I had nearly fixed the tourniquet ligature to Surgeon Shelley’s satisfaction, when they came on again. ‘Run, Sergeant; run, Maguire, my good man,’ cried the Captain between his groans. ‘Leave me, for I can’t follow.’ Off ran Maguire, but I remained for another few seconds until the bandage was secured and the Surgeon could remove his thumbs from the artery; then I, too, dodged among the trees, the bullets crashing about me and the enemy pouring up like a mighty torrent. I was thus the last man to ascend the hill; but heartily blamed myself as I ran that I had lacked the wit to snatch up the salve-box and the roll of bandages. These were now captured, together with Surgeon Shelly and the Captain. However, it was too late to return for them.
This manœuvre of Colonel Hill’s was brilliantly executed: for indeed the Regiment, though rough in camp and on parade, was ready enough on the held, and we all made the summit of the hill except a few men. Here the ground was more open, and our companies drew up in Indian file, facing the enemy, each leading soldier discharging his piece in turn and then running to the rear of the file to reload; so that we maintained a well-directed fire for nearly three hours. I took my turn in the line of Lieutenant Westrop’s company, who was shot through the heart as he stood by my side. A few minutes after, a man a short distance upon my left received a ball in his forehead, which carried off the roof of his skull. He reeled round, turned up his eyes, muttered some nonsensical words as if he dreamed, and fell dead at my feet.
Soon our fire slackened, for our ammunition was well-nigh expended; and the enemy, perceiving this, boldly ran across our front to cut off our retreat, nor could we prevent them.
Just at this critical moment, when all was still, came a cry that made my heart leap with joy and threw the Americans into the utmost consternation: ‘Whoo-oo-oooop’ resounded through the woods. Grounding my firelock, I clapped my hand to my mouth and, ‘Whoo-oooo-oop’, I replied, wildly modulating the note as I had learned, in welcome to the approaching Wyandots and Algonquins. The Americans scattered incontinently and, the fight being over, The Ninth formed upon the hill. Colonel Hill then led them down to the seizure of the Fort; but I remained behind to play the surgeon.
It was a grievous sight to see the wounded men bleeding on the ground. What made it more so, was that the rain, of which only a few great drops had hitherto fallen, came pouring down in a deluge upon us; and, still to add to the misery of the sufferers, there was nothing to dress their wounds, now that the salve-box was gone. I took off my shirt, tore it up and with the help of a soldier’s young wife, Jane Crumer (the only woman who was with us, and who kept close by her husband’s side during the engagement), made some bandages from these strips and from the hem of her petticoat, and bound up each man’s wound in turn. I had held Jane in affectionate regard for some years. She was a slight-figured girl, not beautiful in a picturesque sense, but with an excellent speaking voice and fine eyes – a niece of Sergeant Fitzpatrick, with whom she had lived before her marriage. Little Jane had attended the arithmetic lessons at Waterford that I gave to his boy, and proved my aptest pupil.
Soon Maguire came in search of me, and, ‘By the Holy, Gerry, my jewel,’ says he in great excitement, ‘I can hardly see you for the rain that’s in my eyes. Now here’s a packet of news for ye. Those bloody savages who saved us were no Indians at all, but only Captain Money’s codding. For he brought them up when he heard the battle noise, but they wouldn’t come; so he sent them away and came running up alone, and it was he who uttered that whoop, not they, the heathen beggars – they were four miles hence. What’s more, the rebels burned down the block-house and the saw-mill, but the rain has put the flames out and hardly a stick is charred, Glory be to Jesus, and amn’t I lucky to be alive?’
I stopped the flow of his talk by making him help Mrs Crumer and myself in conveying those of the wounded who could not walk, to a woodman’s hut some hundreds of yards away, the nearest place of shelter. This hut had been the scene of a skirmish towards the end of the battle, for one of our companies had seized it for use as a fort when the enemy tried to outflank us. The work was excessively fatiguing, since we must carry the poor fellows in blankets slung upon poles, and the rain made the ground very slippery.
We had come back from the hut for our third load, and there still remained nine men incapable of movement, when up rode General Burgoyne himself, with his jolly face and jutting chin, together with his ‘family’, or staff, in order to view the battlefield. Recognizing me, ‘So you arrived in good time to share the glory, my brave Sergeant,’ he cried in a booming tone. ‘Tell me, now, how did the battle go?’
I pointed out the positions, which he noted carefully – in order, I suppose, to remark upon them in his dispatches; and I then made bold to ask him for men to be sent to help me with carrying the wounded, which he obligingly consented to arrange.
Then he said: ‘Should any of the Americans surprise you while you are performing this meritorious and humane duty, you must have a letter to give to their commanding officer, which should ensure the preservation of your life – if, indeed, the leaders of this rabble in arms have bowels of compassion like ordinary men.’ He desired his aide-decamp to lend him his back as an escritoire; and then and there, using a pen, a strip of paper and a pocket ink-horn, indited a very eloquent plea for my life and signed it with a tremendous flourish.
I thanked him and he galloped off. Jane Crumer looked after him, and then back at me, and laughed softly. ‘There now,’ she said, ‘I confess I am quite disappointed. I expected him to pull out tinder, flint, taper, wafer, tape, and all, and seal the letter in headquarterly style. Why, he never even used a sand-castor!’
However, the General did not forget us. He sent up a dozen men of the Twentieth Regiment to act as a carrying party. I dispatched Maguire and Mrs Crumer to Colonel Hill, to acquaint him with my situation; and the Colonel sent back Maguire, together with three other men and a quantity of provisions. The Colonel informed me that he was ordered to return to Skenesborough and that he left the wounded in my charge. Among these was Lieutenant Murray, with a flesh wound in his calf, who made merry with two fellow-Irishmen who were boasting of the blood they had shed in the service of their King and country, and the gravity of their wounds. In his blunt manner he exclaimed: ‘By heavens, my good lads, you need not think so much of being wounded – for, by Jesus God, there’s a bullet in the beam yonder by the door, and devil a compliment or pension will that poor timber earn!’
The losses of The Ninth on that day were thirteen killed and twenty-three wounded of all ranks; the gains were thirty prisoners, some stores and baggage and the Colours of the Second Hampshire Regiment of the Massachusetts army. We were commended in Orders.
As for myself, I remained for seven days as surgeon in charge of the hut, whither a supply of salves and bandages was sent up from Skenesborough, and a load of other necessaries. I encountered but one American, by name Gershom Hewit, of Weston, Massachusetts, a poor fellow whose right hand had been broken by a ball, and his leg injured. When I espied him, he was lurking in a thicket near our hut, in the hope of picking up scraps of food that we threw away. I had him covered with a musket when I told him to advance and be recognized. He expected me to shoot him out of hand, and was infinitely grateful when, seeing that he would never be able to soldier again, I dressed his wounds, provided him with victuals and drink, and sent him hobbling back to his own folk. He promised most faithfully not to reveal our whereabouts to his compatriots; which promise he kept.
We expected every moment to be attacked, and fortified the hut as best we could, cutting loopholes so that the wounded men also could fire on the enemy; but we were never molested, though every night during our stay we heard the noise of axes, as the enemy felled trees to hinder the advance of our army. We were proceeding against Fort Edward, on the upper reaches of Hudson’s River, their new rallying-point. At the end of that time we returned to Skenesborough. All the wounded men, except three who died, were then nearly fit for duty; for, in pr
eference to the drugs sent me, I had used a vulnerary recommended to me by the Indians, a sort of hartshorn which I found growing near the hut.
Now, Skenesborough was owned by a Scottish gentleman named Skene, a major on half-pay, who had served hereabouts in the previous war, and had been so taken by the beauty of the place that he obtained by Royal Patent a grant of 25,000 acres at the foot of the South River; and began to establish a great domain. It was he who owned the block-house and saw-mill at Fort Anna, and every other building for miles around. He was a Loyalist, and entertained General Burgoyne in a very magnificent way at his house in Skenesborough. Some say that all our subsequent misfortunes were due to this person. For though we were distant by land not more than twenty miles from Fort Edward, the effort of transporting our artillery and stores by this route would be gigantic because of the frightful nature of the country intervening: but all difficulties were denied or minimized by Major Skene, who calculated that a great military road cut from his quay to Ford Edward would render his estate more valuable by many thousand pounds. The alternative was to take us back by water to Ticonderoga, and thence to sail down Lake George, where the enemy could offer us no opposition. This would take four days with favourable weather; and from Fort George, at the lake’s end, a good wagon-road ran to Fort Edward – the defences of both places being in a ruinous condition. These stormed, another week should have brought us in triumph to Albany; had we left our heaviest guns behind.
However, General Burgoyne took the advice of his host. After two days but two miles of road had been built, notwithstanding the incredible exertions of men and teams; and General Burgoyne should then have acknowledged the error and called the task off – as did General Carleton when we sweated over-much to drag the two schooners entire from Chambly to St John’s. But Major Skene pretended that more favourable ground lay ahead, and reminded the General of his Order of the Day at Crown Point, ‘This army must not retreat’, which piqued his honour. General Burgoyne had, moreover, sent his fleet of batteaux, his own and those captured, up the South River for supplies, and was ashamed to send a fast ship to recall them. He determined to continue the work at all events, the more so as many hundred of provincial Loyalists had arrived in the camp, some with arms, some without, and their expert services could be applied in the pioneering way.
General Philip Schuyler lay at Fort Edward with the beaten American army, amounting to little more than four thousand men; and had left in our hands above a hundred pieces of artillery and large supplies of flour and beef. Two regiments of New England militia he found so disorderly, and so addicted to plundering, that he dismissed them from his army; and what was left could not be depended upon as a fighting force. Yet he was resolved to spare nothing, not even his own good name, not even his life, to promote the cause of Independence which lay so near his heart. At Fort Edward there were cannon lying about on the grass, but no gun-carriages, and scarcely any entrenching tools; insufficient camp-kettles and not five rounds of powder and ball for his muskets. He could not hope to hold the place, but only to delay us until reinforcements were sent him. He had already angered Congress by a letter to them protesting against their dismissal of one of his surgeons without his leave; and now John Adams was saying that the ‘patriot armies will never successfully defend a post till they have shot a general’ – meaning Generals Schuyler or St Clair – ‘who has yielded a fortress, uncontested, to the enemy.’ However, for the victualling of the army that remained to him after the desertions and his dismissals, and for the delaying of our advance, General Schuyler could draw upon his private fortune. He was the proprietor of an ancestral Dutch domain at Saratoga on Hudson’s River, some miles downstream from Fort Edward, which was regarded as the best managed estate in all America, and where hundreds of skilled labourers were engaged in his service. Soon their axes, too, were added to those which we heard ringing in the forest, and marvellous obstruction they caused.
The woods here were composed chiefly of oaks of different variety, and the tough hickory, the hemlock, the beech, intermixed with great numbers of the smooth-barked Weymouth pines. They grew to a great height, though none appeared to be more than two feet in diameter; indeed, the girth of the woodland trees of North America was very small in proportion to their height and trifling in comparison of that of the forest trees at home – they sprang up so close together here, and in such rivalry of the sun, that their force was spent in gaining height rather than thickness. These trees, General Schuyler’s soldiers and lumberers sent crashing to the ground, at intervals of a few paces, across every path and trail, creek and rivulet, between ourselves and Fort Edward; and ditchers with spades laboured, also, to dam and divert these waters to our hindrance. While he was thus adding hugely to our labours, General Schuyler was also subtracting from our subsistence by driving off all flocks and herds, and carting away or burning all standing crops which lay within the utmost range of our foragers.
It was while I was in the hut at Fort Anna that the Reverend John Martin reappeared at Skenesborough and preached a sermon to the troops on a Sunday morning. This was said to be a very dove-like, unwarlike address and more fitting for a parish church at a harvest festival than for the present occasion, which was a thanksgiving service for the success of our arms. The text was ‘Be ye not like unto the ox and the ass, that have no understanding.’ After the sermon a feu de joie was fired by the whole army, with artillery and small arms. We heard the noise in the distance and could make nothing of it, though we guessed it to be the explosion of a magazine.
I have spoken of the mosquitoes of Skenesborough, that bred there in the stagnant waters under the protecting shade of great trees, as the most malignant of all in America. The inhabitants were proof against their venom, but on us they raised great watering pustules precisely like those of the smallpox. The only sure relief was to be looked for in volatile alkali, of which we possessed scarcely any; but immediate bathing in cold water was better than nothing at all. To scratch was most dangerous, and many men were deprived of the use of their limbs for days from swellings due to this imprudence; two were obliged to undergo amputation. These insects added to the hardships of our men, whom on July 17th I rejoined, returning to my own company in the Light Infantry battalion. The road had then attained but one-third of the length projected, and the obstacles were growing more and more numerous. Exclusive of the labour of hauling away the fallen timber, we found it necessary, before we had done, to construct no less than forty bridges and a causeway, two miles in extent and consisting of large timber laid transversely, over a quaking morass. Nor were the bridges mean feats of engineering: many measured as much as forty feet in height and two or three times that in length, straddling over deep and muddy rivers. Occasionally small parties of the enemy attacked our piquets, but were easily repulsed.
The common soldier’s labour now began to become severe in an extraordinary measure. Though working through a difficult country in the hot, sickly season, he was obliged to bear a burden which none except the old Roman veteran ever bore. He carried a knapsack, a blanket, a hatchet, a haversack containing four days’ provisions, a canteen for water, and a proportion of his tent furniture. This, superadded to his accoutrements, arms and sixty rounds of ammunition made a great load and large luggage indeed. Yet the German grenadiers, with their enormous swords, long-skirted clothing, heavy brass-fronted caps and big canteens holding about a gallon, were even worse circumstanced. The carrying of the rations was the greatest grievance to our men, who all held to the opinion that we should rather have been taken round by water at our ease than forced to these cruel labours. Many succumbed to the temptation to pitch the whole contents of their haversacks into the mire, exclaiming: ‘Damn the provisions, we shall get more at the next encampment! The General won’t let us starve.’
It was the last day but one of July before we reached Fort Edward, having taken twenty days to cover as many miles. This place consisted of a large redoubt with a simple parapet and a wretched palisade, an
d barracks for two hundred men; and stood in a little valley near Hudson’s River upon the only spot not covered with forest. The Americans had withdrawn at their leisure thirty miles to the southward; General Schuyler, very properly, as I have indicated, risking to be court-martialled as a traitor and coward for the sake of luring us deeper into American territory. The farther we advanced, he was aware, the greater the numbers of militia and frontiersmen who would come out in defence of their homes, and the longer and less defensible our lines of communication. General Schuyler was even single-minded enough so to yield ground as to make a battlefield of his own domain and expose it to ravage and destruction by both armies. This conduct had its expected reward. The ‘proud Bashaw of Saratoga’ (as his back-biters named General Schuyler) was once more superseded in active command by General Gates; though, much to the chagrin of the Adamses, the courts-martial upon him and General St Clair failed to commit either to the firing-squad.
Unluckily for us, General Washington, who took the part of both these excellent officers in their disgrace, now insisted to Congress that, at least, General Benedict Arnold should be employed by General Gates in a subordinate command; and they consented. It was, however, with some difficulty that he persuaded General Arnold to go to General Gates’s assistance, for he was labouring under a resentment. When in the February of that year five American Brigadiers had been raised in rank to Major-General, General Arnold was not among their number, though his services enormously outweighed theirs, and all were junior to him. Washington gave Congress his opinion of this unpardonable slight put upon the most capable officer in their army, and wrote to General Arnold himself, very delicately expressing his sympathy and begging him to take no hasty action, for he would ‘do all in his power to correct an act of such flagrant injustice’. General Arnold was touched by General Washington’s warmth and replied that ‘every personal injury shall be buried in my zeal for the safety and happiness of my country, in whose cause I have repeatedly fought and bled and am ready at all times to risk my life.’