Read Victory at Yorktown: A Novel Online

Authors: Newt Gingrich,William R. Forstchen

Tags: #War

Victory at Yorktown: A Novel (10 page)

Greene seemed unperturbed as ever, calmly surveying the stricken field where in little more than an hour the British had gained six hundred yards of ground, smashed two of his lines, and were poised to envelop the third.

“Gentlemen, it is time to concede the field,” he said calmly.

Peter looked at him in surprise. This was no defiant stand as he had witnessed at Monmouth. Did Greene really mean to withdraw?

“Colonel Wellsley, look about you. Tell me later what you think General Cornwallis has paid for this piece of useless ground.”

Stunned, Peter was not sure how to reply. The heat of battle was upon him and for the first time since joining Greene’s side on the day Major Andre was hung, he found himself doubting the moral strength of this man. All of his fighting instinct was telling him that they still outnumbered the British. Surely a single solid line could have held and dealt a sharp, even destructive blow. Yet, now orders were being passed for the men of Maryland to pull back in good order.

For a moment, Peter found himself alone on the low crest looking across the stricken field at the now advancing grenadiers, faces contoured with rage, but their advancing line disorganized, ragged, the men obviously exhausted. Then it struck Colonel Wellsley what Greene was about. The British ranks, good Lord, how thin their ranks truly were, the field behind them carpeted with hundreds of dead and wounded.

Greene was still by his side though the advancing British were now within musketry range; a number of them, sensing that the two mounted men before them were of high rank, levelled their muskets to fire.

“Come on, Wellsley,” Greene cried, leaning over to grab Peter’s reins and turn him about, urging their horse to a near gallop, “It’s one thing to die for your country; it’s another thing to die uselessly for your country.”

EVENING OF MARCH 15, 1781

“Peter, do you drink?” Greene asked, holding up an earthen jug of the ubiquitous “corn liquor” of this region.

“At times, sir.”

“Sit down and join me.”

It did surprise him that a Quaker, whose sect did not hold with hard drink, now took a long sip on the jug before offering it over to Peter, who gladly took a warming gulp. In the last few hours a cold torrential deluge had been unleashed from the heavens and all were half frozen and soaked to the bone.

“God pity the wounded lying out on that field tonight,” Greene whispered. “I’ve sent a flag of truce over to Cornwallis, suggesting we mutually offer aid to the wounded of both sides and they be exchanged without regard to numbers.”

He could not help but smile.

“I rubbed a bit of salt into his hide by saying that in the name of Christian humanity I had a surplus of medical supplies and would gladly offer what he might need to succor his numerous casualties.”

He chuckled softly, took the jug back, and indulged in a long drink.

“Most unchristian of me, my real intent, but what the hell. It made its point and actually I’d have done so if not for that damn stiff English pride that haughtily refused the offer.”

Peter said nothing, looking at the ground, not sure how to react as the thin canvas of the tent leaked steady dribbles of cold rain on both him and Greene.

“Burdens them,” Greene said, and his voice was cold now. “We can scatter our wounded back as far as Saulsbury if need be, but he has hundreds this night, so I am more than glad to see him gather them in and offer to help. Each one that lives rather than dies of exposure is one more man for him to tend to—without wagons, ambulances, and supplies.”

Peter looked up at Greene and said nothing, motioning that he would like another drink that Greene readily offered to him.

“You think we lost today, don’t you, Peter?”

“It sure looked that way,” Peter replied honestly. “Our lines, sir, if I may be so bold, were not in mutual support range. As they bowled over the first one it encouraged them to take out our second and then our third, at each point of impact the numbers even or on their side.

“Let me ask you something,” Greene retorted, fetching the jug back and taking another deep swallow.

“A battle is an agreement by both sides to face off and have it out, young sir. Neither side will ever seek battle unless he thinks he can gain something, or on those rare occasions when one side is backed into a corner from which he cannot escape. I was certainly not backed into a corner. We could have continued to fall back. But Cornwallis? He wanted this battle, he needed it after months of ballyhooing and chasing us back and forth across hundreds of miles. He wanted to finish it today.”

Greene smiled.

“If I had presented an impregnable front, outnumbering him two to one, and dug in on the heights as I recall you and some others of my staff urging the night before, do you think he would have attacked us? I wanted my opponent to think I had misdeployed, that I had made a fatal mistake, and thus lure him in. But as to our holding the ground and my risking a close-in brawl with the few solid Continental regiments under my command against half a dozen of the most elite regiments in their entire empire?”

He chuckled sadly and took another sip.

“There’s a hundred thousand square miles of land out here. Let him have it. I wanted him to attack, and attack he did. But what was my purpose today? I asked you earlier to try to count their losses—and your report?”

“Hard to say, sir, but maybe four hundred, five hundred or more on that field before you pulled me back.”

“If I hadn’t you’d of stood there, gap mouthed, or worse yet, with your blood up and tried to lead a countercharge and gotten your fool head blown off. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,” Greene whispered looking over at Peter.

“But better still, Colonel Wellsley, to live for your country and help build an even stronger one after this damn war is over.”

Peter nodded, knowing he was right.

“Victory is not always about holding a field and being the last man standing!”

He stood up, his head brushing against the canvas ceiling, triggering a cold drenching downpour of rain into their leaky tent.

“They have no tents, no wagons, no supplies, no medicines. God pity them. Yet now he has four or five hundred wounded—a quarter of his army to take a useless piece of ground. Good heavens, give him one more victory like that and he will lose everything, and he knows it now this night.”

It was as if a door was beginning to open, and Peter finally did see what this man was driving at.

“War is about winning a war, not a battle. If he wants to attack me like that again tomorrow, in this driving storm, let him. I will apparently misdeploy and again retreat. Then lure him twenty miles farther from the coast, their navy, resupply, reinforcements, and help. I am willing to bet in that miserable camp of his this evening he realizes just what he won today … nothing.”

He chuckled softly.

“Oh, he will write his dispatches claiming a great victory, but some wiser heads, either back in New York or London, will look at the butcher bill, if he reports it honestly, and realize that one or two more alleged victories such as today will mean ultimate defeat.”

Greene sat back down and patted Peter on the knee.

“We will sit back and wait for a day or two to see if he wishes to come farther into our wilderness in pursuit, but already I am sending militia round his flank to the south while trying to lure him deeper in here.”

He smiled after taking another long sip from the jug.

“Three hundred miles or more of back country, flooded roads, perhaps even ice- or snow-covered at this time of year, separate him from his base of supply at Charleston. If he now tries to turn in that direction, I will dog him every inch of the way. He can turn toward Wilmington, but what is there? No supplies or reinforcements to speak of.

“Cornwallis will eventually turn north toward the Chesapeake Bay, which is what I want.”

“Sir?”

“I think I have a grasp of his thinking. If he tries to pull back through the Carolinas it will be a concession of defeat, surrendering ground every step of the way, and doubtful if he can even gain Charleston now, after this battle today.

“There is a combined Loyalist and regular force of several thousand harrying Virginia, some of them led by that damn Benedict Arnold. Cornwallis will be drawn to them like a lodestone. They are the only viable force he can link up with, while at the same time not conceding all that he thinks he has won here in the Carolinas these last two years. He will be filled with the belief that if he can drag the war into Virginia, leaving the Carolinas while claiming to have conquered, he can retrieve what happened here. Yet realize that he is not supreme commander here in the Americas, his reports must go back to Clinton in New York and all the way back to London, a month or more away, where armchair generals and politicians will simply push pins into maps without any grasp of the true reality out here tonight in this freezing rain.

“That is why I will send you off at first light tomorrow, after you have had some rest,” he smiled, “and sobered up, to report back to General Washington, and to him alone, what you witnessed here and what my thinking is regarding future plans to finish off Cornwallis. Not just to defeat him on a battlefield, but to truly bag him, lock, stock, and barrel, and every damn lobsterback and Hessian with him.”

“I am not sure I follow you, sir,” Peter replied, now thoroughly confused.

“I will not write out a dispatch to General Washington as to the events here. There will be plenty of dispatches flying about, of course, one of them being my own official report to Congress. I want you, though, to carry back to him your personal observations of what we did here this day and my thoughts as to how I think Cornwallis will next jump. I am entrusting it to you personally, no one else to hear it, not even members of Congress. If they should somehow waylay you and demand an accounting of this battle, that I shall send to them by separate post. Oh, I am sure Granny Gates, if he finds out about your mission, will try to waylay you. So you are to change out of uniform, I’ll have someone find the uniform of a rifleman or something. I’ll dig up several pounds of hard money to see you on your way, the only note you’ll carry is an order for the military postal relay authorizing you to exchange mounts, and I expect you then to ride hard, damn hard. Get to Washington in a week at the most.”

Peter took that in. Close to five hundred miles. This was going to be one hell of a ride.

“I want your word of what happened here to Washington before all the usual rumors flood out. Convey to him it is important as well that he immediately tell our French allies what happened here, because in the future, their actions must play into this as well if we are to win a final victory as a result of today.

“Gates, his cronies, and those in Congress ready to get out of this war because it is now truly hurting their pocketbooks will call this a defeat, but I want Washington to know my thinking and my intent here. We spoke of this very concept of battle before I left West Point.

“God blessed our arms at King’s Mountain with a damn good victory before we even arrived here. Our victory at Cowpens all but destroyed Cornwallis’s ability to move rapidly and fight an irregular war. So now he is stuck with having to resort to the kind of bloody head-on confrontation that we gave him today, a damn good bloody fight. His only recourse now is either to fall back to Wilmington, and wait for a fleet to pull him out, which he will never do, for it would be a full concession of defeat, or to turn north to link up with that renegade Arnold, and somehow make all this look like a victory in his reports.”

“Will you follow him north?” Peter asked.

Greene smiled and shook his head.

“I will demonstrate south as I have already said, making it clear to Cornwallis that if he should try to regain Charleston he will have to fight every inch of the way, burdened with hundreds of wounded and no supplies. I want him to go north, to reinforce Arnold, perhaps even think he is winning there, while I retake the Carolinas and Georgia that he perforce must abandon.”

Greene smiled.

“Convey to General Washington what I have told you and to him only. Cornwallis moves into Virginia thinking to secure that state now, but with God’s good grace, come summer or fall, General Washington, perhaps even with the support of our supposed French allies, can move into Virginia, join forces with Lafayette who is opposing Arnold, pin Cornwallis against the Chesapeake, and finish him.

“Achieve that,” Greene said excitedly, “and the entire British designs for the South collapse. Collapse those designs that they can at least win back some of their former colonies, then broker a temporary peace, and they will be forced to concede the whole thing. They know they can never conquer New England without garrisoning every city and village with an additional fifty thousand men. With New England holding and New York, too, once outside the city, then Jersey and Pennsylvania will hold out. Their last remaining hope was to split us off and I think, young sir, that we just might have dashed those hopes today. I hope you do not think me full of hubris, but do report clearly to General Washington my thoughts, that we could be on the verge of winning this war if he can take the gamble I am suggesting.”

Greene looked at Peter, eyes filled with fire and belief.

“Get a good night’s rest, Peter. I want you off before dawn. I’ll roust out a good mount for you and an escort of several of Dan’s men to ride with you, at least as far as Wilmington, Delaware.”

Peter left Greene in a state of confusion. He was calling what looked to be a defeat a victory. He had laid out a plan that would cover hundreds of miles of marching even if Washington should see a hope in this. Either they were all mad, or maybe, just maybe, there was a real hope of ending this war, after so many bloody years of stalemate that would lead to inevitable victory.

 

Four

ON THE POSTAL ROAD, TEN MILES SOUTH OF PHILADELPHIA

MARCH 20, 1781

Peter Wellsley, dressed not in formal uniform but instead in the brown hunting frock and leather breeches of a Virginia rifleman, had been in the saddle nonstop for over four days, from the battlefield of Guilford to here. As ordered by Greene he traveled in secret, to report only to General Washington; other couriers riding at a somewhat slower pace would carry official word to Congress of events in North Carolina.

Other books

The Widow's Friend by Dave Stone, Callii Wilson
Poison Tree by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes
Again the Magic by Lisa Kleypas
Phoenix Without Ashes by Edward Bryant, Harlan Ellison
Vintage Attraction by Charles Blackstone
Dark Seeker by Taryn Browning
The Calendar Brides by Baird, Ginny


readsbookonline.com Copyright 2016 - 2024