I Survived the American Revolution, 1776 Page 3

  Paul’s face turned white.

  “Where did you get those bruises?” he said softly. “Did he …”

  Nate hadn’t seen himself in a mirror. But from Paul’s horrified expression, Nate realized he must look worse than he imagined. Those angry bruises told Paul everything he needed to know about life with Storch.

  “Good Lord, Nate,” Paul whispered. “If I had known …”

  Nate looked away so Paul wouldn’t see his tears. But Paul was crying, too. And anyway, Nate wasn’t crying about Storch — he wouldn’t waste a tear on that snake-hearted beast. Nate was crying because he’d let himself lose faith in Paul.

  Neither cried for long. Paul put his hands on Nate’s shoulders. He leaned close.

  “Well,” he said. “We found each other, didn’t we?”

  They sat down in a shady spot near the tents. Paul peeled off his ugly green hat and placed it carefully on the ground.

  “My lucky charm,” he said.

  Nate tried not to stare at Paul, but he kept thinking of the devilish teenager who’d clowned around on Papa’s ships. He’d sneak vinegar into the men’s canteens. He’d taught the ship’s parrot to cuss in French. Nobody drove Papa and his men crazier — or made them laugh harder.

  But now Paul’s eyes looked serious and thoughtful. He listened closely as Nate told him about Storch, and how Eliza and Theo had become like family to him. He explained how he’d fled from Storch and had hoped to find a job on a ship.

  Paul shook his head. “Hardly any ships coming or going from New York City these days. The British attack is coming any day.”

  British warships had been streaming into the harbor all month, Paul said. Each one was packed tight with Redcoats. There were hundreds of ships here already, and tens of thousands of soldiers. The ships were anchored about eight miles from here, off Staten Island.

  “Those two warships today gave us just a little hint of what’s to come,” Paul said. “They just wanted to give us a little scare, and catch us by surprise. Next time we’ll be ready.”

  Paul told Nate that he’d been in the army for more than eighteen months, and stationed here in New York City since May. Before that he’d been living on his family’s farm in northern Connecticut.

  “I figured you’d gone back to sea,” Nate said.

  Paul shook his head, and a shadow passed across Paul’s face. “I couldn’t even look at the ocean. Not after …”

  Nate finished the sentence in his mind.

  After we lost Papa.

  He and Nate were quiet for moment.

  And then Paul went on. He told Nate about his life on the farm, how he’d loved being with his parents but had nearly gone crazy with boredom.

  “The chickens never laughed at my jokes,” he said.

  Paul wanted an adventure. He thought about heading out west, to the wilds of Ohio.

  But then, in April of 1775, everything changed.

  That was when the first battle broke out between British and American troops, in and around the Massachusetts towns of Lexington and Concord.

  The Revolutionary War had begun. Within a week, Paul had joined the fight.

  “I had no idea what it meant to be a soldier,” Paul said. “The first time I fired a musket, I almost blew my hand off.”

  He held out his thumb. It looked like the tip had been gnawed off by a barracuda.

  Paul chuckled.

  “But I had to learn pretty quick,” Paul said, serious again. That’s because just about seven weeks later, he found himself in the bloody Battle of Bunker Hill.

  “I almost didn’t make it out of that one alive,” he said quietly.

  And then Paul told Nate the story of how he almost died on a hill outside of Boston.

  “It was two months after Lexington and Concord — June 1775,” Paul began.

  Almost exactly one year ago.

  “I marched from Connecticut to Boston with about twenty other men from my town. It took a week — a hundred miles. My feet nearly fell off.”

  They joined about two thousand other American soldiers camped outside Boston.

  Boston was the headquarters for the British army in America, Paul explained. There were six thousand Redcoats stationed there, and they’d taken over the city.

  “The people of Boston were like prisoners. British soldiers moved into any house they wanted. There wasn’t enough food. Shops were shut down. It was so bad. We had to do something to get the British out.”

  There was no American army yet. But each town in the colonies had a militia — a small group of volunteer fighters. Few of those men had ever fought in a war before.

  “We were all just regular fellows — farmers, bakers, shopkeepers, shoemakers, sailors. Some of us didn’t even know how to shoot.”

  And this ragtag group was about to battle the most powerful army in the world.

  Paul and the other men knew all about the Redcoats. They were experienced fighters.

  The British carried modern muskets. And their muskets had extra killing power — a sharp sword attached to the end — a bayonet.

  “We heard that the British shoot first. And if you don’t die from a musket ball to your gut, they’ll finish you off with a quick stab in the heart with a bayonet.”

  Nate flinched.

  The night before the battle, the Americans had been warned that thousands of British troops were on their way. Paul spent the night frantically helping to build fortifications — dirt walls and ditches that could protect them from musket fire.

  “We worked all night,” he said.

  And then, just after dawn, the British attacked.

  “We could hear them before we could see them,” Paul said. “Their battle drums make a terrible sound.”

  Paul leaned forward. His voice dropped to a husky whisper.

  “RAT, tat, tat, tat, tat.

  RAT, tat, tat, tat, tat.

  RAT, tat, tat, tat, tat.”

  The hairs on the back of Nate’s neck stood up.

  “Then came the cannon explosions. British warships had sailed into the river below us, and were blasting us nonstop with cannonballs.”

  “I was in one of the ditches — a trench. Somehow a big rock had gotten into my boot. I bent down to get it out. And the second I lowered my head, something huge went screaming over it.”

  “A cannonball?” Nate gasped.

  “At least a twenty-pounder,” Paul said. “It knocked my hat off. It could have taken off my head!”

  He patted the ugly green hat next to him. “I always knew this was my lucky hat. I never go anywhere without it.”

  Paul took a deep breath.

  “I was terrified. I just wanted to run away.”

  “But you didn’t run,” Nate guessed.

  “No,” Paul said. “It’s amazing that none of us did.

  “We were high up on that hill,” Paul went on. “That’s always where you want to be in a battle. On the high ground. It’s easier to knock out your enemies when they’re coming up a hill. And we were dug in — protected by our dirt walls and trenches.

  “The drums got louder.”

  The British army finally appeared — four thousand Redcoat soldiers, marching in endless lines. They started up the hill.

  “But we didn’t shoot. Our plan was to wait until the British were close — close enough to see their eyes. And then we’d all shoot at once.”

  The British came closer, and closer.

  Finally the order came.

  “Fire!”

  KI-crack! KI-crack! KI-crack! KI-crack!

  Thousands of musket balls flew through the air.

  “Hundreds of Redcoats fell. We Americans ducked behind our defenses and reloaded. Then we fired again.”

  KI-crack! KI-crack! KI-crack! KI-crack!

  “The Redcoats sent up three waves of soldiers. And then the battle was over.”

  Paul took a deep breath, like he’d been running. Nate’s own heart was pounding. It took him a moment to remember th
at they weren’t on that bloody hill outside Boston. They were in New York City, sitting together in the grass.

  “So you won the battle?” Nate asked excitedly.

  “No,” Paul said.

  “You lost?” Nate asked, confused.

  “Not really. We ran out of gunpowder. We had to retreat — escape down the back end of the hill. We didn’t free Boston. So no. We definitely didn’t win.

  “But we didn’t lose, either. More than a thousand Redcoats were killed or hurt that day. We lost about three hundred, not nearly as many as we thought we would.”

  But there was more.

  “And we showed that Americans are willing to fight the most powerful army in the world. We showed that we can hold our ground.”

  As Paul kept talking, Nate realized how much he didn’t know about the war. Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill had just been the beginning. The Americans had lost a big battle up in Quebec, Canada. But they beat the British in a fight down in South Carolina. And this past March, the Americans finally drove the British out of Boston.

  And then came the most shocking news: America wasn’t part of England anymore. Not really. Just last week, on July 4, 1776, leaders of the American colonies signed a letter to King George. It had an important-sounding name: the Declaration of Independence.

  “Our captain read it to us a few nights ago. I can’t remember the fancy words, but basically it said that the American colonies are joining together to make a brand-new country, a free country: the United States of America.

  “That’s what this war is about. We are fighting for our new country.”

  And the biggest battle was about to happen right here — in New York.

  Paul leaned forward. His eyes were flickering with excitement.

  “So you’ll join us?”

  “The army?” Nate asked.

  Now Paul had to be kidding — or crazy.

  Nate couldn’t fight in a war. He was only eleven years old!

  But Paul was dead serious. And he wasn’t saying Nate should be a soldier — he’d have to be at least fourteen for that.

  “I need to talk to the captain,” Paul said. “He’s been looking for a camp helper.”

  “He’d let me stay here?” Nate asked.

  “I bet he would.”

  Nate thought of what Papa used to say as they would stand together on the deck of his ship, looking out over the ocean. “You never know what’s ahead.”

  Papa was right.

  Barely a day ago, Nate had been running for his life. And now here he was with his oldest friend in the world. He was going to be a part of George Washington’s army.

  Nate barely realized that he was smiling, and nodding.

  “Looks like your answer is yes,” Paul said.

  The days at the army camp started at dawn, when the drummers sounded the wake-up song. Nate chopped wood, dug trenches, and hauled water. By the end of the day, his muscles quivered like pudding. His hands were covered with bloody blisters. At night he’d collapse into his little droopy tent next to Paul’s.

  At first Nate felt himself under the watchful glare of Captain Marsh. He was the gruff and unsmiling head of the Connecticut 5th, Paul’s army company. Captain Marsh made it clear from the start that he had doubts about hiring a boy so young.

  “This is the army,” he’d told Paul. “Not a nursery.”

  Nate’s cheeks burned, but he was determined to prove the captain wrong.

  At the end of the first week, he caught the captain watching him as he helped dig a trench under the roasting sun.

  “Good work, son,” Captain Marsh said, with the flicker of an almost-smile.

  Nate felt like he’d won a medal.

  Nate missed Eliza and Theo. But he soon felt at home in the camp. The eighty men of the Connecticut 5th welcomed him. Paul hardly let Nate out of his sight. A few of the other men kept their eyes on Nate, too.

  The oldest of the group was Samuel. He was fifty-three — ancient! But he was strong and fast and the best shooter of the group.

  There was James, the youngest of the soldiers. He came from a rich family — the other men made fun of the silver buckles on his boots. But James wasn’t all fancy. He had the loudest burp of the bunch. He was always leaving little gifts in Nate’s tent — a pair of wool socks, a tin canteen. He even managed to get Nate a frontier shirt, one of the tie-front shirts most of the men in the army wore with pride. Nate was happy to throw away the rough, stained shirt he’d been wearing for months.

  Another man who looked after Nate was Martin. He cleaned and bandaged Nate’s blistered hands and patched up the holes in the bottom of his boots. Up until a few months ago, Martin had been a slave. His owner had freed him so he could fight in the war. But that same man had refused to free Martin’s wife and daughter. Now Martin hoped his meager soldiers’ pay would help him save up to buy freedom for his family.

  There were a few hundred other black soldiers in the army. Many more worked in the camp. They were mostly slaves, sent by their masters to dig trenches and build walls. Watching those men work gave Nate an uneasy feeling — like he’d bitten into something rotten, something he couldn’t spit out or swallow.

  He’d learned more about the Declaration of Independence. It said that all men were created equal. Why didn’t that include people like Martin’s wife, like those men digging trenches for George Washington, like Eliza and Theo?

  Trying to answer that question was like looking for buried treasure without a map. Nate searched his mind for an answer, but he couldn’t find it anywhere.

  When Nate wasn’t busy with his chores, he sometimes watched the men do their practice drills. They’d march through the streets to the different drum songs. Those drums songs weren’t for fun. In a noisy battle, the officers couldn’t just shout out their orders; their voices would be drowned out by the explosions. It was those different rat, tat, tats that told the men which way to turn, how fast to march, when to load their muskets, and when to shoot.

  When they were done marching, the men would practice loading their muskets quickly, which seemed to Nate to be the hardest part of being a soldier. One mistake and the musket could blow up your hand. The ammunition came wrapped in little paper packets called cartridges. Inside was a single musket ball and just enough gunpowder for one shot. The men had to tear those packets open with their teeth.

  And, boy, was it hard to get the muskets to fire right! No wonder Paul almost blew his hand off when he was learning.

  Of course, Nate didn’t have a musket. But Samuel was determined to teach him how to load and fire one perfectly. He spent hours teaching Nate how to pour in the gunpowder. He showed him the right way to ram the musket ball down the gun’s barrel. Samuel couldn’t let Nate actually shoot — gunpowder was too precious to waste on an eleven-year-old.

  At the end of the long days, when the marching and musket practice were done, the men could relax by the camp’s big fire. And these were Nate’s favorite times.

  The men would trade battle stories. They’d show off their scars — thighs chewed up by musket balls, bellies and backs clawed by bayonets.

  They’d raise up their tin cups of warm water with molasses. And they’d cheer the brave leaders whose words had sparked this fight for freedom.

  “To John Adams!”

  “To Dr. Warren!”

  “To Samuel Adams!”

  “To Paul Revere!”

  But they saved their loudest cheers for their commander, General George Washington.

  Nate saw the general often. He’d ride by the camp on his gray stallion. He was very tall, and always wore an elegant blue uniform with silver buttons and a bright white sash across his chest.

  He looked almost kingly, Nate thought. But the men said he worked as hard as a common soldier.

  “To General Washington!” the men would sing. “God save the United States of America!”

  Those cheers rang through Nate’s mind as he lay in his tent at night.

&
nbsp; But some nights Nate woke up to a different sound. It came from his nightmares.

  RAT, tat, tat, tat, tat.

  RAT, tat, tat, tat, tat.

  On those nights it would take a very long time for Nate to fall back to sleep.

  By the second week of August, there were about twenty thousand American soldiers in the camps in and around New York City, with more arriving every day. The Americans had built ten big forts on Manhattan Island, and six more across the river in Brooklyn. Each fort had a rough building surrounded by tall dirt-and-stone walls and deep trenches. The walls were topped with cannons.

  The men felt ready for battle.

  But still the British didn’t attack.

  Rumors swirled. They heard about a new kind of cannonball called a shell. It exploded when it hit the ground. Spies reported that there were now more than 430 British ships anchored off nearby Staten Island, and at least forty thousand soldiers.

  And not all of them were Redcoats.

  King George had hired eight thousand German soldiers to fight alongside the British. They were known as Hessians.

  Hessians!

  The men whispered the word, like it was a curse.

  “They’re professional killers from Germany,” Paul explained.

  Hessians were famous around the world for their dark green-and-red uniforms, their pointed silver hats, their thick black mustaches — and their thirst for blood. They began training when they were five years old. They fought mostly with their bayonets, which were twice as long as the ones the British used.

  Nate couldn’t tell if the stories were completely true. He thought of the legends Papa and the men used to tell, about giant squid and whales that swallowed ships. The Hessians sounded more like storybook monsters than real-life soldiers. But there was no mistaking the fear in the men’s eyes.

  But there was something even more dangerous than Hessians, and it was lurking right in the camp. Nate discovered it on a boiling afternoon.

  The men were on a marching drill, and Nate was alone in the camp doing his chores. The weather was beastly hot. The sun beat down. Mosquitos attacked them at night. And the usual camp smells turned into an unbearable stink.