Joseph clung to the notion that he and his mates were veterans, already tested by war. Just two weeks earlier, during the swelter of August, the regiment had gone aboard a ferry at the foot of Maiden Lane to cross the river to Brooklyn. Cannon fire, musketry, and smoke announced that a fierce struggle was raging there. Before leaving, the soldiers had shouted together, three cheers. The roar from their throats had been answered by the shouts of the people on the waterfront, who were not going over.
Too bad for them, Martin had thought with secret scorn. Events were afoot—he was determined to feel the pulse of history. He was about to join in a battle, just like you read about in the books. Folks would talk about it like they did about Julius Caesar and General Wolfe. He and his fellows were going to shine in history.
As the regiment swayed toward the landing opposite, he had turned away from his scareful imagining and swore, “I will endeavor to do my duty as well as I am able and leave the event with Providence.” On landing, he saw wounded, blood-crusted men, men limping and carried along. “The sight of these a little daunted me,” he remembered, “and made me think of home.”
He had tried to fight off the crowd of memories that appeared to his mind as if he were looking into the wrong end of a spyglass. Milford, his hometown sixty-odd miles up the Connecticut coast, was as far away as the moon. The arduous hours of plowing there now seemed play; the soft remonstrances of his grandfather, love sounds. The morning meadows of the home fields, dancing with bees and midges, were a distant paradise.
During the day of the fight at Brooklyn, he had watched the Maryland and Delaware boys sprint into the Gowanus millpond. The regulars fired at them with a booming 12-pounder that made the American boys lift their knees like old hags, trip and founder as tentacles of water dragged them under. The roar was something.
One man arched his back and fell. Oh, God! Another gasped and splashed, the water choking him. Them that got across emerged rat-like, coated with sopping sludge. After the tide went out, Joseph joined with others to wade into the mud and pull the bleach-white, slime-smeared corpses to land. Others came running from up the lines, telling tales of horror, of friends’ bellies ripped by Hessian bayonets, of redcoats surging at them from every direction.
His regiment marched here and there and fought a band of scarlet-clad foot soldiers near a cornfield. Their muskets made an angry stamping sound. Confusion snarled Joseph’s mind. A heavy burst of rain tore up the sky and left him and his fellows soaked. With night came whispered orders to march back to the ferry. They moved in perfect silence, not even a cough allowed. They boarded boats and were glad to make it across the river again, glad to be alive.
Now, in the heat of September, the war seemed like a dream. Now this immediate threat, the hulking ships, laughing sailors, yawning black cannon mouths, gave the lie to the notion that they were veterans. His blood thinned with the expectation of what was to come. War, Martin saw, had many faces.