Washington and Caesar

4

Great Bridge, Virginia, December 9, 1775

Caesar had an eye for ground and a head for tactics, and he never doubted that they would be beaten. He could see that most of the white troops, the soldiers of the Fourteenth Foot, felt the same. They were quiet, looking at the enemy entrenchments across the bridge. No one seemed to doubt that they would be ordered to storm those lines, or that even the ragged militia would be able to kill them in the long narrow defile of the bridge. Caesar couldn’t understand why they had to try, but he waited with the others in the cold morning light, where the dew was so heavy it seemed like rain. Everything was wet. He wiped his lock again, directed his file mates to do the same. Caesar was now a file leader in Corporal Peters’s section; everyone said he would be a corporal soon enough. He liked that, and he tried to look out for his own. His file consisted of Tom and Virgil; Jim was next to him at the flank of the company, a place he held by both his small size and his competence.

The handsome officer in the brown velvet coat who had read the proclamation was from the third company. Peters called him “Mr. Robinson”, and the two seemed to know each other. Caesar hadn’t thought to ask, but the man seemed a good officer and his company was the best appointed and the best drilled. Their own officer, Mr. Edgerton, was not as wealthy, and seemed more interested in books than in war. He was still in Williamsburg, down with the fever. That left King to command the company, a situation fraught with complication, as he was not invited to the meetings the white gentlemen held.

Mr. Robinson could be seen arguing vociferously with the two white officers of the regulars, a very young man and an older one. Both of them kept their voices down. King watched impassively.

“They gon’ send us ovuh the bridge fuhst!” someone commented from the rear rank.

King glared back. “So what?”

“It’s madness,” Caesar murmured from the front rank.

“Their powder might be damp. They might be so scaret they can’t shoot. Anything might happen. I done seen it at sea, boys. You don’ know what the fight will be till you in it, and then it’s too late to change you mind!”

He looked over at Caesar and nodded. “Course, it does help to have a better plan. But we ain’t doomed.”

Both men watched the movement of the militia over on the far bank. They didn’t look scared.

Mr. Robinson came up to them and ordered the sergeants to wheel the Ethiopians on to the road, so that all his men were facing him. There were only about a hundred, less than a third of the regiment. The rest had been left in Williamsburg, for reasons not stated.

“Boys, we are going to follow the Fourteenth Foot across the bridge. They are regulars and better used to standing the fire, but I expect you to follow them with a will and fire as soon as you form line on the far side. I will lead you off myself. If I fall, you must look to Mr. Cowan and your sergeants. The Fourteenth officer is Mr. Cowse. Follow him as you would me. Remember that you fight for your king, and consider that your honor is the honor of your race. Please form the battalion in a column of half-platoons formed from the right, and remind the men of how to form to the left. Carry on!”

The noncommissioned officers moved through the ranks, reminding the men of what the maneuver would be if they crossed the bridge: each half-platoon marching up to the left to form on the one beside it. It was one of dozens of maneuvers they had practiced, and Caesar thought that if he had been in command he would have made the men practice it again. Although the verbal reminder helped all but the dullest, Caesar knew that most of the men in his platoon had only the shadiest notions of marching to an incline. He shook his head. It was interesting that the regulars were going first.

It was, to some extent, his second battle, and he was much better prepared than he had been for his first, far away at home against a sudden attack of slavers. He looked to the right and left at the men in his section and platoon, and smiled a little, because he was young and such things touch the heart. He had been a leader since the swamp, and that meant that he had to wonder how many of them would die.

The regulars formed on the road ahead of them, and did it in a way they had not been taught; Caesar watched it curiously. They marched off by files from the center so that they were only two men across. Caesar couldn’t see how they would reform in a hurry, but they certainly looked crisp. Most of the men had reversed their hats and let down the back cock, so that they had a shade for their eyes; it made them look more like scarlet farmers than the usual crisp soldiers. They also talked more at the moment of battle than they did on parade. One fellow near the back turned and waved at Caesar and his men.

“See that you follow us, blackie! No shirkin’!”

Caesar remained silent as befitted a good soldier, a little ashamed that the white regular should have broken discipline, but Virgil leaned forward and shouted: “Leave some for us, lobsterback!” For some reason, the insult caused a number of the other white soldiers to turn and wave. It was an odd moment of camaraderie. Caesar wondered distantly where the white Loyalist militia was. Clearly they were less expendable than either the regulars or the blacks.

“We all gonna die,” said one man from Robinson’s company. “But I like that them white boys is gonna die first.”

And then the regular officer raised his hand, and the column began to cross the bridge.

It was far worse than Caesar had imagined, because they didn’t even get across the bridge the first time. They made it a little over halfway, and the wall of fire stopped the regulars. They took hits and slowed to a crawl, then stopped and began to fire back, sporadically. No one ran, but no one seemed to be getting any farther. Caesar didn’t even have his foot on the bridge yet. His impatience soared, sure, in his strength, that he could make a difference. After a few minutes of ineffective return fire, the regulars retreated in good order. They had lost men, and several were wounded. They were angry.

The Ethiopians were placed in front, but Robinson’s company was first, and though they did a little better, moving faster across the bridge, they too were stopped by the volume of fire from the far side. Men were killed, or maimed, and they screamed. Caesar made it on to the bridge this time, and began to hear the bullets making their whirring noise as they passed close enough to cause other men to duck. He couldn’t fire, while other men in the column seemed to be shooting at the water, or nothing at all. The smoke actually gave them a little cover.

And then they retreated again, called back by their own officers when it was clear that they weren’t going any further. Both regiments had brought back their casualties, who were now lying in rows on the dry ground well to the rear, their calls for water and the mercy of God clearly audible above the fifes of the Fourteenth Foot and the popping of musketry from the far bank. The officers had a conference and the older regular officer, his arm in a sling, led his company to the front of the column. The men stripped off their packs, loaded their muskets, and looked grim.

King pointed to a young officer and an ensign with a handful of men from the Fourteenth.

“Know what they call that, Caesar?”

“No, sir.”

“That’s a forlorn hope. Them boys is gon’ run across as fas’ as they can an’ draw fire so that the rest of that company can get across.”

Caesar watched them with wonder. The men were pulling off their coats and putting their waistbelts over their shoulders, giving all of them a faintly piratical look. The officer, barely old enough to be called a man, was whistling tunelessly and stabbing at things with his smallsword. He didn’t seem afraid, and Caesar loved him for it, because he was certainly going to die. He seemed almost happy. He was fencing with a patch of ferns, showing off his skill, and he lunged, just decapitating the nearest of the plants, then turned and caught Caesar’s eye. Caesar smiled uncertainly, and the boy smiled back, turned and trotted to the head of his men.

There was no longer any joking among the men, and the redcoats were as silent as they had been in Williamsburg on parade. When the order was given, the young officer dashed across with his little party of men on his heels, and then the rest of the Fourteenth followed at the double. Caesar couldn’t see what happened because he was in the column, but although the volume of enemy fire increased, the column didn’t slow, and suddenly Caesar could see figures in red on the ground in front of the entrenchments. He moved on to the bridge himself, and then continued to jog forward. There was a sudden crash and as it sounded like one of their volleys, he thought that perhaps the Fourteenth was across and firing. He was halfway, and the bridge was slick with blood from the men who had fallen in the first and second attempts. And the whole column slowed, but they seemed barely under fire. The enemy had a real foe to face now, he thought, and no time to waste on the bridge. The amount of blood on the bridge was a surprise. A man held about as much as a deer, it seemed.

The Fourteenth fired again, precise as on parade and fast, and then the column leapt forward for a moment and stopped, with Caesar and the front of his platoon right at the edge of the land. And just under him, his fine boots caught in the bridge, was the boy-officer, dead. His sword was gone, and one hand seemed to clutch the bank of the swampy ground.

The Fourteenth had formed well, and they were firing steadily, but both they and the entrenchments were so shrouded in smoke that neither seemed to offer any targets. The Ethiopians, whether from indiscipline or native spirit, had formed a loose line instead of the tight line of platoons they had been taught; and they were all intermixed, their ranks and files lost as the men had tried to push forward through smoke to fire their rounds. Caesar didn’t hesitate, but led his own men to the left so that the line would continue to form. Mr. Robinson was simply encouraging men to load and fire, and not trying to form them up, so Caesar ran to his flank, stopped near a man from Robinson’s company, and began to fire into the smoke.

The triumph of the rush across the bridge was shortlived. Inaccurate as the militia fire was, their superiority in numbers and the advantage of their entrenchments quickly began to tell. Caesar saw men fall around him, some hit badly enough to go down without a groan, a few unlucky ones screaming in anguish, and others, perhaps wiser, taking minor wounds and moving off quietly to the rear. The fire of the enemy never slackened, and Caesar began to doubt that they were hitting any of the rebels. He looked through the smoke and saw a regular officer go down, then stand again clutching his shoulder. He and Robinson stood together for a moment. Then Caesar’s attention was brought back to his own narrow frontage, where it was obvious that too many men were down.

They were going to break and run.

A few, mostly younger men, began to edge back, some of them lightly wounded. When they reached the water’s edge, they began to move more quickly to the bridge. Sergeant King stopped them.

“Stand still, you bastards. If’n you run, slavers will take you. Stay and fight!”

Caesar hadn’t left his spot, determined to die. He cast his musket about crisply and rammed another round down the barrel. The younger men forced themselves forward, although most seemed to lie down or kneel, and few of them were firing. The fire of the Fourteenth Foot had slackened too, and then it stopped.

“Regulars is retreating!” shouted one of the young men, hysteria plain in his voice. Caesar kicked him, hard, so that the man doubled over.

“Ethiopians!” bellowed a voice out of the smoke. “Two more rounds and we will retire. Make your shots count!” It was Mr. Robinson. He sounded old.

King was trying to form his own company. Caesar had no idea why, but the familiar voice in the smoke was giving orders that he could obey. Tom and Virgil were still with him, and he found young Jim and then Peters and then there were more men. Other men were firing sporadically.

“Everybody loaded?” A ragged volley of assent.

“Make ready!” Caesar knelt and his back foot kicked Virgil, who hadn’t moved fast enough. All around Caesar, men were moving slowly.

“Present!” Caesar tried to snap his musket down, but he could see that some of the front rank were out of place, and other muskets late.

“FIRE!”

It was not a crisp volley, but it had a sound that seemed to lift some of the soldiers out of their fear. It was easier to be shoulder to shoulder in the smoke than strung out in a skirmish line, intentional or not. Closer, they seemed invulnerable, and they could hear the voices of their leaders.

“Prime and load!” Caesar rotated sharply and reached for a cartridge, his eyes trying to pierce the gloom in front of him. He dreaded a charge by the militia, now that the regulars were gone. He sensed that the men from the other companies were slipping away as well. He could see King, standing just beyond Jim in the smoke. Then he had cast his musket about and was ramming the cartridge down the barrel. The barrel was red hot and it burned his hands, and the smoke burned his throat. He had bitten the cartridge badly and had the foul stuff on his tongue. He raised his musket to the position that showed he was loaded. As he was one of the fastest to load, he had a moment to look around him. The smoke had cleared, just a little, in a flaw of the breeze, and they were alone, the redcoats drawn up in good order on the far side and a good deal of Robinson’s company spread across the bridge in retreat.

“Make ready!” King’s voice sounded louder in the sudden sunlight. The company functioned more smoothly, the men kneeling together in the front.

“Present!” Every musket seemed to come down together. It was an amazing feeling, like being part of a great beast of war. Smoke appeared from the enemy entrenchments, and men fell. King went down with a small shriek. He lay silent, but his arms were moving. The seconds stretched on unbearably, and Caesar breathed deeply and yelled.

“FIRE!”

They fired very much as one, a crisp volley that roared their defiance.

“Mr. Peters! Sergeant is down!” Caesar yelled. He slung his musket and, with Tom and Virgil, moved to King. The man was clearly alive, although a rifle ball had gone through his cheek and there was blood everywhere. Peters began to order the men to reload, but Mr. Robinson, hatless, appeared beside him.

“Back across the bridge, boys!”

The company melted away from the center in seconds, as men fled at the best speed their legs could make. They had permission. It didn’t seem necessary to wait for orders.

The little group carrying King were almost the last, although a few men stayed to cover them with sporadic fire, and one of them died. Mr. Robinson ran ahead, and then returned to urge them on. The bridge seemed shorter going back, even with the bulk of King, and soon enough they were placing him in the line of bodies that stretched away along the dry ground above the bridge.

And then they went back to where the remnants of the company waited and simply lay down. Later that day, they marched away with their wounded and left the bridge to the victorious militia. They didn’t talk much.

Cambridge, Massachusetts, December 11, 1775

“I think we’ll keep most of those who are left,” said Lee, adjusting his sword belt and watching General Gates with a lifted eyebrow. “Does that man consciously seek to imitate a clown?”

Gates was struggling with the collar of his greatcoat, and one of its capes continued to fly up in the wind and disarrange his hat. No such thing had ever been seen to happen to General Lee. He looked up, took note of Lee’s regard, and flushed. There was little love lost between them.

Washington ignored Lee’s pettiness about Gates. “I understand that the Connecticut men are ill-received on the road.”

“I imagine their own sweethearts may spurn their charms when they arrive,” said Lee with a certain sparkle in his eye.

Washington caught the look, considered carefully if he wanted to know the means by which the Connecticut regiments had suddenly become so unpopular, and decided that he did not need to know after all. Gates had his coat under control and was striving to sit his horse in the wind like a portly hero. Most of the officers of the staff were in their finest, although much labor on powder and hair was coming to naught in the wet wind.

The Connecticut men had signed on to serve the army and the siege of Boston until December. Washington had held them a few extra days until the Massachusetts and New Hampshire militias had come in to fill his lines, but for a moment, the entire structure of the army had tottered. Now he had “long-faced” militia in the lines; but instead of leading a mutiny against the new Continental Army, the Connecticut troops were being treated like lepers by all New England. It was a satisfying reversal of fortune. Washington looked at Lee again, a man of elegant dignity, yet some subterfuge against the men of Connecticut left him with an ugly look of smug satisfaction, like a cat who has played with a mouse until it died.

“They were actually hissed when they passed Bridge’s regiment. That’s a good man, Ebenezer Bridge.”

Washington hated that look, and he spoke up. “General Lee, I would point out that these men served loyally and that it is the British, not the men of Connecticut, who constitute the enemy.”

Lee bowed his head, as he always did on being rebuked. Washington disliked the habit, and would have preferred if the man held his eye. He sometimes suspected Lee did it to hide anger.

“With all respect, sir, I will maintain that two days ago you offered to hang the lot of them as mutineers.”

Washington sat straighter in his saddle, unused to such direct rebuke, but it was, alas, true. He had been away from other men too long, was too used to the ultimate authority on his own farms. Here in the world, even as the military “master”, his staff felt free to question him. He stifled the start of anger and barked a laugh.

“So I did, Charles Lee.” He held Lee’s eye, and Lee smiled, his whole face illuminated for a moment. When the man smiled, it was like a clear day-enough to make anyone like him. But he rarely smiled.

The perfect distraction was just turning from the Mansfield road. It was a coach pulled by six matched horses and surrounded by a company of gentlemen led by the staff’s own Colonel Baylor. They all looked splendid as the coach and escort dashed up the last of the green and rolled to a stop opposite the gathered staff.

Washington smiled thinly, then made a comment to Lee over the confusion.

“If Knox’s guns were to arrive, I think my day would be perfect.”

His wife, Mrs. Horatio Gates, and a seemingly endless stream of Virginia travelers emerged from the coach. Lee bowed in the saddle to each lady as she emerged. None of them was likely to be Mrs. Lee, and Washington thought inconsequentially how difficult it would be if Mrs. Lee were to arrive, as her place was so clearly occupied by a local woman General Lee took no care to hide. But then Martha was there, and he dismounted to smile down at her and bow. She curtsied as if to open a dance, the essence of good breeding, and her eyes sparkled.

“Did I just hear myself compared to Colonel Knox’s guns?”

Washington always forgot what she was like, and he bowed again to hide his usual confusion.

“I am so happy to hear myself ranked with an event that must be important to our whole continent.” But she smiled, and began to introduce him to the other ladies, and in moments, they had the making of the first celebration most of them had known since they joined the army.

On board HMS Amazon, Chesapeake Bay, December 21, 1775

“I nevuh thought we’d get beat so bad.”

“I never thought.”

“I never thought. Right enough. I’d wager we didn’t kill a one.”

“Nor did we. Slave came in last night, into Edgerton’s company. Said the same.”

Caesar looked at the older man, his hands still moving through the process of reassembling his lock. It was perfectly clean, and he had stripped it twice. It was as if the action of seeing to his musket had acquired a religious purpose to Caesar.

Peters looked out over the flat water that stank with the filth of three hundred seamen and two hundred soldiers. The cold winter weather was probably all that kept them alive, cramped as they were. The ship remained at her moorings just off the land, and every item that went over the side stayed there, a trash heap and a dunghill combined into a great wet midden just at the surface of the water, getting fouler every day they spent on board. Ten days had passed since the “battle”.

“We lost a mort of men.”

“Yes. So did the Fourteenth. More than we.”

“For nothing!”

“Caesar, nothing is for nothing.”

The younger man glared out, thinking of Sergeant King falling wounded, of the twenty men left dead or carried away only to die later.

“Watch yer ‘ead, mate.” A sailor swung by on the ratlines, walking the top of the taffrail above them rather than along the crowded deck. He was blacking the rigging as he went, touching up spots where birds and salt had ruined the perfect black of the tarred lines. Caesar nodded, always pleased when offered courtesy, but the man was gone to his next spot of gull white. The Amazon was not a hard ship, but she was smart, and her captain didn’t leave a lot of leeway because his decks were full of soldiers. The sailors’ relative cleanliness and security was contrasted all too often with the soldiers’ filth.

Caesar dreaded asking the question, but Peters was likely to move off now. He often did when Caesar complained about the battle or about the conditions; he didn’t care to listen to matters he could not change. Caesar had his measure, and it was high. He was not the natural leader that King had been, but his education and the power of his words, his air of manners and quiet confidence were more than enough to fill the sergeant’s shoes. Other companies had done worse, losing leaders and having no one to fill their gap. Caesar knew he had been suggested for sergeant’s rank in Mr. Robinson’s company. He knew that Peters had turned it down.

“Why’d you tell them I wasn’ ready to be sergeant?”

“You are not.” Peters smiled. “No more am I, Caesar. But you cannot read or write, and the duties do require that you keep accounts, figure, and write returns.”

Writing. It hadn’t occurred to him; he had built an ugly structure of his own failings, but never thought it might be something as simple.

“Can you teach me to write, sir?”

“I’m quite certain I can, if you place the same emphasis on’t that you do on that musket. Would you care to begin this evening?”

“Yes, sir!”

“Excellent. Do you know the Bible at all, Caesar?”

“I can’t say that I do, sir. I’ve heard it read, oft enough. It be a fine book an’ all. But I don’ know it like some.”

“Pity, as knowing it by heart can speed a man’s learning. Still, I reckon you’ve heard enough for it, once you start. Know your letters?”

“No.”

Peters nodded. “Well, you are in for a long and difficult experience, my friend. Well worth the effort.”

“When I can read, will you recommend me for sergeant?”

“When you can read, you’ll be a better soldier than I. Which is to say, yes.”

Peters moved away, off to his other corporal to see how he fared.

Virgil sat on the hatch cover sewing himself a jacket. None of them had uniforms, but Tom and Jim had returned to the ship after foraging ashore with the regulars with a good piece of brown woolen cloth. Virgil considered himself a fair hand with a needle as he had tailored a little on his plantation. Winter was cold on men in shirts and linen jackets made from sails past their prime; Caesar longed for a woolen jacket. He nodded at Virgil to get his attention, then at his own equipment in a neat pile under the bulwark by a gun. Virgil nodded. There were light-fingered men aboard; it didn’t do to leave your belongings alone.

Caesar went up toward the bow where the white soldiers were. They had better equipment and more of everything, so that he always looked at them jealously, but they were either amused or tolerant of a black soldier who sought to emulate their standards. Most were friendly; a few were bad. Tommy Steele, a big red-headed man, called the bad ones “awkward sods” in a voice that Caesar couldn’t emulate. Steele was friendly. Caesar sought him out, waited patiently at his elbow while the man finished talking to another. Caesar couldn’t bring himself to interrupt a white man’s conversation-a slave habit that he recognized but had yet to overcome.

“Good day, there.”

“Mr. Steele, sir. May I use your black ball?”

“Och, Caesar, don’t you call me Mr. Steele or ma mates’ll think I’m comin’ it a bit high. Of course you can use ma black ball. Why don’t I jus’ get you one? Have a penny?”

Caesar thought about it for a moment and produced a penny. He wasn’t sure of the man, and a penny was a penny, but it seemed worth the risk.

“Back in a flash, mate.” The soldier slipped off down a companionway into the bowels of the ship. He was gone so long that Caesar, who didn’t want to doubt him, began to, and figured his penny lost and his fledgling friendship as well. He had seen worse on board. Some men couldn’t stand the black soldiers and made that all too clear. But then Steele appeared at his elbow.

“Done me a favor, really. Here you go. Mind the wax. No, really, I paid the sergeant a penny for it an’ told him I lost mine. Now I’m the diligent soldier of the world, he says, paying good drink money for a new black ball.”

Caesar took the hard wax ball gingerly. If the stuff came off on your hands, it was like to spoil white leather or good linen. He already had an embarrassing tar stain on his jacket.

“Thank you, Mr. Steele.”

“Think nothin’ of it, mate. Now, seeing as how you’ve done me a good turn here, I have a little tobacco I might share with a needy man.”

Caesar looked at him, trying not to appear suspicious.

“Go on, then. I don’t want nothin’ for it. Do you have a tin?”

Caesar shook his head, but he reached into his hat and took out the stub of a clay pipe, broken so often that the bowl had less than an inch of stem. Steele pulled some tobacco off a hank, rubbed it between his hands and pushed it into Caesar’s pipe.

Someone behind him among the men of the Fourteenth made a comment about black balls and black boys. It was the sort of thing that Caesar had expected for some time. He hunched his shoulders and ignored it. Steele looked up, made a face over Caesar’s shoulder, and finished packing the pipe.

“Must be hard as sin being a blackamoor,” he said quietly. “I’m a Borderer in an English regiment, an’ that’s nae walk in a country lane.”

Caesar was embarrassed by such talk. He didn’t know what a Borderer was, didn’t want to be a blackamoor. But he decided to push a little. The pipe was packed, and he could escape quickly enough if he had to.

“What’s a Borderer, then?”

“A Borderer is a natural thief, a lazy man who lies in wait to steal and kill and never does an honest day’s work as long as he lives.” The man who spoke had an educated voice, like Peters, but he was white, and an officer in the blue coat of the navy.

Steele’s face was expressionless. It was unusual for an officer to intrude on any conversation of the men; usually the officers seemed as if they were on a different vessel. Steele was standing straighter, almost at attention. The officer looked at both of them and the look on his face was at odds with the harshness of his opinion.

“What’s your name, soldier?”

“Steele, sir.”

The man nodded. “I’m a Nixon,” he said as he turned and climbed the ladder to the quarterdeck. Caesar watched him go uneasily, aware that Steele had thought himself in very great danger for a moment and now was fairly sighing with relief.

“What’s a Nixon, then?”

“He’s from the Borders himself, the gentleman. Not that my da’ would have been strong on Nixons, mind. But here, they seem like brothers.”

Caesar gathered, then, that Borderers were a tribe of the British, which pleased him, as making them all seem a little more familiar. He nodded and waved his pipe.

“My thanks, Mr. Steele.”

“Just Tom. I forget yours…Pompey?”

“Caesar.” Mortified.

“Sorry. Your lot sound like a play-Virgil this and Caesar that. Along wi’ ya then, an’ have your wee smoke.”

“Thanks, Tom.”

He walked back down the deck to his spot, still empty through the power of Virgil’s glare, and settled his back against Tom’s.

“I’ve a full pipe,” he said.

Heads turned all around. Since they had been on the ships, tobacco had become a rarity among the men, especially the blacks. Caesar scarcely missed it, but Tom did, and some of the other men in his section. Mr. Edgerton’s man Tonny was one, a regular smoker. They gathered round, and Tom took out his tinder kit and, crouching by a gun, got a spark into his char and lit the pipe. The sweet smoke fought the stench over the side, and even the cold, for a few minutes.

“Next time, pack it in my pipe.”

“I didn’t have it handy.” Caesar, getting better at these exchanges, smiled broadly. “If’n you don’ like it, don’ be smokin’ it!”

Virgil’s coat was beginning to take shape; he pulled it on over his shirt, the left sleeve on and the right at his feet. It fit snugly. He hopped down off his grating and reached out for the pipe and took a long drag, rolling the smoke slowly out of his nostrils. Several of the sailors admired the jacket, but they kept their distance. Virgil nodded at them; one smiled and one frowned.

It was that sort of ship.

Caesar leaned his head against the gun behind him and began to black the cover of his cartridge box, thinking of the future.

Cambridge, Massachusetts, January 6, 1776

“I protest, sir! That was my plan, a plan that required subtlety and decision, two properties you will not find in General Sullivan.”

“General Lee!”

“Sir, I appeal to your sense of fairness. Was that not to have been my command? Was it not my plan? Is there to be no glory in this war for me at all?”

“General Lee, this war is not about personal glory. This is a war fought against our mother country to free ourselves from the chains of tyranny. Every man can only contribute…”

“Spare me, sir. You are the commander in chief. You may direct or subordinate every action. I am on your staff; I have no regiment of my own, and command precious little respect outside this headquarters that I have not slaved like an African to get, riding the lines and browbeating adjutants. I have spent weeks in Rhode Island trying to clear the ground of Loyalists and sympathizers so that we don’t find ourselves outflanked by a fleet in Newport, and I return to find that the one command I might have expected on the actual field of battle has been given to an incompetent bungler who traipsed across the ice in full view of their sentries. I have no right to make this complaint and that I will allow. I admit freely that the good of the service should come first, but a man is allowed a little vainglory, I think, and…”

“Calm yourself, General.” Washington took a deep breath, distressed at a decision that he had suspected was poor from the start, and doubly distressed that this clash was taking place in front of the staff. He couldn’t apologize. To do so would injure the integrity of the office he held. But he must make amends; he had been wrong, and Sullivan had botched the attempt. “I expect more of you than this shouting. Our people are about.”

Lee glared, a cat with his back up. He had done yeoman work in Rhode Island-nasty work at the ugly junction where intelligence and politics met-a job no one else had wanted. Washington was again conscious that he had wronged the man, and wounded that he seemed so often to wrong him. There was something about Lee that lent itself to wrong, or a certain injured dignity that seemed the only dignity the man could muster.

Which didn’t change the fact that he was a good soldier, and that he and Gates were the only two men approaching professionals in his army. They were not easy men. Washington suspected that each felt he might have had the command. They were not easy men again because they had difficult ways; all three of them were accustomed more to being obeyed than to obeying. That had been Martha’s phrase. Perhaps Gates resented it as much as Lee; the thought made Washington wince. He wanted a band of brothers like Henry V. He seemed to be leading a band of squabblers, and there was a fair share of blame with his own name on it.

“General Lee, I will see to it that you have the next important active command. There is some talk of a southern command in our recent letters with Congress. I will see that you have it, if Congress will agree. Or the command at New York.” This last in an undertone.

He heard the intake of breath. They all wanted independent commands. He wanted a united army that would serve more than six weeks.

“General Greene?”

“I have a new set of returns with new numbers on the regiments, sir. They are lower, as we feared.”

“Whose returns?”

“General Sullivan’s. He is not here to defend himself.”

Lee shook his head, rubbed his face with his hands, and looked up.

“How low?”

“Possibly below ten thousand, although word of the king’s proclamation has brought a fair number of recruits.”

Lee shook his head again, weary disdain mixed with none-too-secret elation on his narrow features.

“The rumor in Rhode Island among the Loyalists is that the British will stab at New York.”

Washington looked keenly at the maps in front of him. It was reflex, really; he had looked over the terrain a hundred times. An attack on New York was the only logical step: it was full of men loyal to the Crown; it lay virtually undefended; it had a marvelous anchorage for the Royal Navy.

“They are certainly preparing to leave Boston. I think we can consider the siege victorious.”

Washington glowered at Greene, his eyebrows lowering a fraction. “No talk of victory until we have triumphed, gentlemen. I, too, have heard that they are readying a fleet and boats. We must pray it is not for a repeat of Breed’s Hill. We don’t have the lines to stop them tomorrow if they come.”

“I don’t think they want to.” Lee was more relaxed. “I think my friend Burgoyne has written off Massachusetts Colony. It may be punished later; it may see raids. But the Boston garrison knows they have only foes here. They will go and find greener pastures, like Rhode Island or New York.”

“And you think the most likely thrust is New York.”

“Yes, sir, I do.”

Washington looked around the table at his staff. Gates, unruffled by the tempers shown, looked as if his thoughts were elsewhere; he often did, but they never were. The others were still a little distanced by Lee’s outburst, but every face was attentive. They were not scribbling figures to balance the latest returns, which was too often the case.

“New York must be defended. I would like a letter drafted to Congress asking for permission to raise troops and appoint martial authority for that defense.”

“Sir,” Lee was deferential, but firm. His use of sir had acquired a new proportion, as if it was a substitute for “my lord”. “You do not need the authority of Congress to place New York under defense. Congress made you commander in chief of the entire continent.”

Washington smiled a little, a smile that didn’t show his teeth. How much he would like to believe that he could exercise such powers! He was satisfied, if somewhat distantly, that every face around the table seemed to reflect approbation for Lee’s words. They were loyal to him, even if fractious among themselves. He no sooner felt the thought than he banished it. If he would not allow Lee his vainglory, no less could he allow himself a hope of dominion.

“I am not sure of that. Congress is our master, Charles; we must be wise in choosing our displays of authority.” It was said softly; every man in the room could hear it, but said so, Lee would take it as a personal aside.

“I honor that, sir. I honor it deeply. But I have the greatest reason to believe, from the most authentic intelligence, that the best members of Congress expect that you would take much upon yourself, as referring everything to them is, in fact, defeating the project.”

Tempted as he was to ask after the “best members of Congress”, Washington was pleased, but he controlled it as efficiently as he controlled his anger on other occasions.

“Draft the letter regardless, and show it to me later. General Lee, draw up a plan for the defense of New York. If Congress accepts, it shall be your command.”

Perhaps Gates flinched; perhaps Greene was jealous. Sullivan was absent. But soon enough, he was going to have to send them, every one, away to lead armies. The war would only broaden. Perhaps Canada would fall; perhaps Great Britain would see sense. Neither seemed likely. He had begun to think it would be a long war, and even as he reached to grasp his first victory, he had begun to feel his own monumental confidence slipping.

Along the Chesapeake, Virginia, January 28, 1776

As soon as the governor decided that the peninsula might be suitable for a winter camp, he ordered it scouted. Although the marines were excellent soldiers, they knew nothing of the terrain, and the word came down to the Loyalists, black and white, that scouts were wanted to learn the ground. Many of the Ethiopians volunteered, but Caesar and Jim were taken. They were issued two pistols apiece and sharp knives, a tarpaulin of oiled canvas and a haversack of naval rations.

The next morning, the two of them were taken ashore with a midshipman from one of the Royal Navy ships that accompanied the governor. Mr. Harding was nominally in charge and had the knack of making maps, but his small size and urchin’s face did nothing to inspire Caesar’s confidence. But he proved reasonable enough once they were ashore.

“Captain said I should listen to you, sir,” he said with a civil nod to Caesar. In the boat, the boy hadn’t even looked at him. Caesar felt as if he had become a different person on the beach. Behind Caesar, the sailors splashed in the cold water as the bow oars pushed the keel of the big boat free of the sand. Their mates pulled them aboard, their bare legs flashing in the weak sun, and then the oars were out. With surprising speed, the boat began to grow smaller.

“Best be getting inland, sir,” said Caesar. He ended the sentence more kindly than he started it; the enormity of being alone on an enemy beach was just coming to the midshipman. He looked a little gray.

Jim bounded ahead. He was gone into the woodline at the edge of the beach in a second, and Caesar wondered if he was going to have to call Jim back like a runaway puppy. The thought of two days ashore with two boys struck him as less like scouting than minding children. He took a moment at the edge of the beach to gather a pile of driftwood for a fire. Then he pulled a big sheet of old bark over his pile. He thought it looked like rain and he meant to camp near the beach.

Jim found a big meadow with a stream just to the east of their landing spot. Caesar thought it would make a good camp, screened by trees from the bay and by deep woods from the land. There was a small cabin site, as if the ground had been cleared for a farm that had never succeeded.

They made their way across the small peninsula in less than three hours by the mid’s watch. They crossed one track, a pair of paths with a low hump of grass between. Mr. Harding walked along it and came back. “No horse on this path for some time,” he said cautiously.

“We can come back to it, if’n you like,” said Caesar.

“Aye, that would be best.” He made a mark on his paper and they carried on, walking easily between the big trees on either side. Caesar listened to the white boy counting his paces.

Jim went ahead, mostly. He very quickly caught the habit and the intention of counting his paces, and he would come back with a bound, reporting the distance he had traveled. He kept going down to the shore. Caesar, watching Mr. Harding, noted that the mid already had the whole coast of the peninsula drawn in great detail, and that every time Jim came loping back, he’d question him until he could determine where on the coast Jim had emerged. Caesar watched little lines drawn across the paper, began to see in his head how the lines corresponded to places they had been. The only maps he’d seen were decorations on walls in rich houses. He understood how a map could show all of Jamaica, or all of Virginia. This was the first time that he or Jim had seen a map made small enough to show something on a more human scale. He liked it, but his enthusiasm was nothing next to Jim’s.

“That’s the trick!” Jim said on one of his returns. He was perspiring, despite the cool air, but he leaned down close to the white boy, watching the pencil move along a straightedge. The white boy was clearly proud of his accomplishment, and he explained to Jim as he went how he measured degrees with his pocket theodolite, how even Jim’s forays to the beach were along measured lines, and the paces made for distances, so that they slowly covered the ground.

“Like a net,” said Jim. “It’s like laying a net of us over the ground. We’ the cords o’ the net.”

Mr. Harding considered this for a moment. It didn’t sound mathematical enough to suit him. His mathematical knowledge was hard won, and he didn’t wish to belittle its power.

“It’s like it, I suppose.” The white boy couldn’t remain indifferent, however. Jim’s enthusiasm was infectious, and both boys began to work well together.

Caesar understood well enough, and he relegated himself to guard and make a little coffee when they stopped in the afternoon. The boys drank the coffee, but they were burning to return to the track in the woods and follow it. They saw the whole expedition as adventure. Caesar was oppressed by the emptiness of the peninsula and the constant fear of capture, with the added responsibility of the two boys.

After coffee, he buried his fire and they walked back to the track. Jim loped off, following the track toward the sea. Caesar took out his pipe and filled it. He had little tobacco left and few pennies with which to buy more. He’d saved a coal from his coffee fire and he used it to light the pipe. Harding looked over at him and Caesar held out the pipe.

The boy shook his head. “Mids aren’t allowed to smoke.”

Caesar thought about that, about all the rules they lived with. Harding could give him orders, but he couldn’t smoke. That had some humor to it. Caesar looked at the locks of his pistols and changed the prime out of the little horn from his bag. He looked at the sky.

“I think we’re going to have rain,” he said.

The white boy nodded.

Jim came running back, his energy still a tangible thing.

“Four hundred fifty-five each way. Curves to the north. Nice even curve, I think.”

Harding took a note. Then he drew on his sketch. “Like that?”

“Yessuh.”

Caesar didn’t like the track. “I think it’s a plantation track to the beach for loading.”

“Let’s go find the plantation, then,” said Harding cheerfully, and they were off.

An hour later, their packs were feeling heavy and the rain was imminent. Indeed, the first cold drops had already fallen around them in spurts, as if the sky was indecisive. The track had crossed two fence lines, and they could see fields in the middle distance. Darkness was not far away.

“We need a camp.”

“We’re a long way from the beach,” said Caesar. “I had thought to camp on the beach, where the boat could see a signal.”

The two boys looked at him. “It’s a long way back,” said Jim.

“An hour.”

“We’ll be wet through by then.” Harding was less cocksure, now. He was tired. “And I want to see the plantation, get a sketch of the house. The governor will want to know. We’re here.”

“If we camp here, we’re a damn sight surer of gettin’ caught, suh. Sir.” Caesar tried to look for alternatives. Getting the boys back to the beach, building them a shelter, then coming back here? It seemed possible.

“We’ll make camp here.”

“No fire then,” said Caesar. Jim nodded. Harding seemed surprised when Jim joined Caesar and looked at him reproachfully. Caesar took both of them by the sleeve and pulled them off the little track and into the shadow of some trees.

“We ah’ standin’ in the open. We are standing in the open.”

Jim looked at Harding apologetically. “We been hunted in ground like this. Smell of a fire carries a long way. Suh.”

Harding looked like he was going to be angry, then thought better of it. “You’re the scouts. I want to see that plantation. What do we do?”

“We go to the plantation, quick as we can. Then we go back to the beach to camp. That’s what’s safe.” Caesar was already looking at the ground between his stand of trees and the fields. “Don’t want none of the slaves there to see us.”

“Won’t they protect you?”

“Maybe. Maybe not, too. An’ if’n they see you, might be different.”

“I’m willing to take the risk, Mr. Caesar.”

Caesar stopped watching the fields and turned back to face Harding. The boy looked earnest.

“Mr. Harding, if’n you get took here, you’ll be a prisoner for a few weeks, kept in houses by folk. If’n Jim or me gets took, we’ll be hung up dead on the spot, or made slaves. I don’ wan’ you to think we’re afeared, but I wan’ you to know what you ah’ askin’ us to risk to take a look at that house.”

The rain began in earnest.

“I’ll go alone, then,” said the white boy. “I’m sorry. I had forgotten.”

“That’s wrong, too. Jim an’ me’ll go. You stay here and stay dry an’ keep our packs.”

“But you said…”

Jim sank down on his haunches next to Harding. “We’ good at this, suh. We’ll take a little peek an’ be back in no time.”

Harding looked miserable. “I’m in command. I should go.”

Caesar felt himself admiring the boy a little. “Good for you,” he said. “But you got to know we can do this bettuh…better than you.”

He didn’t wait to argue with the boy. The boy spoke quietly to Jim and handed him something. Jim nodded. He and Jim checked their pistols again and moved off across the ground, now wet. They walked up some dead ground to a creek bed, and then followed the creek bed through a few fields until Jim, crawling up the bank, could see the chimneys of a big house. Caesar worked his way farther along the bank and then came up himself.

The plantation was a fine one, although small. The main house was solid brick, with five large windows on the top floor front over four windows and an elegant entrance with a fanlight. Brick outbuildings stood to the right and left. Even in the gray of winter’s evening, the building had some warmth to it, and the lit windows glowed orange as if inviting cold men to come inside and be warmed.

Behind the warm house lay the slave quarters, two rows of dark huts. None of them had an orange glow to them. Without servants to keep fires going all day, the fires went out on cold afternoons, and the huts were always cold.

A proper road ran from the front of the house off to the north. A great stand of trees grew at the northern edge of the fields, which stretched for half a mile. Caesar nodded to himself. The plantation was too far inland to make a good headquarters, but it was too close to ignore. He understood that much. He crawled back to Jim and found Jim sketching the positions of the buildings. His heavy, clumsy strokes were very different from Harding’s, but his eye was sure and the heavy square of the house was proportionate to the two barns and rows of slave cabins.

Caesar pointed at the nearest shed, an openwork log barn with a shingle roof. “Tobacco barn,” he whispered.

Jim nodded.

Caesar mimed smoking. “Gonna steal some.”

Jim shook his head in exasperation.

“Mistuh Hardin’ is waiting for us. You jus’ tol’ him not to take risks.”

Caesar crawled over the top of the bank and began to run toward the barn. Jim went back to his drawing, but now he couldn’t do it. He was tense. He wanted to follow Caesar, but thought that only increased the risk. He could see slaves working in the fields just beyond the barn, and he could hear a white voice, probably an overseer, shouting in the middle distance.

Then he saw Caesar at the side of the barn, and then slipping into it, a dark shadow against the near dark of the barn. Then Caesar was out again, and running toward him, his legs pumping. Jim wondered at how fast he was. He’d never seen anyone run as fast as Caesar. In a moment, the man was over the edge of the bank and down beside him. The rain was coming faster. Caesar had two armfuls of tobacco leaf, dry and pungent, and the sweet, dry smell filled the air.

“You done drawing?”

“As good as I can get it.”

“I wan’ get this under my tarpaulin, an’ keep it dry.” Caesar had a fortune in tobacco, at least by the laws of economy on their ship.

The darkness covered their retreat. It was somehow shorter back to where they had left Harding than it had been sneaking out. Harding looked as if he hadn’t moved, and his relief at seeing them was so great that he laughed aloud. Caesar didn’t pause to greet him, but pulled out his oilcloth and wrapped his precious tobacco in it. Then he slung the whole package over his shoulder and stood up.

Jim was showing his sketch to Harding, but the dark and the rain made it impossible to judge or add Jim’s work to the map.

“Must we go back to the beach?”

“If you want a fire.” Caesar didn’t mention that he had piled firewood that morning, or left it in a dry place.

Harding nodded. His hat was collapsing in the rain, and the dye from his blue uniform jacket had run into his shirt. He was small and wet and cold, but he still had some indefinable air of command.

“Let’s go, then.”

It took them much less time to walk back down the trail, even in the dark and rain, than it had to walk up. Caesar had experienced this before, and knew that careful approaches in unfamiliar ground took much more time than a simple walk down a clear trail. They were all soaked through and shivering.

The tide was up when they came to the beach, and had come up high, so that the shingle was only a few yards wide at the top before the open woods began. Caesar had to hunt for his woodpile for a while, but he found it by stumbling over the slick old bark. Then he used the bark as a shield while he lit the fire under it. First he got a spark from his flint and steel on his charred cloth, all out of his fire kit and the driest thing he had. Then he used dry punkwood from the center of a rotten log to take the spark and make it a coal, and he carefully built a tiny fire of dry twigs on that one coal, building and blowing until he had a flame, and then adding scraps of bone dry bark and twig, and a twist of paper donated by Harding.

Through the whole performance, the two boys sat on the wet ground in the rain, only partially sheltered by the trees overhead. Jim fell asleep, despite the cold. He had been out in worse. The white boy had stood his watches on the deck of his frigate in all weathers, and he rested his back against Jim’s and tried to sleep as well.

If the transition from spark to coal to flame had taken a long time, the leap from flame to roaring fire was swift. Caesar fed his dry wood until he had a blaze, and then he put wetter wood on and it burned regardless. He looked over at Harding, who seemed fascinated.

“On a dry day, you can build a tiny fire. On a wet day, you need mo’ fire jus’ to burn the damp wood.”

“We don’t burn much wood on board ship,” said Harding.

Caesar smiled and nodded. He took his brass kettle, fetched some water from the stream, then boiled some salt pork and biscuit together and woke the two boys. They ate voraciously, but without really waking up. They made him feel old.

He stretched a tarpaulin across the opening between two trees and lashed it with pine roots. Then he pushed the boys under it, threw a second tarp over them, and prepared himself a pipe of his new tobacco. It tasted wonderful, if a little damp, after a month or more of stale rations and ancient stuff issued by the navy and sold on by the sailors. He drank a little water from his canteen, ate the rest of the salt pork and washed the kettle, and crawled in with the two boys. Mostly, he was content.

The boat came for them the next day, on time and even a little early. Caesar received his share of praise. It appeared that Mr. Harding’s map was to everyone’s satisfaction, as was the site of the camp and the peninsula as a whole. The governor decreed that they were going ashore.

Harding came back to thank them that same evening. He gave Jim a metal pencil with some leads and a little book of blank sheets, and he gave Caesar a clasp knife.

“I’ve never had so much praise from my captain all at once.”

“What did the governor say?”

“He told Captain Lovell and the marine officer that he wanted to put the force ashore to keep you all from dying of disease. And then he laughed and said that he could at least be thought to be campaigning in Virginia if he was ashore.”

Caesar shook his head. “We’re better off here.”

“Will we make more maps, suh?” asked Jim, and Harding nodded.

“I’ll ask for you.”

The British marines were the best soldiers Caesar had seen. They led the landings from boats provided by the navy, dashing ashore and forming loose lines, every man using the cover along the shingle. There was no opposition; the rebels hadn’t smoked the landing and were forty miles away or more.

Command had responsibilities that Caesar hadn’t anticipated. As a corporal, he knew more than the other men about these landings. He knew that they were not intended as a step in a campaign to reclaim Virginia from the rebels; the sergeants and officers had made it clear that Governor Dunmore had abandoned any real hope of retaking Virginia for the king by force of arms. But taken together, the need of the men for exercise and the threat of disease on the ships mandated a landing. Five weeks’ waste lay in the bilges and around them in the slack water of the Chesapeake. The governor intended to take this little peninsula, hold it, and make it an exercise ground for his army.

The wind was bitter coming over the open bay. Caesar’s men all had brown wool jackets, but some of the newer recruits had only shirts and navy slop trousers or petticoat breeches. They were nearly blue with cold. They gripped their muskets with white-knuckled hands, and Caesar knew that they would be useless in a fight.

The whaleboat holding his men landed on the sand with a hiss.

“Up oars,” called the midshipman, a stranger. He turned to Caesar. “This is as far as we go, Corporal.”

“Yes, sir.” The midshipman was so young his voice was still high, and he had no real authority. That came from the coxswain, a burly man behind him, who simply smiled and jerked his thumb over his shoulder in the universal sign for “get out”. Caesar grasped the gunwale and leapt over the side into less than a foot of water, and then Virgil followed over the other side, just as they had practiced. The rest of the men walked up the thwarts between the rowers, and the sailors handed them their muskets, which had been stored along the bottom boards. It went very smoothly, and Caesar was pleased to see Lope, his newest man, standing on the beach with his musket, bayonet, and cartridge box, as it meant that his was the first boat unloaded. Caesar enjoyed the little courtesies of command; he touched his hat to the midshipman.

“Thank you, sir.”

The boy returned the gesture. “First on the beach, after the marines.” The coxswain, a decent sort who smoked constantly, waved his pipe at Caesar. He had offered a good price for any tobacco they could “liberate” in the course of their jaunt ashore; had purchased half of what Caesar had brought from the mapping party. The coxswain was sure that the expedition was doomed, and even claimed to know where they were bound next.

“Marker! Second Section marker!” Caesar called the ritual words, even though his marker man, Virgil, was ten feet away. Virgil pulled himself erect and put his musket on his shoulder with a negligent air, but the completion of the movement left him in the position of a soldier, the very personification of his section.

“Second Section! Fall in!” The rest of the men, even the recruits, ran to their places in the line, forming two ranks with the tallest in the center and the shortest on the flanks. Caesar’s section was almost a platoon since the latest draft of runaway slaves. He had twenty men.

The other boats were hanging back in the current. Caesar didn’t know enough about the water to understand what was delaying the second wave of boats. His were the only Loyal Ethiopians on the beach.

In the manual of arms he had learned, he could remember no order that would enable him to disperse his men in the rocks as the marines had done. He turned to Virgil.

“Spread them out along the scree, Virgil. I’m going to find an officer.”

Caesar grasped his musket across the body and ran to where he could see an officer of the Fourteenth, a naval officer, and a man in a blue velvet coat, whom he thought to be Captain Honey of the marines. He stopped a few feet away, uncertain, and then stood at attention with his musket at the recover. It was a position designed to attract the attention of a higher officer; it meant that a soldier was requesting permission to speak.

The officer of the Fourteenth was the eldest, but apparently not the senior man in the group. However, he was the one man Caesar knew; he had led a company at the disaster at Great Bridge. When he caught Caesar’s eye, Caesar stepped forward.

“Sir!”

The man in the blue velvet coat turned and looked at him with distaste.

“Is this an example of our slave militia, Lieutenant Crowse?”

Caesar felt the blood run to his face and sweat break out all over his body, as if he was about to fight.

“Yes, sir.”

The man looked at Caesar, barely touching him with his eyes as if the sight were too painful.

“What do you want, darkie?”

“Where would you like my section, sir? My officer has not yet landed.”

“Get those men’s guns away from them before they shoot someone, and have them start hauling boxes up the beach.” He wasn’t addressing Caesar, but Crowse. He took a little silver whistle from his waistcoat pocket and blew it twice. The marines rose to their feet and began to move forward. On the far right, Virgil got the Ethiopians to their feet and moved off on the flank of the marines.

Blue Coat whirled around and stabbed a finger at Crowse.

“If I wanted those blackamoors stumbling through my skirmish line, I’d ask for them. Now get them hauling boxes.”

Caesar was still standing at attention. Crowse, a man he barely knew, looked at him with a spark of pity, but that was all.

“Have your men stack their arms,” he said. “And then get them moving with the stores.”

“As you say, sir.”

Crowse looked unhappy.

Over the next six weeks, Sergeant Peters had them up early to drill with their muskets. It was the only time they handled them; otherwise, the guns were locked away in the magazine by the blockhouse that the Ethiopians had built in the first week of labor. They spent every waking hour building: first sheds for the men to sleep, then the blockhouse and its chimneys, then a set of entrenchments along the front of the camp. None of their officers could change the situation, and the white troops, many of whom had started to fraternize with them, began to grow used to the idea that they could order a black soldier to do all the dirty work. Some of the blacks accepted this; others, especially the veterans of Great Bridge, resented it. The resentment lowered morale, and the men became listless. In fact, to Caesar’s attentive eye, they began to show signs of acting like slaves. They moved more slowly and the joking disappeared, at least when any white soldier was about. The men became furtive.

Visits from the sailors provided their only relief. The sailors seemed immune to any notion of color, perhaps because so many of their own were Africans or lascars from East India Company ships in the Far East. The ratings of the Royal Navy came in every color of the rainbow. The coxswain of the Amazon continued to pay well for tobacco, and to talk to Peters and Caesar as if they were members of the same mess, as they had been aboard ship.

The sick were brought ashore to recover from the fever that had them in its grip on the crowded ships. Once ashore, smallpox began to ravage the men who had survived the fevers onboard ship. The white Loyalists seemed to die faster than the blacks, but Jim caught it, and had the fever for almost two weeks. He lost all the weight he had gained since they had joined the army, and then even more, until he looked like a tight leather bag stretched over sticks. The others from their mess group, even the men like Tonny who hadn’t been in the swamp with Jim, took turns bathing him and cleaning him. As he lay there, his bright, intelligent eyes burned with greater intensity, as though he could cling to life by will alone.

Twice he had loud, angry dreams. Once, when Caesar was minding him, he was somewhere in his own distant past, forced to watch another man being beaten. If the sounds he made in the dream were reliable, the beating had gone on for a long time. The second dream came when Tom was tending him-a reliving of the battle of Great Bridge. Long Tom said it was eerie, hearing Jim say the words again, like being there, except they were lying on the ground in a dark hut.

The white soldiers continued to get Jesuit’s bark for their fevers but the supply ran short and the black men no longer saw any of it. There was no medicine for smallpox, and the men died, black and white together, and as often as not the Ethiopians were ordered to bury them. The dead men seldom got anything like a funeral, just a deep hole and a few muttered words from an officer with a scarf over his mouth.

The surgeon hurried to explain to Sergeant Peters that his people were tougher and less affected anyway. It might have been true, as far as any of them knew; certainly, more blacks survived the fever than whites, but it didn’t help the black soldiers with the notion that they didn’t rate quite the same treatment as the whites.

The winter winds bit through the tents and hasty cabins, that had covered the meadow with a patchwork of rude shelters, military tents, and mud. The constant movement of hundreds of men had worn through the grass. The incessant rain turned the ground to thick mud, and they never had the straw or forage to keep it from their tents. Some of the men went and slept in the woods. As the labor of camp building declined, there was more time for the men to brood on the unfairness of the white soldiers. Caesar began to encounter resentment when taking the men out for early drill. Men who had been eager to learn grew hesitant; men who had had little interest in the work to start with became rebellious. Caesar sensed that even the survivors of the swamp were losing interest.

Two mornings after Jim raved about the battle, Long Tom went down with the smallpox. Spirits were low as Caesar marched the men early to the magazine and stood them in front of the arms racks. Sergeant Peters was laying out a new storehouse, and Caesar was to command the morning drill for the first time. He was trying to pay close attention to what went on, but his thoughts were with Jim, and now Long Tom.

“Take up your arms,” he said as if by rote.

“Ain’t no need, corporal-man,” said Willy, a man from Peters’s old squad of inspection. “We ain’t soldiers. We slaves.”

“I am not a slave,” Caesar answered hotly. “Now get in line and pick up that musket.”

“Nope. Not taking no orders from no black mastuh, neithuh.”

Caesar had no experience with mutiny. His men mostly followed his lead because he had led some of them out of the swamp and the rest because of the trust of the first. Some of the new men were not so loyal.

Caesar snapped out of his reverie. He could see that Willy was keyed up, and that he was looking at his mates Romeo and Paget, flicking them expectant glances. He knew that this confrontation had been building since they landed. Caesar was astute enough to recognize that he and his authority might never have been challenged if not for the hostile attitude of the marine officer. As it was, he became the focus for his company’s discontent because he was both the newest noncommissioned officer and in some ways the most demanding.

Caesar took a step toward Willy but transferred his attention to Paget. Keeping his eye on the other man, Caesar spoke low.

“Get on the line and take your musket from the rack. Do it!”

Virgil recognized from his tone that something serious was taking place. Tonny shifted his weight a little, as he was the file leader of the next file over from Willy. The others looked vacant. They might know that something was up, but they had chosen not to take part.

“Wha’ don’ we jus sit somewheah fo’ a bit?” asked Willy in a slow, almost affected way. It was blatant disrespect. It was also no different from the way half the men behaved every day. Caesar was tempted to ignore it, or to jolly the man along. He expected he could do that; it worked well enough on slaves.

But these men were soldiers.

Caesar moved like a cat springing on its prey, his left foot stomping directly on to Willy’s instep and the butt of his musket smashing into the man’s midriff, doubling him in pain and surprise. He collapsed and Caesar stepped past him, thrusting the muzzle of his empty musket deep into the pit of Paget’s stomach and then kneeing him in the face as he bent over with the blow. Paget fell atop Willy.

“We are soldiers, not slaves. We got some troubles here, but we’ll get through ’em by working harder. On your feet, you two. You ain’t dead, but if I hear a peep about drill again, you’ll wish you were. Move.”

Willy got up slowly, but Paget just lay and moaned. Caesar knelt by him, his musket cradled across his thighs.

“You think it ain’t fair I hit you so much harder than him? He isn’t smart enough to buck me without you helped him. You think I don’ know? I know. An’ I know how hard I hit you, so get up before I make that show real.”

“You broke my nose, you bastard!”

Caesar grabbed the man’s head and lifted it off the dirt floor of the magazine. He lifted until he could look into the man’s eyes. It was quite a display of strength and it must have hurt the man a great deal.

“You get up, now,” Caesar said gently. “Or I’ll kill you.”

The whole magazine was silent. Then Paget got a leg under himself and raised himself to his feet. He moaned, but he stood. Caesar ran his eyes over the whole platoon, hurt to see that even Virgil and Tonny seemed to flinch away from him a little. But he had chosen a hard way, and he couldn’t falter now.

“Count off from the right,” he said. And they did.

After an hour’s ferocious drill, he took himself to Sergeant Peters and reported the incident, angry that he had lost control, angry at the marine officer and the army. It was the kind of helpless anger he had felt working in the Great Dismal-the first time he had felt that way since his group had found the army.

Peters had a good tent, courtesy of Mr. Robinson, and he sat on a tiny stool that had probably started life next to a fireplace or a kitchen hearth. He was so much too big for the stool that it vanished under him. Next to him was a small straw pallet in a forage bag. His backpack was open at the far end of the pallet.

“Ah, Caesar. I would like to offer you a place to sit, but…”

“Sergeant Peters, I have to report that I struck two of my men in suppressing a mutiny.”

Peters looked up his long nose at Caesar thoughtfully, and fumbled in his waistcoat pocket for his eyeglasses.

“The ground is hard even with the straw, and the nights are cold. The rest of you can curl around each other for warmth, but I have the solitary splendor and the lack of warmth it brings, and I’m stiff in the morning.”

His fingers couldn’t work the catch on the eyeglass case, and he had to concentrate for a moment and press it repeatedly till he opened it. Then he brought the glasses out slowly, as if treasuring them, and slowly unfolded the lappets before he pulled them over his ears and tied the ribbon. They transformed his face from that of a tired man to that of a scholar.

“Tell me about this mutiny, Caesar.”

“Willy, Romeo an’ Paget…”

“Willy, Romeo and Paget.”

“Willy, Romeo and Paget refused to take up their muskets for drill.”

“Perfectly understandable.”

Caesar, bent over in the entrance to the tent and looking down at his sergeant, almost vibrated with shock.

“Sergeant?”

“I’m sure it has come to your attention that we are being used as a labor force and not as soldiers?”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“So the mutiny is quite understandable.”

Caesar shook his head, almost imperceptibly.

“Caesar, when men are treated badly, they behave badly. Willy and Paget have always been slaves, correct?”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“As such, they know only one code: when mistreated, slow down. You are lucky they didn’t spoil their muskets. Breaking tools is an honored practice, as I’m sure you know.”

“I’ve done it myself, Sergeant.”

“Good. Now you see their point of view. I’m glad I’ve shocked you, Caesar; you need to understand how other men think and feel if you plan to lead them. You expect too much from men; you expect them all to behave as you do. How did you handle them?”

“I beat them.”

Peters looked at him, his head tilted a little, and he reminded Caesar for a moment of Colonel Washington speaking to a particularly intelligent puppy. He had tilted his head in just such a way.

“And did they drill?”

“They did.”

“It sorrows me to say it, but that is definitely one way of dealing with a mutiny. The best way, I think.”

“Thank you, Sergeant.”

“No, Caesar, you mistake me. It is the best way of dealing with a mutiny once it has become open. But I want you to consider how it became open, and how that might have been avoided. I have feared this for some days. I believe I mentioned it to you. In future I hope you will keep such instances from eventuating by giving the handling of the men your very best attention.”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“Do you have your roll? Give it here. That is still the most oddly formed ‘R’ in Christendom, Caesar. Look at the letters I wrote out for you. Tonny deserves a surname; only slaves have just one. See to it.”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“Same for Long Tom.”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“Lessons tonight, after dinner is cooked. And our women are being landed tomorrow. Take your squad of inspection down to the beach and see to it that we get the same women we had before. No harlots, if you please.”

Something in his tone gave Caesar the hope that he would be forgiven. The shock of censure had not been so deep. He recognized, even as Peters was speaking, the essential truth of his words, and realized that he had felt guilty about the incident and his use of force even as it happened. Yet he did resent that it had happened at all, and he was torn by conflicting feelings of anger and guilt. If Captain Honey were a decent man to the black soldiers, none of this need have happened.

Peters watched him with concern. He wanted to reach out and touch his shoulder, or offer some gesture that would ease the sting of rebuke, but he had dealt with young men all his adult life, and he knew the lesson would have more effect if he carried his coldness through to the end. Tomorrow would be soon enough to relax his appearance of ill will. Poor Caesar. Being a leader was difficult enough. Training one half his age was almost too much, and though he loved his new-found freedom, sometimes the former butler missed his warm bed under the eaves.

Caesar made his way down the tent row that housed his platoon, listening to the men as they patched garments or smoked, idle or busy according to their own inclination.

One of the greatest complaints that the black troops had was that they were not allowed to patrol; the patrols inevitably returned with useful items, from barn boards to chickens. Kept in the camp as a labor force, the Ethiopians were missing out on what little there was to have. What they did have was tobacco. The plantation north of where they had landed was planted in tobacco, poor quality stuff that had stripped the soil, they all agreed, but worth something anyway. Virgil had led the other men in building a small drying shed and putting up some of the tobacco. Most of it was saved from the plantation’s own drying barn, but a little was from a field left unharvested in the autumn of war. It wasn’t much, but the sailors seemed to like it and it gave the Ethiopians something to trade. It also gave them a larger building in which to stay dry.

When Caesar didn’t hear the voices he expected in the streets of the camp, he followed the stockade until he came to the little drying shed. Inside, he was surprised to see Mr. Edgerton. He was stooped over under the low roof, his hat in his hand and his greatcoat wet. He seemed quite at ease.

“Caesar. Just the man I was looking for. Could we step outside?” Edgerton sounded polite, distant, and Caesar feared that the mutiny was still with him.

“Good day to ya, suh,” called several voices from inside the shack. The sweet smell of dry tobacco filled the air. Outside, it had started to rain again, a cold rain that felt greasy where it touched the skin. Caesar expected that they would stop out of earshot of the shed, but Edgerton kept walking.

Caesar elected to strike first.

“Sorry about the…trouble, sir.” He turned his head and met Edgerton’s eyes directly. Some white men didn’t like that, but Edgerton didn’t seem to mind.

“Quite the little incident. Yes. I thought you handled it well, Caesar. But keep in mind that it had roots…” Edgerton looked away for a moment and then back at Caesar. His look had been in the direction of the marine camp, and it was as eloquent as it needed to be. “It had roots elsewhere. Is my meaning plain?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good, but that’s not why I left a warm fire and a book just to find you. I didn’t want to alarm the other men in your platoon, but one of our men has just died.”

“Little Jim?” Caesar tried to hide the hurt in his voice. Jim had survived so much to fall to a fever in the relative comfort of the army.

“No, Caesar. Jim’s no better, but he isn’t dead yet. It’s Long Tom.”

“He’s only just been sick!”

“He’s gone. Come along.”

Caesar walked through the rain, tears flowing unnoticed down his cheeks, head up, almost blind to the camp around him. Long Tom had been with them from the first-after Virgil, his most trusted man. Caesar could see him standing a watch in the camp in Great Dismal, or whistling tunelessly as he whittled a stick down to slivers with his long razor in the woods of southern Virginia. He thought about how far they had come from the swamp, and wondered if they would keep it. Even the attitude of the white soldiers was a far cry from life as a slave or a hunted runaway. Tom had died free. But he had died, and in the dismal light of the hospital, Caesar wondered how many of them would live to the end of the war, or whether they would even win through and keep their freedom. Sometimes, it seemed like a hard life to live just to lose it all again.

The hospital was worse in the light of day than it ever was lit by fire in the night; the men looked paler, their filth was more evident, and the hopelessness stood out on every face. Tom lay just under the shed outside the door, his dirty white blanket thrown loosely over him. Caesar stripped off Tom’s brown wool coatee-they had so few he couldn’t bear to waste one-and then he rolled his friend gently on to the straw, laid out his blanket, and rolled him up in it. He did these things almost automatically; it wasn’t really Tom, and he thought obscurely that he needed to get back to work. He didn’t worry especially about the smallpox; he thought he’d had it already. Mr. Edgerton stood under the shed, water trickling down his greatcoat, his once-fine tricorn now just a shapeless mass.

“Sergeant Peters told me to make sure Tom had a surname on the next muster.” Caesar was breathing hard as he tried to lever the body over without seeming disrespectful.

“I beg your pardon?” Edgerton sounded distant.

“Apologies, sir. I was just…just saying that Tom, he had no family name.”

“I suppose not. Many slaves don’t. Pity, that. The army should issue them along with freedom. Perhaps he could be called ‘Hanover’, after the king.” Mr. Edgerton kept his head turned away from the corpse.

Mr. Robinson stepped under the roof of the shed. “He’s welcome to mine, Caesar.” His greatcoat was soaked through, and he had the silver crescent of a gorget around his throat. He was the officer of the day. He hadn’t shaved and looked rough.

“Thank you, sir.”

“No thanks needed. I remember Tom at Great Bridge. He stood until the end, and the Robinsons can always use a few brave men.” Mr. Robinson looked at Mr. Edgerton for a moment as if willing him to say something, but Mr. Edgerton took a snuffbox out of his deep pockets and took snuff, then blew his nose into a handkerchief from another pocket.

“I’d like him to have a military funeral.” Caesar stood up from the body to make this announcement.

Edgerton just shook his head in the negative, still playing with his handkerchief. Robinson leaned against one of the pilings supporting the shed, and put his chin in his hand. He looked at Edgerton and raised one eyebrow.

“Mr. Edgerton, I dare say we could give him a military burial. The Fourteenth do it every day.”

“Captain Honey would never allow it. He barely tolerates us as it is.”

“Captain Honey already uses our troops as a labor force, Mr. Edgerton. He should be the soul of tolerance.”

“This is not the place for this discussion, Mr. Robinson. But if you insist, on your head be it.”

“Truer words were never spoke, Mr. Edgerton. Corporal Caesar, please see to arrangements for a military burial party. Three files with muskets and full equipment, the rest of the platoon in workshirts, turned out in thirty minutes in the company street.”

“Yes, sir. Military burial party. Three files armed, rest of Mr. Edgerton’s platoon in the street with work shirts and no arms.”

“Carry on.”

Caesar saluted smartly and marched off, leaving Tom lying between the two officers with his old white blanket around him as a shroud. As he headed off toward the streets of the camp, he heard the two men continue to argue.

The only difficulty turned out to be from the soldier on duty at the magazine, who had no orders to allow any troops access to the arms stored there. He was a soldier of the Fourteenth, and he stuck by his orders until Sergeant Peters stepped forward and ended the contest of wills between the sentry and Caesar.

“Private, we have orders from our officer to conduct a burial party. We need six muskets for the firing party. We’ll be back with them double quick. Didn’t the Fourteenth have a burial party yesterday morning?”

“We did, at that.” The man was hesitant, knowing that a positive answer would weaken his case. He was divided, as the white soldiers often were with the Ethiopian noncommissioned officers-training versus prejudice. He shrugged, as if dismissing responsibility.

“You are ordering me to give you the arms?”

Sensing victory, Peters smiled mirthlessly and nodded.

“Right, then, Sergeant. Here are the keys. Please sign the book.”

In a moment, the three files in coatees had their arms and accoutrements, consisting of a cartridge box, bayonet carriage, and bayonet. They fell in at the head of the parade, bayonets fixed. Peters, Caesar, and the other corporal, Fowver, took their arms as well. The officers joined them with their swords belted on and their greatcoats slung like capes. The last two files carried picks and shovels. The whole platoon marched briskly outside the palisade and over the field that had been cut to give the defenders a clear line of sight, to the little cemetery at the edge of the apple orchard.

“Halt!” Mr. Robinson held his hand in the air. The rain fell harder. “Work detail, dig the grave. The rest of you, under the trees and see to your arms.”

The burial detail was commanded by Virgil, who had volunteered, and otherwise consisted of the morning’s mutineers, looking a little the worse for wear.

Virgil and Paget dug the outlines of the grave with the spades they had carried, cutting deeply into the sod and lifting squares clear until they had a hole six feet long and three wide. Then Romeo and Willy began to break the ground with their picks. Romeo cut away with a will, clearly anxious to please; Willy looked as if every cut hurt him. The platoon watched them work in total silence. Mr. Edgerton took snuff; Mr. Robinson removed a tiny tinderbox from his pocket and got a pipe lit, quickly and easily. Several of the men watched enviously; none of their tinderboxes was waterproof enough to keep their tinder dry in the rain.

Mr. Robinson was an astute man, and he caught the looks soon enough.

“Got a pipe packed? Bring it here.” He took Tonny’s pipe and lit it from his own and passed it back. The spark was passed to other pipes, and gradually all the men who smoked either had a pipe or shared with another. The grave went down, and the platoon sat under the apple trees, cold and wet.

When the men with picks had broken the ground, the men with spades would come in and throw the earth up out of the grave. By his third round of breaking ground, Willy looked used up. Caesar took off his brown cloth coatee and laid it on the ground, then went and took the pick out of the other man’s hands.

“You go rest a while.” Caesar jerked his head sharply toward the trees, where the others were resting. Then he began to break the ground. When he was done with his half, he found that two more men had stepped forward to take the places of Virgil and Paget. Tonny took the pick from him, and two by two the whole platoon dug down through the red clay and the sand until the grave was deep and wide.

Another month of waiting and working. The camp was more orderly now, laid out in streets, long rows of hordled tents with planks gray in the sun, stretching out like small houses facing another across an empty street of mud. There weren’t enough tents for all the troops, and many of the Loyalists, black and white, had built huts of brush in the shape of tents. Boards from the plantation’s barns had been used to hordle some of the tents, and many of these were now thatched in straw. Every day the camp looked more permanent.

Caesar was out alone, standing in the rain under the same apple trees and watching Captain Honey drill his men. He had them strung out across the whole field, each file of two men separated by some yards, and every man seemed to be loading and firing his musket on his own time. There was so much to it that was different from the soldiering Caesar knew that at first he couldn’t see that the men were under command at all; it looked as if each man were making his own decisions. But after an hour of drill, Caesar could see that they expanded and contracted on the captain’s little silver whistle. They could also halt or advance on the whistle, and when they fired, Caesar gradually sorted that each man in a file was aiming while his partner was loading, so that half the line was loaded at any given time. It looked like a very sensible way to fight in close country, but it asked more from the soldiers because they lost the comfort of the solid wall of their fellows.

He heard Captain Honey give an order, although it was indistinct, and there was a groan from the ranks, a sense of levity that Caesar hadn’t seen from regular soldiers, but he knew that Honey was well liked by his men. Then both ranks threw themselves down on the wet ground and seemed to roll on their backs and then on their stomachs like acrobats. Caesar stepped out from among the apple trees to see better, his movements not quite conscious, until he was halfway toward them in the dying light.

They were practicing loading and firing while lying flat on the ground, firing prone. Caesar had never seen the Fourteenth do it, and he resolved to ask Steele whether he knew the trick of it. He could tell that it was not simple; the movement of the ramrod in the barrel while lying on your back clearly took tremendous coordination, and the men were all now soaking wet. But it was the last drill of the evening, and as the rain began to lash down, Honey had the sergeants form them up again and march them back to their cantonment. Caesar followed at a fair distance. It wasn’t that any of the marines had shown the hostility that Honey had to the black men, but that Caesar didn’t feel he wanted to give them an opportunity to show it. He was becoming careful.

Instead, he crossed through the lines to where Steele and his mess group had a hordled tent on the right of the Fourteenth. Three men of Steele’s six were sick, making the tent seem empty. Caesar knocked on the pole, taking extra care not to give rise to any resentment. White soldiers in groups were not always friendly.

“Who’s that, then?”

“Julius Caesar.”

“You know, mate, from anyone else, that name would be a joke. Come in out of the wet, then, and don’t bring it with you.”

Caesar unhooked the tent flap and slipped in. There was a dense fug of pipe smoke and unwashed soldier inside, but it was warm and snug, like the tobacco-drying shed. The men of the Fourteenth were veterans, and they knew how to live in the field. Even their mess fires were covered in brush wigwams that occasionally caught fire but kept the men warm and dry while they cooked, a habit they had “learned in Germany”. Germany was just a name to Caesar, although it occurred nightly in his readings with Sergeant Peters. Germany was a place the real Caesar had fought in, where the barbarians were hard men and cruel. Caesar liked to think that the Fourteenth had served there.

Caesar sat on another man’s pack when an outstretched palm indicated that he was welcome to it. He reached into his haversack and pulled out his tobacco box, offered it around. One soldier filled his pipe and the others simply nodded, as if accepting that he hadn’t come empty-handed. No one spoke for a moment and pipes were lit. The period before the drummers beat last call was too precious to be wasted in idle chat.

“I have questions about the drill, Tom.”

“God in heaven, look at this one, mates. He’s still on about the drill. What is it, then?” Steele turned a tolerant eye on Caesar, whose passion to learn the military arts brought a patronizing amusement in most of the regular establishment NCOs.

“Do you know how to fire lying down, Tom?”

“You’ve been watching the Jollies, you have,” said another man, Herbert Atkins by name. “They have a different manual from us, any road. No knowing what them buggers will do. All that ‘expanding’ and ‘contracting’. Poor bastards won’t know how to form a company front, soon enough.”

“Looks useful, though,” said Caesar. “Think of Great Bridge, when the rebels were in entrenchments.”

“Think how long it would take you to get to your feet and get your kit stowed if you had to move fast,” said Steele, but kindly. “I was in the Light Company, back in ’74. I probably will be again. We did some of those antics-and not another word from you, Bert Atkins. Sure, I can show you some of it. But it’s gey hard, I’ll tell you.”

“I’d esteem it a favor, Tom. And another thing. What’s an adjutant?”

Steele just shook his head. “Adjutant is an officer doing the job of a sergeant, to my way of thinkin’. He takes the rolls an’ musters, and keeps the men at their drill, but in the old days when the army was in Europe, the sergeants and the sergeant major did all that.”

“We don’ have either one.” Caesar hated going to the officers of other regiments with his accounts and muster rolls.

“You don’t have ten companies, mate,” said Bert Atkins. “Stands to reason that you don’t get all the extrees until you’ve met the establishment of a regiment.”

Steele looked embarrassed. “Every company has a barrack-room lawyer, Caesar. Bert’s ours.”

Caesar nodded at Bert, encouraging him to go on.

“Aye, well, you lot are lucky to have the likes of me to keep you from abuse, is all I can say. Caesar, when you have filled ten companies with recruits, and when the king has granted commissions to all your officers, so that every company has sixty men, and a captain an’ his lieutenant and perhaps an ensign, why then they call your battalion ‘complete’. An’ from that date, they muster you and give you a number, an’ you are regulars, or they muster you only for local service an’ call you provincials.”

“We don’t have ten companies,” said Caesar.

“That’s why you don’t have a sergeant major or an adjutant, then. Every complete battalion has ten companies of sixty men and three officers, and one of those companies are grenadiers in their high fur hats and fancy clothes, an’ the other is the poor light bobs in regiments that have them, always running about or being on patrol like huntsmen on a hunt day. They wear short coats and little leather helmets.”

“The Fourteenth don’t have a light company just now, Caesar. If they did, Bert would be in less of a hurry to speak ill of them.”

“Why not?” asked Caesar, regretting the question immediately from the gleam in Bert’s eye.

“Because light bobs cost money, don’t they? And the colonel runs his regiment like a business, don’t he? An’ is the purpose of his business to win wars? No, boys, it is not. Is the purpose that Bert an’ Tom and their mates be comfortable and warm in the field? No, mates, it is not. Is the purpose that the colonel makes a tidy profit on every cheap coat he sells us?”

Caesar interrupted the indignant flow. “Sells you?”

“Oh, aye!” called another from the back of the tent, and Steele turned a tolerant eye on Caesar.

“We buy all our gear, don’t we? Every copper is charged against our pay. But is it ours? No, lad, it ain’t. Can a lad sell his musket for a few tots? Not unless he wants a bloody back.”

“Some regiments is run different,” said Bert. “I’ve seen some as the colonel don’t care to make a copper on his lads, an’ they have all the best. Good coats, rainshirts, fancy packs that keep the wet out.”

“Like the marines?” asked Caesar, and they all looked at him as if he’d grown an extra head.

“Marines ain’t in the army, lad,” said Steele, shaking his head at Caesar’s ignorance. “They’re in the navy.”

“Paid more an’ us, too,” said another voice.

“Better an’ more o’ everything.”

“So they’re in the navy. And you don’t have a light company?”

“Even though we are required to by the warrants,” said Bert triumphantly.

“But until we have one, we won’t get our own adjutant?” asked Caesar.

Steele nodded.

Caesar nodded back at him, with much to ponder, and silence fell again, until Bert poked forward a little from his place in the back, hesitant.

“Saw you bury your man today.”

The other three white soldiers nodded, solemnly.

“Very proper, your lot looked. Sorry you lost another-we’ve been hit hard our own selves.”

Caesar nodded, surprised to be so affected by their comment.

“Thankee, gentlemen. I’ll pass your kindness to my company.” He rose as the drummer at the head of camp began tapping his drum and pulling the head taut, no easy feat in the rain, but a fair warning that the camp was about to close up. “Good night.”

“Good night, Julius Caesar!” they called from the warmth of the tent, and men in the next tent laughed.