To Try Men's Souls - George Washington 1 Read Online Free PDF Page A

vista stretching to eternity. Most of the English soldiers he knew in the last war had found the dark forests, the wilderness, disorienting, frightful even. They longed to return to England, its ordered fields, well-tended lanes, and teeming cities.
    That was a difference between us so profound. Beyond the issues of the rights of free Englishmen, defined now as Americans, therewas something deeper, harder to define, and the men who had just marched past him, echoing his own youth, perhaps symbolized it.
    Beyond the Ohio he had explored in his youth there was the Mississippi. The few he knew who had seen it said the Ohio was merely a brook by comparison. And beyond that the Missouri, and beyond that river there were vague distant places that kings in Europe claimed were theirs but had never seen, and would trade back and forth as lines on a map, and mountains that supposedly dwarfed the Alps.
    England could no longer rule this land; Englanders had no sense of it as we who were born to it did. They could never comprehend it unless they had trekked it for months at a time as he had. There was a time long ago when he had longed to travel to England, the motherland as some still called it, even invited there by comrades of old with whom he had served in the war against the French. But he knew now he never would, unless it was in chains to face a hanging. He grimaced at the thought, remembering what Ben Franklin had said about hanging together or hanging separately for what they now did. No, not the rope if we lose this night; they will not take me alive, and I will never surrender.
     
    He turned to look back at the waters of the Delaware. Dark, foreboding. He knew those gathered nearby were waiting, most likely praying that he would end what they thought of as this mad venture. Knox had indeed said it outright earlier in the day with his booming voice, though his artillery chief did not know he was listening.
    “It is one turn of the cards tonight, gentlemen,” Knox had said solemnly when he thought his General was beyond earshot, “and if trumped, it is the end for all of us.”
    As the skies lowered and more and more men turned to look upward, muttering that it was going to be a blow, he could sense their wavering. But there was no turning back. The army was at a ragged end. Enlistments of all but a handful expired at the beginning of the new year, but six days off. An army once thirty thousand strong onthe day independence was proclaimed had collapsed to a pitiful frozen few. He could muster five thousand tonight. In days it might only be five hundred.
    That is why I cannot turn back, he thought, though common sense tells me that I should. My instinct tells me we have no choice. It is not for mere symbolism that I chose “victory or death” as our password for this night. It is a gamble, but it is the only gamble we can take.
     
    The plan was well-nigh impossible to execute even by a professional fighting force trained to it for years, as were the English and even more so the Hessians, the finest professional soldiers to be had in Europe.
    His army was to cross in three parts, his main force here, nine miles north of Trenton; a second, diversionary force at Bordentown, downriver from Trenton; and then, just before dawn, a third force directly below the town to block any escape by the garrison they planned to attack at first light. Even if, by some strange device, he could speak instantly to the commanders of his other two forces and monitor each step of their moves, even then such an attack at night was a challenge near to overwhelming, as he knew almost all of his staff believed.
    The men were poorly fed, many having wolfed down the three days of so-called rations within minutes after receiving the leathery beef and hardtack. The march this night would be a hard one on ice-covered roads, which by the feel of this storm would soon turn to slush and semifrozen mud. Of the five thousand reported as present, the surgeon’s