The Crossing Read Free

upon any sort of discipline as a direct threat to their honor, as they put it. Loudmouthed, foul-tongued as many of them were, they posed a constant threat to the entire structure of the new army. After the slaughter on Brooklyn Heights, they boasted no longer. Within two weeks, half of the riflemen had deserted, fleeing the camp by night for the most part—nor were they ever again to be a decisive factor in the American Revolution, although some regiments, the Bennington Rifles of Vermont and a number of Pennsylvania and Virginia regiments, performed bravely throughout the war.

[4]
    IN THE COLD, bitter reality of defeat and death, an army was born, and this is the story of their borning and of the agony that went with it—and how awful in those birth pangs was the realization of what war is and what happens to men who fight. Most of the army was very young, but in the weeks that followed the 22nd of August in 1776, their youth passed away. They became old with the aging that only the intimate knowledge of death brings. They learned that when a soldier retreats before an invader in his own land, he leaves a little bit of himself behind every step of the way. His retreat is thus limited and conditioned by death, and it has a point of no return.
    In our story, this point was the Delaware River, the natural boundary between the two rich colonies of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and it is this river that is specific in the crossing; and ours is the story of how the skinny fox hunter from Virginia and his frightened men crossed it twice.

[5]
    A WORD MUST BE SAID here about the table of organization of this Army of the Revolution led by Washington. Beginning at the bottom, there were the companies, and they were put together in a dozen different ways. Many of them were of Minutemen or Committeemen, who had been drilling on their village greens for months before the hostilities started. The drilling was fun and socially pleasant, but it did not make them into soldiers. Others were religious companies: Methodists or Presbyterians or Baptists. There were fewer of these. Then there were the lodges, Masonic companies, fellowship companies, trade companies such as fuller and cooper and ropewalker and bookbinder and many others, and then the class companies of rich men and their youngsters in beautiful tailored uniforms and, of course, there were the regular militia companies for defense against the red men and bandits and outlaws.
    A number of companies, geographically connected, as in town or county or colony, were logged together as regiments. Most of the companies were commanded by captains, who were usually assisted by one or two or five lieutenants. The number of lieutenants depended upon the size of the company—from forty to a hundred men at the beginning—and also upon how many young officers could afford saddle horses and tailored uniforms. The regiment—and all of this applies only to the first months of the war—would consist of from two to ten companies. It was commanded by a colonel, a man whose command derived from prior military experience, or from his wealth, or from his position in the community or from his education, for these were a people dedicated to education and deeply impressed by it.
    Two or five or ten regiments—again depending upon size—would be logged together as a brigade, and this would be under the command of a brigadier or brigadier general. These general officers who commanded the brigades of General Washington’s army were as unusual a group of men as this continent ever saw associated in a single effort—doctors, lawyers, merchants, college professors, teachers, professional soldiers who had left the British army to fight with the Americans, planters, builders, saintly men, drunkards, scoundrels, cheats, liars—but in their great majority men of high purpose and integrity. In other words, they were precisely the kind of collection of men such a situation as