December 15th, 1775
For some days, I have not written here. Opportunity for transcription was wanting, though matter was abundant. And after the battle, I could not write of it; words seemed insufficient.
We were occupied in the usual manner on the day of the eighth. We being ready to retire following our labor, we received orders that all companies should instead be prepared for deployment, but no word of our purpose. Accordingly, we returned to our barracks and ate our supper, prepared our weapons, and then waited uneasy for further command. Many of us fell to sleeping.
The guns had just gone off on the ships to mark the evening when Corporal Craigie appeared and ordered us form into rank.
Slant rose next to me. Pomp clasped him upon the arm, as he had seen men do, and, like a man, said, “Don’t you fear.”
Slant gave a look expressive of rebuke. “Just because I — stutter,” said he, “don’t mean I’m afraid.” He grimly turned and rolled his blanket.
I myself felt no fear as we passed out the doors; but this was not so much the effect of temerity as of the strangeness of the hour and the darkness, and the mystery of the errand.
We assembled upon the square; we marched out through the streets of Norfolk, encountering a great parade of soldiers with whom we joined number. When we were free of the houses, we could espy the length of our column, which was great, the march being led by the regulars of the 14th Regiment and a small detachment of the Queen’s Own Loyal Virginian Regiment. We were cautioned to make no sound, though the scudding of our feet on the road made a continual grinding, histle, and scrape.
I did not know whither we headed, but I fain would be there, be there — wheresoever there was — desired to be already engaged in confrontation, the terror full and present before me rather than measured out in paces of a foot and an inch.
We walked for hours through the country; our Regiment stopping only once, that those of us with shoes might lend them to such of those as marched without, and thus give them some respite.
Pomp was one of the unshod, and gentle-hearted Slant and I vied to proffer relief. He took my shoes, and watched me wind my feet in cloth to protect them from the extreme cold. He expressed his thanks; raised himself on his toes to even them out in too cramped a space, dropped back upon his feet, and said, “Now the big contest.” He squinted along the line. “We look like them armies of ghosts that walk through the skies. You know, damned. They seen them there in England, marching. True. True story.” Then he said to me, “You ain’t told us what you want do, when we won. When we has our triumph.”
“I would like,” said I, tying a knot at my ankle, “to play violin in an orchestra. Symphonies of Arne and Sammartini.”
Pomp regarded me with some amaze; Slant said, “Friend, you — . . . when you are there playing the music with the candles and the . . . fine ladies, you think back on this moment, tying you rags to you feet.” He smiled and offered me a hand to pull me up.
We set off again, our number sunk in complete silence. We passed farms and villages, lone dogs crying out at our vast column. Their voices were sharp and small, and their warnings were unheeded.
As said Pomp, we looked like an army of phantoms, marching upon those roads. Our faces were sullen. In the absence of warning or explanation, we watched carefully, lest the enemy burst out upon us. There was no assault, however, and nought disturbed the countryside as we marched south toward the front.
I must own that the two hours I walked without shoes were in the highest degree uncomfortable, not only for the roughness of the cold earth against my heels — which were not hardened as some others’ had been by years of such abrasion — but also for the extreme cold, which first chilled, and then dulled, the toes to insensitivity.
We passed through homestead and swamp, traversing a distance of perhaps ten miles in all. After a time, the darkness was so great that we could see little.
Some hours having passed, we were cautioned again to remain silent; and we found ourselves filing into a stockade in a broad marsh. Within, the stockade was cramped, some five hundred men gathered in a small and incommodious yard between tents.
We did not know where we were come, or what this march portended; though now that we were within the stockade walls, there was a continual whispering and muttering of intelligence; ’twas said that we were at Great-Bridge, and that the enemy was across a river from us, and that we should be called upon to defend the approaches to Norfolk. Peter, he who had lately escaped from the rebels, vaunted to all who would listen that it was his intelligence had convinced His Lordship to launch this expedition; for which no one knew whether to thank him or cuff him, and so we turned away.
It being perhaps three or four in the morning, our officers informed us that we could sleep for a time, each regiment directed to gather around their own campfires — all of which blazes were meager. There were some two hundred Negroes of the Ethiopian Regiment present, clustered around three flames that scarce would have warmed ten.
I was half way between waking and slumber in the dark corner of the stockade, shivering beneath my blanket — my shoes once again my own — my spirits ebbing with fatigue. My gaze was fixed without object upon the encampment, the dim figures who, an arm or a cheek caught in the distinguishing gesture of flame, huddled or moved about the mob of soldiery. Before me, half-seen, men lay on scant blankets, or smoked pipes and chafed their arms; near me, six soldiers on their knees offered prayers together; Coromantee fellows muttered poems or praise-songs to each other to prepare for battle; white grenadiers drank toddies and cracked nuts with their teeth. An older man of some fifty or sixty years walked among the others of our Regiment, offering a compound in a bowl which he spread on muskets as a blessing. Many shunned him; a few nodded, and handed him their weapons; he rubbed the unguent on the stock and muzzle, all the while whispering to the firearm coaxingly in some unknown tongue.
He came to a figure twenty feet away from me and offered his compound; and a voice replied, “What’s this, some fashion of luck grease? A man don’t need luck grease when he’s every inch of him superlative.”
This voice thrilled every nerve of my being — caught at my heart — for I knew its accents as well as my own.
I rose, disordered with delight, trepidation, confusion — I know not what — and said — louder than I liked, “Bono? Pro Bono?”
For my voice, I received hard stares from some around me, but jubilation at reunion confounded any sensibility of censure; and I rushed to his side as he twisted his head to face me, swore, and, in a voice of doubt, called my name: “Octavian?”
He half rose; I half sat; and hung thus between earth and air we grabbed at each other’s fingers — and he cackled a laugh, and clasped me to him. “Your Supreme Regal Highness Octavian Gitney,” he said, wonderingly. “This is a joy,” he said. “This is a genuine joy, to see your little cry-teary sulky-boy face.” Stepping back from our embrace, he swore, “Sweet Moses! You got a muscle in your arm. I felt it — a full muscle. Don’t you fret yourself, Prince O. It’s probably you been reading complete collected works instead of little poems.”
“I am no longer Octavian Gitney,” I said. “I am now called Octavian Nothing.”
“Well, I ain’t Pro Bono still. William Williams, Private. Like I told you, next time you saw me, I have a new name. So, sir.”
We extended our hands and shook.
“William Williams,” I repeated in wonder.
He explained, “They seem to favor the English names, the white folk. It’s my interest to please their affable selves at every o’clock of the day. So I reckoned the pale, forgettable names was the best. Two, where one wouldn’t do. I tried John Johns and Richard Richards. Richard Richards set a barn afire and he slain a sheep, so now I’m William Williams.” He frowned. “I warrant I missed something fine with Henry Henry. But there is time, sir, there is plentiful time in this war for Henry Henry and, if I commence English, for Aubrey Aubrey, too.”
He bade me sit, which I did, and we again expressed our mutual pleasure at our reunion, following which he asked after my fortunes, inquiring how long I had been at Norfolk. I answered him, and asked of him the same, and he replied to my counter-interrogative that he had been at Norfolk since Lord Dunmore had arrived there from Hampton; that he had been in His Lordship’s service since the summer, when he had found his labors elsewhere inconvenient; but any further disclosures on this lively subject were interrupted by another fervent question — for said he, “Your mother with you? She come down from Boston?”
I baulked. I had not considered the question. Of course he did not know; ’twas as if I conceived that some shudder would have reached him, who was so close a companion to us; as it is said that when Lisbon shook in the great quake, the spires of Boston quivered.
But unprepared, as I say, I baulked.
He studied me. “Prince O.?” he said.
Judge of my emotions upon being asked to recount her tale.
And I am ashamed to say: After long delay, I answered, “She is in excellent health. She — she sends her compliments and asks me to convey her deep affection and regard.”
At this, he smiled. “Princess Cass,” he said, in a tone of reverie. “When you seen her last?”
“Three months hence,” said I; then, “Four months. April.”
Bono, twitching my shirt, corrected, “That’s eight months.”
“When I last saw her, she sate in the garden —”
“And you left her behind? When you run?”
This was sudden; I could not speak. My mouth was, I know, open.
Around us, men slept upon the ground, or with subtle convulsion, approached the small fires. The watch walked the walls above us, their muskets at ready.
“She is a beauty,” said Bono. He sat back and pulled the edges of his blanket around his knees. “Which garden?” he said.
I begged his pardon.
“Which garden?” he repeated. “Was you back at the College?”
My wits were so disordered that I answered yes.
“After the rebels surrounded the city?”
Once again, I answered yes, miserably.
He said, “Reckon it was too early for the delphiniums.” Uncertain, I nodded; he continued, “Only damned parcel of labor your mother’s ever tried her hand at. That garden. She and Mr. Gitney, ordering me up and down the borders. The names all jumble up in my head. Your lupine and your sweet-sultan and such.”
Again, I nodded. Soldiers were rushing about near a white marquee, carrying casks.
Bono said, “She is a treat in that garden. That’s a very fine place to see her. She fix the borders different this year? She and Mr. Gitney had a plan last summer.”
“I regret I am not aware,” said I.
“They was going to have a switch in the midsummer. Take out the foxgloves when they die, put in the chrysanthemums, take out the daisies and the pansies and such, put in the — I can’t recall — the phlox or such.” He considered. “Lupine and foxglove. Them, they always muddled me. Both tall.” He asked, “You don’t know how the garden was?”
“I left, regrettably, before it was in flower,” I said. “In April.”
Bono nodded. “When a man puts in work, he wants to know it will bloom.”
I wished we would speak of something else. Three men dragged an ammunition cart through the mob of bodies, hissing to waken the sleeping.
Bono wrapped his hands in his sleeves. He said, “The enemy, he’s sitting, guess a half mile from where we is. We been here since the middle of November. We’ve had some skirmish. They send some fool across to us, we fire our guns a couple of hours; we send someone back, their snipers fire, we retreat, but no one can move a damn inch. Other day, me and a few others, we go and burned some houses.”
“Why are we brought here tonight?” I asked.
Bono shrugged. “Sally forth,” he said.
He pointed to places that lay unseen through the stockade walls and told me about each: the mud around the fortress, which made it impossible to build rampart or redoubt; the village across the bridge to the south, now fortified by the rebels; the church where their insolent boys shimmied up the steeple to peer at our walls; the earthworks, lightly guarded, where the rebel marksmen lurked.
“I have heard,” I said, “that there are a mere three hundred entrenched in the village.”
“Don’t rightly know,” said Bono. “I reckon more than three hundred.”
For longer we sat, content to be in company once more. At length, Bono opined, “I don’t believe those impatiens will ever grow near the pine tree. What do you reckon?”
“I believe I was informed that those near the pine tree are nasturtiums.”
“Whatever they is, I warrant they won’t grow there. Too much shade, and those needles choke them off.”
I was full of misery at my lie, but I found I could not disabuse him of it — I could conjure no words sufficient. And this was, perhaps, my secret desire: Though my mother would be dead for Pro Bono Gitney, for Private William Williams she was still in the garden; when we returned, she would be perched there in straw hat and bright India chintz, exchanging daisies for phlox; and she would stand and hold out her arms to us —“Octavian! William!”; and we should run to her and tell her our triumphs, our travails; and sit throughout the long afternoon.
In the darkness just before dawn, they called us to rise. When we stood, I saw for the first time that I was grown taller than Bono.