The Glorious Cause - Jeff Shaara [338]
“You are a man of optimism, General. That is to be admired. I find I cannot avoid General Clinton’s particular mention:
It is supposed the necessary repairs of the fleet will detain us here to the fifth of October and . . . you must be sensible that unforeseen accidents may lengthen it out a day or two longer; I therefore entreat you to lose no time in letting me know your real situation.
He put the paper down, saw the same glimmer of hope on O’Hara’s face, said, “I have given the commanding general every account of our real situation. As I asked you before, General, what would you have me do? According to General Clinton we are to wait for rescue, by a great and powerful fleet that may or may not have sailed October 5. I have received no word of any movement by the French fleet, thus I cannot assume Admiral Graves has made his presence known.”
Outside, another hard blast buffeted the sides of the tent, more shouts, one man screaming. O’Hara seemed to flinch, and Cornwallis held himself tightly down on the chair, expected the tent to collapse again. O’Hara was scanning the canvas above him, and Cornwallis felt something give way inside of him, shouted, “What would you have me do?”
O’Hara seemed to cower at his volume, looked at him with stunned horror. Cornwallis felt his hands shaking, curled his fingers into hard fists. They sat in silence for a long moment, and he said, “My apologies, General.”
“Not necessary, sir. What possibilities do we face? Surely, sir, you know better than I.”
“We can attack, we can flee, or we can await our deliverance at the hands of Henry Clinton.”
“I must assume, sir, that you would choose to attack.”
OCTOBER 16, 1781
They slipped out past the British lines shortly after four in the morning, a handpicked assault force of three hundred fifty men. There could be no general advance by the army, the rebel numbers far too superior, so the target would be specific, to open a chink in the rebel armor by eliminating the effectiveness of several key artillery positions. The British soldiers were to move quickly, silently, a rapid surge into the closest French batteries. His men would be less concerned with the troops they confronted than the destruction of the French guns, one squad of men given the task of driving spikes into the fire holes, rendering the cannon useless.
The first wave accomplished its mission and immediately pushed on to the second battery. The guns were spiked again, but now, the response came, a wave of French troops that met the British advance with more force than the British had expected. The fights were brief and sharp, both sides suffering casualties. Before the sun had come up, the mission was over. By midday, the French had repaired their cannon, the big guns again hurling a steady rain of iron and fire into the British lines.
He had stayed in the tent, had long given up hope of sleep. As the brief skirmish had echoed in the darkness, there was no cause to venture out, no need to place himself in any more risk than he was in now. He would wait instead for the message to be sent back from the mission commander. But there was no courier, no dispatch, the word was brought to him by the mission commander himself, Robert Abercrombie, one of Cornwallis’ finest officers. Abercrombie had lost more than a dozen men, only inflicting minimal damage to the cannon and the troops he had encountered. To Abercrombie, it was an embarrassment. To Cornwallis, it was the outcome he had to expect. Despite every instinct that told him to push hard into the enemy in front of him, he had come to accept that his army was simply too outnumbered.
The shelling continued, the town ripped by fire, the list of casualties growing by the hour. He pulled himself up from the small chair, moved out to the opening in the tent, stared across the river. Gloucester Point was a mile away, fortified by the same good work of the engineers who had done their best around Yorktown. But Gloucester had not yet come under the siege guns, seemed for the moment to