“Mister Fennel!” Captain Barkley called through a speaking trumpet, “sheet in, if you please.”
The Blonde gathered way. “Take her in,” Barkley told the helmsman, and so the Blonde, the North, the Albany, the Nautilus, the Hope, and the five transports they escorted came to Majabigwaduce. They arrived safe in the harbor and anchored there. It was June 17th, 1779 and, for the first time since they had been driven from Boston in March 1776, the British were back in Massachusetts.
Some two hundred miles west and a little south of where the devils arrived, Brigadier-General Peleg Wadsworth paraded his battalion on the town common. Only seventeen were present, not one of whom could be described as correct. The youngest, Alexander, was five, while the oldest were the twelve-year-old Fowler twins, Rebecca and Dorcas, and they all gazed earnestly at the brigadier who was thirty-one. “What I want you to do,” the general said, “is march forward in single file. On the word of command you stop. What is the word of command, Jared?”
Jared, who was nine, thought for a second. “Halt?”
“Very good, Jared. The next command after that will be ‘prepare to form line,’ and you will do nothing!” The brigadier peered sternly at his diminutive troops who were in a column of march facing northwards. “Understand? You do nothing! Then I’m going to shout that companies one, two, three, and four will face left. Those companies,” and here the general walked down the line indicating which children comprised the leading four companies, “are the left wing. What are you, Jared?”
“The left wing,” Jared said, flapping his arms.
“Excellent! And you,” the general paced on down the rest of the line, “are companies five, six, seven, and eight, the right wing, and you will face right. I shall then give the order to face front and you turn. Then we counterwheel. Alexander? You’re the color party so you don’t move.”
“I want to kill a redcoat, Daddy,” Alexander pleaded.
“You don’t move, Alexander,” the color party’s father insisted, then repeated all he had said. Alexander was holding a long stick which, in the circumstances, substituted for the American flag. He now aimed this at the church and pretended to shoot redcoats and so had to be chivvied back into the column which singly and generally agreed that they understood what their erstwhile schoolmaster wanted them to do. “Now remember,” Peleg Wadsworth encouraged them, “that when I order counterwheel you march in the direction you’re facing, but you swing around like the arm of a clock! I want to see you turn smoothly. Are we all ready?”
A small crowd had gathered to watch and advise. One man, a visiting minister, had been appalled to see children so young being taught the rudiments of soldiery and had chided General Wadsworth on the matter, but the brigadier had assured the man of God that it was not the children who were being trained, but himself. He wished to understand precisely how a column of companies deployed into a regimental line that could blast an enemy with musket-fire. It was hard to advance troops in line because a long row of men inevitably straggled and lost its cohesion, to avoid which men must advance in companies, one behind the other, but such a column was fatally vulnerable to cannon-fire and quite unable to use most of its muskets, and so the art of the maneuver was to advance in column and then deploy swiftly into line. Wadsworth wanted to master the drill, but because he was a general of the Massachusetts Militia, and because the militia were mostly on their farms or in their workshops, Wadsworth was using children. The leading company, which would normally hold three ranks of thirty or more men each, was today comprised of Rebecca Fowler, aged twelve, and her nine year old cousin, Jared, both of whom were bright children and, Wadsworth hoped, capable of setting an example that the remaining children would copy. The maneuver he was attempting was difficult. The battalion would march in column toward the enemy and then halt. The leading companies would turn to face one way, the rearward companies turn to face the opposite direction, and then the whole line would counterwheel about the colors in a smooth pivot until commanded to halt. That would leave the first four companies facing away from the enemy and Wadsworth would need to order those eight children to about turn, at which point the whole formidable battalion would be ready to open fire against the enemy. Wadsworth had watched British regiments perform a similar maneuver on Long Island and he had reluctantly admired their precision and seen for himself the swiftness with which they had been transformed from a column into a long line that had unleashed a torrent of musketry on the American forces.
“Are we ready?” Wadsworth asked again. If he could explain the system to children, he had decided, then teaching the state militia should be easy enough. “Forward march!”
The children marched creditably well, though Alexander kept skipping to try and match steps with his companions. “Battalion!” Wadsworth called. “Halt!”
They halted. So far so good. “Battalion! Prepare to form line! Don’t move yet!” He paused a moment. “The left wing will face left! The right wing will face right, on my word of command. Battalion! Face front!”
Rebecca turned right instead of left and the battalion milled about in a moment of confusion before someone’s hair was pulled and Alexander began shouting bang as he shot imaginary redcoats coming from the Common Burying Ground. “Counterwheel, march!” Wadsworth shouted, and the children swiveled in different directions, and by now, the general thought despairingly, the British troops would have hammered two slaughterous volleys into his regiment. Perhaps, Wadsworth thought, using the children from the school where he had taught before becoming a soldier was not the best way to develop his mastery of infantry tactics. “Form line,” he shouted.
“The way to do it,” a man on crutches offered from the crowd, “is company by company. It’s slower, General, but slow and steady wins the day.”
“No, no, no!” someone else chimed in. “First company front right marker to step one pace left and one pace forward, and he becomes left marker, raises his hand, and the rest fall in on him. Or her, in your regiment, General.”
“Better company by company,” the crippled man insisted, “that’s how we did it at Germantown.”
“But you lost at Germantown,” the second man pointed out.
Johnny Fiske pretended to be shot, staggered dramatically and fell down, and Peleg Wadsworth, he found it hard to think of himself as a general, decided he had failed to explain the maneuver properly. He wondered whether he would ever need to master the intricacies of infantry drill. The French had joined America’s struggle for freedom and had sent an army across the Atlantic and the war was now being fought in the southern states very far from Massachusetts.
“Is the war won?” a voice interrupted his thoughts and he turned to see his wife, Elizabeth, carrying their one-year-old daughter, Zilpha, in her arms.
“I do believe,” Peleg Wadsworth said, “that the children have killed every last redcoat in America.”
“God be praised for that,” Elizabeth said lightly. She was twenty-six, five years younger than her husband, and pregnant again. Alexander was her oldest, then came three-year-old Charles and the infant Zilpha, who stared wide-eyed and solemn at her father. Elizabeth was almost as tall as her husband, who was putting notebook and pencil back into a uniform pocket. He looked good in uniform, she thought, though the white-faced blue coat with its elegant buttoned tail was in desperate need of patching, but there was no blue cloth available, not even in Boston, at least not at a price that Peleg and Elizabeth Wadsworth could afford. Elizabeth was secretly amused by her husband’s intense, worried expression. He was a good man, she thought fondly, as honest as the day was long and trusted by all his neighbors. He needed a haircut, though the slightly ragged dark locks gave his lean face an attractively rakish look. “I’m sorry to interrupt the war,” Elizabeth said, “but you have a visitor.” She nodded back towards their house where a man in uniform was tethering his horse to the hitching post.