The Crossing Read Online Free PDF Page B

ignoring the fact that most of them were of his own faith. And it is also said that the Americans fired their muskets and gave the colonial equivalent of a Bronx cheer to the kilted Highlanders. But it is more probable that the entire army was safely across before Cornwallis reached the river bank, even though Cornwallis had marched his men on the double for five hours once he finally realized that the “old fox,” as they had begun to call the stubborn Virginian, had dug up something larger than river skiffs.
    Too slow and too late, though Cornwallis understood it not at all. If he had come on five hours earlier, he could have pinned Washington and the dying army to the Jersey bank, and there, the river behind them, the fierce Highlanders and Hessians in front of them, the war might have been over.
    But from Cornwallis’s point of view, it was already finished. The sight of the Continental army in full flight down the road from Fort Lee to Hackensack would linger long with the British officers, and one might think of them, sitting their horses on the bank of the Delaware River in the early winter sunset and saying, good riddance to bad rubbish, for no army was left, no threat and surely no hope for the rebel cause.
    And they might have said all this with reason, for safe across the river, able to breathe deeply and slowly for the first time in four months of defeat and flight, General Washington took stock of what he had rescued out of disaster:
    Four months ago, he had had twenty thousand men—and better, all of them healthy enough to march and fight.
    Now he had somewhat over six thousand men by count. But of the six thousand, almost seven hundred were unable to walk, so sick from disease and wounds that they had to ride in carts or be carried by their comrades; and a thousand more were ambulatory ill, differing from the stretcher cases only in that they could still drag their sick bodies with no more help than a crutch or a comrade’s arm.
    A hundred miles to the north of him, about a thousand of his men were under the leadership of General Horatio Gates. Washington had left Gates with seven depleted regiments to guard the Hudson River Valley for a while. But then when he needed those men, Gates ignored him, pretended not to receive his messages and would not come to him. And somewhere in western New Jersey was another part of his army, some two thousand men under the leadership of General Charles Lee. And Lee too had disappeared with his army and ignored messages, and might well have been destroyed for all that Washington knew. Both these sections were under the leadership of professional British officers, who had deserted the British for whatever gain or riches or fame might lie with the American cause.
    But Washington had no real hope on December 7 that these two bodies of men could elude the British forces on the Jersey side of the Delaware River. He had no other hope than the ragged, beaten army he still led.

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    BUT WHEN WASHINGTON AWAKENED, the following morning, after a few hours of sleep, it was to the friendly sound of church bells tolling in a place where his shattered army would be sheltered and protected. New York and New Jersey had been a jungle, both colonies torn by inner strife and often by what amounted to civil war. There were whole counties in New York and New Jersey that belonged to the Tories, where rebel families had been rooted and driven out, tarred and feathered and sometimes shot or hanged. Bands of Tories conducted their own warfare with bands of rebels, and every fence or tree could hold a friend or an enemy or highwaymen and bandits who were both.
    Unlike New England, both Jersey and New York had been in large measure parceled out by the Crown in big estates, great manors of many thousands of acres. Bucks County in Pennsylvania was something else entirely. Originally explored by the Dutch, who only established a few trading posts, it was first settled by Swedes, who