Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker: Sometime Brevet Lieutenant-Colonel on the Staff of his Excellency General WashingtonMitchell, S. Weir (Silas Weir)
History
Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker: Sometime Brevet Lieutenant-Colonel on the Staff of his Excellency General Washington
Mitchell, S. Weir (Silas Weir)
Quakers -- Fiction; United States -- History -- Revolution, 1775-1783 -- Fiction
Years afterward I was walking along the Strand in London, when, looking
up, I saw a man and woman approaching. It was Arnold with his wife.
His face was thin and wasted, a countenance writ over with gloom and
disappointment. His masculine vigour was gone. Cain could have borne
no plainer marks of vain remorse. He looked straight before him. As I
crossed the way, with no desire to meet him, I saw the woman look up at
him, a strange, melancholy sweetness in the pale, worn face of our
once beautiful Margaret. Her love was all that time had left him; poor,
broken, shunned, insulted, he was fast going to his grave. Where now he
lies I know not. Did he repent with bitter tears on that gentle breast?
God only knows. I walked on through the crowded street, and thought of
the words of my great chief, “There is a God who punishes the traitor.”
XXVI
The long winter of 1780 and 1781, with its changeful fortunes in the
South, went by without alteration in mine. There were constant alarms,
and leaves of absence were not to be had. We drilled our men, marched
hither and thither, and criticised our leaders over the winter
camp-fires, envying the men who, under Williams, Marion, and Morgan,
were keeping my Lord Cornwallis uncomfortably busy in the Carolinas. By
the end of January we knew with joy of the thrashing Tarleton got at the
Cowpens, and at last, in April, of the fight at Guilford. It began to
dawn on the wiseacres of the camp-fires why we were now here and now
there. In fact, we were no sooner hutted than we were on the march, if
there were but the least excuse in the way of a bit of open weather, or
a Tory raid.
Sir Henry was kept in doubt as to whether our chief meant for New York
from the north or from Jersey, and when at last he began to suspect that
it was not a city but an army which he intended to strike, it was too
late. Our brave old hawk, so long half asleep, as it looked, had begun
to flutter his wings, and to contemplate one of those sudden swoops
upon his prey which did to me attest the soldier of genius within this
patient, ceremonious gentleman. He was fast learning the art of war.
At last, as I have said, even we who were but simple pawns in the game
of empire knew in a measure why we had been thus used to bother and
detain this unlucky Sir Henry, who had failed to help Burgoyne, and was
now being well fooled again, to the ruin of Lord Cornwallis.
But all of this was chiefly in the spring. The winter up to February
was sad enough in our waiting camps, what with low diet, desertions,
mutinies, and the typhus fever, which cost us many more men than we lost
in battle. It brought us at last one day the pleasure of a visit from
the great physician, Benjamin Rush, now come to Morristown to see after
the sick, who were many.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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