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1775, and I was able to read as well that they were raising a regiment of Pennsylvania men and all others who would enlist for pay, bounty and glory, to strike down the tyrant. I knew what to do and I did it, because the answers to my questions were written on my back and on my memory too.
    That is enough of Jamie Stuart to justify this narration which I will set down. He was like the other men, of whom I will also tell, and he loved them deeply and came to know them.
    May they sleep well, do I say, myself. They reached up for the stars and they made a crude key to unlock the gates of heaven. This, other men will do, and the key will become a better one; so I will not weep for them or have you weep, but only give them their due.

PART TWO
    Being an account of the death of Tommy Mahoney, and the Congress we held and the pledge we made on the eve of the New Year of 1781.

T HE FACTS which I am about to set down in a narrative to do honor to my dead comrades – for no other honor has been done to them – had a beginning somewhere; but the more I ponder the interconnection of things, the more I come to understand that the beginning is not traceable – which is all for the best: for then a spark of hope burns in my heart, and I ponder the possibility that the end is as little traceable as the beginning. And if that is the case, then I for one believe that there was a meaning and a purpose and a final chapter still to be written out in life to what we did.
    But however that may be, there must be a starting point, and for that I have chosen the death of little Tommy Mahoney, the Protestant drummer boy from Dublin town, who died on the eve of the new year of 1781, in the encampment outside of Morristown, New Jersey. I will also tell you that I choose the death of this poor, damned little lad because our first Congress of the Line followed; but there were other places for the beginning. Even before the war, there was a beginning to what we did, and even before any man there was born, and even maybe so long ago as when Christ led men not so different from ourselves, and no more poorly clothed and fed.
    It is something we know and which doctors cannot explain, that a man will not go on living if he has lost the desire to do so; and it was plain to everyone after we had marched from Totowa to Morristown that little Tommy Mahoney was not long for this earth. It was not the cold winds that blew so cruelly from the northern forests; it was not the fact that we lived on a little parched corn with never a taste of meat; it was not our nakedness, our lousiness, our sickness – for all of these things we were used to, and these things we had lived through before and had a ripe belly of, when we lay at Valley Forge. It was because we had stopped hoping, and because we were bereft and betrayed; and the little lad knew better than some of us who were old enough to be his father what the situation was. His beardless face became gray and the sparkle went out of his eyes. When he beat on his drum, it was a new rhythm, a sad and hopeless rhythm.
    I beat because my heart is breaking, his drum said.
    There was a time when such a drumbeat with such a sad and frightened rhythm would have angered us, and then some of us would have said, Twelve on his backside, that drummer lad needs. And others of us would have said, Stop your chopping dirty sticks, if that is all the kind of a tune you can beat out. And there would have been many a clip alongside the head and chin for little Tommy Mahoney as a reward for the devilish and persistent means he took of beating that drum.
    But we were changed too, along with the lad, and nobody clipped Tommy Mahoney and nobody shouted at him; for inside of us we knew that the tune he played was the truth and nothing but the truth. We had all of us, all of the men of the ten infantry regiments and one artillery regiment of the Pennsylvania Line who were marched from Totowa to Morristown to go into winter