Book One: The Olive Branch Part Three: Saratoga Characters
Chapter Twenty-one
The Same Leg
Benedict Arnold. Bemis Heights, in the Province of New York. Tuesday, 7 October 1777.
Benedict Arnold is remembered in the Realm for his conduct at Saratoga.
He had the pass in the breast of his coat, where he could feel it, and he had been carrying it about for a fortnight like a stone in a shoe.
It was a perfectly ordinary pass. It said that Major-General Arnold had leave to go to Philadelphia with his two aides-de-camp, and it was signed by Major-General Gates, and any sentry in the army would have let him through on it, and he had not used it. The King’s army had taken Philadelphia since, so that it was now a pass to a city he could not have got into, and he had noticed that. He took it out sometimes, in the farmhouse on the heights that he shared with General Poor, and looked at it, and put it back. He did not know himself, most days, whether he kept it because he meant to go or because he liked to know that he could.
On the morning of Tuesday the seventh of October he sat at the table by the window in the Neilson house with a cup of coffee going cold at his elbow and looked out at the fog lifting off the river, and thought, as he had thought every morning for a fortnight, that today Burgoyne must either fight or go; and that whichever he did, Arnold would watch it from a window, like a man in a lodging house watching a fire across the street.
He was thirty-six. He was a major-general of the Continental army, which had taken the Congress some persuading, and he had commanded the left wing of this army until a fortnight ago, and now he commanded nothing at all.
He could have told anybody exactly how that had happened, and had, at length, to anybody who would listen, until his aides began to find reasons to be elsewhere.
Washington sent him north after Ticonderoga fell. With nine hundred men he relieved Fort Stanwix without a fight. Hon Yost Schuyler, condemned as a spy, had a mother who begged Arnold for his life. Arnold spared him, kept his brother hostage, and sent him into St Leger’s camp in a coat shot full of holes. He was to say Arnold’s army was as many as the leaves. After Oriskany the Indians had no appetite for that army. They left; St Leger followed. Arnold marched into the fort with his drums beating. He had told Gates to expect news of victory or no more of him. He liked the way that had come out.
He had been the hero of the north for about a month. Then he had come down to this camp at Bemis Heights and found Gates in command of it.
They had been friends, or something near it, in the summer and autumn of last year, when Arnold had built a fleet on Lake Champlain out of green timber and fought Carleton’s fleet with it off Valcour Island in October, and lost it, and burned what was left, and bought the colonies a year, because Carleton had looked at the season and gone back to Canada for the winter. Gates had defended him then to the Congress. But Gates had since become the man who had pushed General Schuyler out of the northern command, and Arnold was a friend of Schuyler’s, and his two aides were Schuyler’s men, and in this army that was enough.
Arnold sent the left wing in at Freeman’s farm until it had stopped Burgoyne. Gates’s report called it a detachment and omitted his name. Then the orders took Morgan from his command. At headquarters Gates said he had not known Arnold was still a major-general; had he not resigned to Congress? Lincoln would arrive in a day or two. After that Gates would have no occasion for him.
He demanded a pass. Gates sent an open letter to Hancock instead, like a servant’s character. Arnold returned it, asking what designing villain had traduced him. Only then did the ordinary pass arrive, and here it was.
His officers asked him to stay. Burgoyne was two miles away and must fight soon. On the first of October Arnold wrote again: treated as a cipher, never consulted, he would nevertheless sacrifice his feelings and remain for the battle in which he expected to rise or fall.
If Gates had answered that one, Arnold had not seen it.
They heard it at about one, from the far side of the woods to the west: not firing, but drums, and then the sound an army makes when a good part of it moves at once, which is like no other sound and which Arnold had never heard without his heart turning over.
He went out on to the heights with his glass. By two the story was all over the camp. Burgoyne had come out with fifteen hundred men or thereabouts and some guns, and drawn them up in a wheatfield on a farm a mile off, and set his foragers to cutting the wheat; and his soldiers were sitting down in their ranks in the stubble with their muskets between their knees, and his officers had climbed on the roof of a cabin with their glasses, and were looking at the left of the American lines as if it were a view. James Wilkinson, the adjutant-general, who was twenty and had a high opinion of himself and a higher one of General Gates, rode out to look and came back and reported, and General Gates heard him, and said, Arnold was told afterwards, Well, then, order on Morgan to begin the game.
Morgan began it, at about three, from the woods on the British right. Poor’s brigade went in against the grenadiers on the British left. Learned’s went at the Germans in the middle. And from the Neilson house, a mile away, Arnold heard the whole of it begin, the long tearing volleys and the guns, and the cheering, and stood on the heights with a glass in his hand that showed him nothing but smoke and trees, and was not in it.
He stood it for about half an hour.
He did not remember afterwards deciding anything. He remembered that his own horses, the sorrels his sister had sent up from New Haven in the summer, had never come, and that the horse at the door was a dark brown horse that belonged to a Mr Chester of Wethersfield, and that he got on it. He remembered somebody calling after him. He was told afterwards that he had struck an officer over the head on the way, a captain of Dearborn’s light infantry, who had been standing in the road; and he had no memory of it at all, and said so, and was sorry, and said that too, which he did not often do. He went down off the heights at a gallop towards the noise, and as he went past the headquarters he saw a horseman come out of it after him, and knew who had sent him, and did not stop.
Major Armstrong, of General Gates’s family, had orders to bring General Arnold back to camp before he did something rash. He followed him for half an hour across that field, and did not catch him until it no longer mattered.
The British line was gone by the time he reached it. It had lasted, Wilkinson said afterwards, who timed such things, fifty-two minutes from the first shot. The grenadiers on the left had been driven off their ground and their major taken. The Germans in the centre were going back through the wheat. On the right the light infantry had been fighting along the edge of the woods with Morgan’s riflemen, and a general officer on a grey horse had been riding up and down behind them all through it, rallying them, steadying them, making them stand: Fraser, everybody said afterwards, Burgoyne’s best. Arnold saw him. Everybody on that part of the field saw him, because he made sure of it. And then a rifleman somewhere in the woods, one of Morgan’s, whose name was argued about for long afterwards and never settled, shot him through the body, and he went down off the grey horse and was carried away, and the British right went back with him.
They must not reach the redoubts and sit behind their guns. He had the feeling in his stomach he had at Quebec before the barrier: the men were moving, and if he went now they would go with him. He looked for a regiment he knew.
He found a brigade of Massachusetts men in front of the nearer redoubt, the one Lord Balcarres held with the light infantry, and he rode out in front of it and took his hat off and told them to come on.
They came on. They came on across open ground, up a slope, against a log wall with guns behind it, and were thrown back, and came on again, and were thrown back again, and the slope was covered with them. Arnold rode along the front of them each time, shouting, with his hat in his hand. He had never in his life told a man to go anywhere. He told them to come.
The redoubt held. He looked along the line, through the smoke, and saw the other one, half a mile off on the left, where the German grenadiers were under Colonel Breymann, and saw that between the two there was nothing but some log cabins full of Canadians and a gap, and that Learned’s brigade was coming up in front of the gap.
He went across. He went between the two lines, along the front of the King’s redoubt and through the fire of both armies, the British firing at him because he was there and the Americans firing because the British were, and he came out at the other end without a scratch on him or the brown horse, which nobody who saw it afterwards could explain, least of all Arnold. He took Learned’s leading regiments and cleared the cabins with them, and the Canadians ran, and then he took Colonel Brooks’s Massachusetts regiment round to the back of Breymann’s redoubt, where there was a sally-port, a gap in the logs for the garrison to go in and out of, and went in through it at the head of them.
Inside it was very close and very loud, and full of smoke and Germans. Breymann was there, a big man with a sword, beating his own men back to the wall with it, and somebody shot him, his own men or ours, and he fell. The Germans began to go over the back wall. Arnold had the horse’s head round to follow them when a German grenadier who was lying on the ground with a wound in him, and who should by every rule have been out of the fight, raised himself on one elbow and fired.
The ball took Arnold in the left leg above the knee and broke the bone, and the same volley killed the horse, and the horse came down on its side with the leg under it.
He lay in the mud of Breymann’s redoubt with a dead horse on his leg and heard himself make a sound he did not recognise.
Then he saw a soldier of Brooks’s, a man he did not know, coming at the wounded German with his bayonet down, and he found that he had breath after all.
“Don’t hurt him!” he said. “He’s a fine fellow. He only did his duty.”
The soldier stopped, and looked at him, and looked at the German, who was lying back on the ground now with his eyes shut and was not going to do anybody any more harm that day, and lowered his bayonet, and went to help get the horse off the General.
Four men lifted the horse. He saw the leg. It was the left, the one the ball had found at Quebec below the knee; and now another had found it above the knee, so that the King’s army had very nearly the whole leg.
Somebody was kneeling by him. He looked up and it was Dearborn, Henry Dearborn, who had walked through the wilderness to Quebec with him two years ago and fed his dog to his company, and who was a major now, with the light infantry, and had come through the sally-port behind Brooks.
“General,” Dearborn said. “Where are you hit? Are you badly hurt?”
“In the same leg,” Arnold said. And then, because it was true, and because it was Dearborn, who had been at Quebec and would understand it: “I wish it had been my heart.”
Dearborn did not answer that. He took off his own coat and put it under Arnold’s head, and sent for a litter.
While they were waiting for it, a horseman came in through the sally-port, very much out of breath, and dismounted, and looked about the redoubt, and came and stood over Arnold, and took off his hat. It was Major Armstrong. He had General Gates’s compliments, he said, and General Gates’s orders that General Arnold should return to camp at once, lest he do anything rash.
Arnold looked up at him from the mud.
“You may tell General Gates,” he said, “that I am returning.”
They carried him back through the dark on a litter, four men to it and two more walking alongside to change over, by the light of the guns that were still firing at the redoubt the Germans had lost and would not get back. Every man they passed on the road knew who it was. A good many of them came over and walked beside the litter for a little way, and said things, and he heard about half of them.
The surgeons had him on a table in a tent behind the lines by about eight. There were three of them and they were very tired, and they looked at the leg by lantern-light for some time without saying much, and then the oldest of them said what Arnold had known he would say, which was that the bone was broken in more than one place and the safest thing was to take the leg off.
“No,” said Arnold.
The surgeon began to explain, kindly, what would happen to the leg if it stayed on.
“I know what will happen to it,” said Arnold. “I have had a ball in it before. You will set it as best you can, and it will be shorter than the other, and I shall walk on it, or ride on it, or be carried on it, and it will be mine.” He looked at the surgeon, and the surgeon looked at the leg, and then at the man it belonged to, and sighed, and sent for splints.
He did not make a noise while they set it. He talked to them the whole time instead, about the redoubt, and the sally-port, and what Burgoyne would do now, which was go, tonight or tomorrow, back to Saratoga and the river, with his best general dying and his German redoubt lost and nothing in front of him but a longer road; and the surgeons listened to him, or let him think so, and pulled.
Varick came to him after midnight, Richard Varick, his aide, who had been at headquarters. Arnold was lying on a cot in the corner of the hospital tent with the leg in a box and a blanket over it, not asleep.
Varick told him that the British had abandoned their camp in front of the redoubts and drawn everything back into their great redoubt on the river, and that General Fraser was dying in a house behind their lines and was not expected to live the day out, and that the whole army knew who had gone into Breymann’s redoubt first. He told him that the army had taken more than two hundred prisoners and eight brass guns, and a good many officers, and among them Sir Francis Clerke, General Burgoyne’s own aide-de-camp, shot through the body and brought in to headquarters.
“And General Gates?”
Varick hesitated. “General Gates had Sir Francis put on his own bed, sir,” he said. “And when Wilkinson came in from the field they were having an argument.”
“About what?”
“About the merits of the quarrel, sir. Whether the colonies had any right to be in arms against the King’s ministers at all, if they meant to keep the King. Sir Francis said they had not. General Gates said they had. Wilkinson says it got very warm. And then General Gates took Wilkinson out of the room and asked him whether he had ever in his life heard such an impudent fellow.”
Arnold lay and looked at the canvas over his head for a while.
“Was General Gates on the field today, Dick?” he said. “At any time?”
“No, sir.”
“No.” Arnold closed his eyes. “He had a great deal to do at headquarters. He had a war to explain.”
When Varick had gone he lay in the dark and listened to the rain beginning on the canvas, and to the men in the other cots, and to the guns, which had stopped.
Across the camp, at headquarters, General Gates would be writing to the Congress tonight, or tomorrow, about the action of the seventh, and Wilkinson would carry it to them, taking his time on the road, and it would be read out at York in the courthouse to the delegates of thirteen colonies, who would vote their thanks. Arnold lay in the dark with the leg in its box and composed the letter for him, sentence by sentence, as Gates would write it: the army, and the troops, and the enemy’s lines, and the orders the commanding general had given, and the gallantry of all ranks. It was a good letter. Gates wrote a good letter. Arnold went through it twice, from the beginning to the end, looking for his own name.