their voices would grow silent as well, the madness consuming them as it had the rest, what remained of their strength giving energy only to the beasts in the darkness.
He did not know what month it was, but the air cut