The Fearsome Death-Struggle in the Forest.
Were I Homer and Shakespeare and Milton, merged all in one, I should still
not know how fitly to depict the terrible scene which followed.
I had seen poor headstrong, wilful Cox pitch forward upon the mane of his
horse, as if all at once his spine had been turned, into limp string; I
saw now a ring of fire run out in spitting tongues of flame around the
gulf, and a circle of thin whitish smoke slowly raise itself through the
dark leaves of the girdling bushes. It was an appalling second of mental
numbness during which I looked at this strange sight, and seemed not at
all to comprehend it.
Then Herkimer cried out, shrilly: "My God! here it is!" and, whirling his
mare about, dashed down the hill-side again. I followed him, keeping ahead
of Paris, and pushing my horse forward through the aimlessly swarming
footmen of our van with a fierce, unintelligent excitement.
The air was filled now with shouts--what they were I did not know. The
solid body of our troops on the corduroy bridge were huddling together
like sheep in a storm. From the outer edges of this mass men were sinking
to the ground. The tipping, rolling logs tossed these bodies on their ends
off into the water, or under the feet of the others. Cox's horse had
jumped sidelong into the marsh, and now, its hind-quarters sinking in the
mire, plunged wildly, flinging the inert body still fastened in the
stirrups from side to side. Some of our men were firing their guns at
random into the underbrush.
All this I saw in the swift gallop down the hill to rejoin the Brigadier.
As I jerked up my horse beside him, a blood-curdling chorus of strange
barking screams, as from the throats of maniac women, rose at the farther
side of the ravine, drowning the shouts of our men, the ping-g-g of the
whistling bullets, and even the sharp crack of the muskets. It was the
Indian war-whoop! A swarm of savages were leaping from the bush in all
directions, and falling upon our men as they stood jammed together on the
causeway. It was a horrible spectacle--of naked, yelling devils, daubed
with vermilion and ghastly yellow, rushing with uplifted hatchets and
flashing knives upon this huddled mass of white men, our friends and
neighbors. These, after the first bewildering shock, made what defence
they could, shooting right and left, and beating down their assailants
with terrific smashing blows from their gun-stocks. But the throng on the
sliding logs made them almost powerless, and into their jumbled ranks kept
pouring the pitiless rain of bullets from the bush.
By God's providence there were cooler brains and wiser heads than mine,
here in the ravine, to face and grapple with this awful crisis.
Old Herkimer seemed before my very eyes to wax bigger and stronger and
calmer in the saddle, as this pandemonium unfolded in front of us. His
orders I forget now--or what part I played at first in carrying them
out--but they were given swiftly and with cool comprehension of all our
needs. I should think that within five minutes from the first shot of the
attack, our forces--or what was left of them--had been drawn out of the
cruel helplessness of their position in the centre of the swamp. This
could never have been done had not Honikol Herkimer kept perfectly his
self-control and balance, like an eagle in a tempest.
Visscher's regiment, in the rear, had not got fairly into the gulf, owing
to the delay in dragging the wagon along, when the ambushed Indians fired
their first volley; and he and his men, finding themselves outside the
fiery circle, promptly ran away. They were followed by many of the
Indians, which weakened the attacking force on the eastern side of the
ravine. Peter Bellinger, therefore, was able to push his way back again
from the beginning of the corduroy bridge into the woods on both sides of
the road beyond, where cover was to be had. It was a noble sight to see
the stalwart Palatine farmers of his regiment--these Petries, Weavers,
Helmers, and Dygerts of the German Flatts--fight their path backward
through the hail of lead, crushing Mohawk skulls as though they had been
egg-shells with the mighty flail-like swing of their clubbed muskets, and
returning fire only to kill every time. The bulk of Cox's Canajoharie
regiment and of Klock's Stone Arabia yeomen were pulled forward to the
rising ground on the west side, and spread themselves out in the timber
as well as they could, north and south of the road.
While these wise measures were being ordered, we three horsemen had,
strangely enough, been out of the range of fire; but now, as we turned to
ride back, a sudden shower of bullets came whizzing past us. My horse was
struck in the head, and began staggering forward blindly. I leaped from
his back as he toppled, only to come in violent collision with General
Herkimer, whose white mare, fatally wounded, had toppled toward me. The
Brigadier helped extricate himself from the saddle, and started with the
rest of us to run up the hill for cover, but stumbled and stopped after a
step or two. The bone of his right leg had been shattered by the ball
which killed his steed, and his high boot was already welling with blood.
It was in my arms, never put to better purpose, that the honest old man
was carried up the side-hill. Here, under a low-branched beech some two
rods from the road, Dr. William Petrie stripped off the boot, and
bandaged, as best he could, the wounded leg. The spot was not well
sheltered, but here the Brigadier, a little pale, yet still calm and
resolute, said he would sit and see the battle out. Several young men, at
a hint from the doctor, ran down through the sweeping fire to the edge of
the morass, unfastened the big saddle from his dead mare, and safely
brought it to us. On this the brave old German took his seat, with the
maimed leg stretched out on some boughs hastily gathered, and coolly
lighting his pipe, proceeded to look about him.
"Can we not find a safer place for you farther back, Brigadier?" I asked.
"No; here I will sit," he answered, stoutly. "The men can see me here; I
will face the enemy till I die."
All this time the rattle of musketry, the screech of flying bullets, the
hoarse din and clamor of forest warfare, had never for an instant abated.
Looking down upon the open space of the gully's bottom, we could see more
than two-score corpses piled upon the logs of the road, or upon little
mounds of black soil which showed above the level of the slough,
half-hidden by the willows and tall, rank tufts of swamp-grass. Save for
the dead, this natural clearing was well-nigh deserted. Captain Jacob
Seeber was in sight, upon a hillock below us to the north, with a score of
his Canajoharie company in a circle, firing outward at the enemy. Across
the ravine Captain Jacob Gardenier, a gigantic farmer, armed with a
captured Indian spear, had cut loose with his men from Visscher's retreat,
and had fought his way back to help us. Farther to the south, some of the
Cherry Valley men had got trees, and were holding the Indians at bay.
The hot August sun poured its fiercest rays down upon the heaps of dead
and wounded in this forest cockpit, and turned into golden haze the mist
of smoke encircling it. Through this pale veil we saw, from time to time,
forms struggling in the dusk of the thicket beyond. Behind each tree-trunk
was the stage whereon a life-drama was being played, with a sickening and
tragic sameness in them all. The yeoman from his cover would fire; if he
missed, forth upon him would dart the savage, raised hatchet gleaming--and
there would be a widow the more in some one of our Valley homes.
"Put two men behind each tree," ordered keen-eyed Herkimer. "Then, when
one fires, the other's gun will be loaded for the Indian on his running
forward." After this command had been followed, the battle went better
for us.
There was a hideous fascination in this spectacle stretched before us. An
hour ago it had been so softly peaceful, with the little brook picking its
clean way in the sunlight through the morass, and the kingfisher flitting
among the willows, and the bees' drone laying like a spell of indolence
upon the heated air. Now the swale was choked with corpses! The rivulet
ran red with blood, and sluggishly spread its current around barriers of
dead men. Bullets whistled across the gulf, cutting off boughs of trees as
with a knife, and scattering tufts of leaves like feathers from a hawk
stricken in its flight. The heavy air grew thick with smoke, dashed by
swift streaks of dancing flame. The demon-like screams of the savages, the
shouts and moans and curses of our own men, made hearing horrible.
Yes--horrible is the right word!
A frightened owl, I remember, was routed by the tumult from its sleepy
perch, and flew slowly over the open space of the ravine. So curious a
compound is man!--we watched the great brown-winged creature flap its
purblind way across from wood to wood, and speculated there, as we stood
in the jaws of death, if some random ball would hit it!
I am writing of all this as if I did nothing but look about me while
others fought. Of course that could not have been the case. I recall now
these fragmentary impressions of the scene around me with a distinctness
and with a plenitude of minutiae which surprise me, the more that I
remember little enough of what I myself did. But when a man is in a fight
for his life there are no details. He is either to come out of it or he
isn't, and that is about all he thinks of.
I have put down nothing about what was now the most serious part of the
struggle--the combat with the German mercenaries and Tory volunteers on
the high ground beyond the ravine. I conceive it to have been the plan of
the enemy to let the Indians lie hidden round about the gulf until our
rear-guard had entered it. Then they were to disclose their ambuscade,
sweeping the corduroy bridge with fire, while the Germans and Tories,
meeting our van up on the crown of the hill beyond, were to attack and
drive it back upon our flank in the gulf bottom, when we should have been
wholly at the mercy of the encircling fusilade from the hills. Fortunately
St. Leger had given the Indians a quart of rum apiece before they started;
this was our salvation. The savages were too excited to wait, and closed
too soon the fiery ring which was to destroy us all. This premature action
cut off our rear, but it also prevented our van reaching the point where
the white foe lay watching for us. Thus we were able to form upon our
centre, after the first awful shock was over, and to then force our way
backward or forward to some sort of cover before the Germans and Tories
came upon us.
The fighting in which I bore a part was at the farthest western point,
where the remnants of four or five companies, half buried in the gloom of
the impenetrable wood, on a line stretching along the whole crest of the
hill, held these troops at bay. We lay or crouched behind leafy coverts,
crawling from place to place as our range was reached by the enemy,
shooting from the shield of tree-trunks or of tangled clumps of small
firs, or, best of all, of fallen and prostrate logs.
Often, when one of us, creeping cautiously forward, gained a spot which
promised better shelter, it was to find it already tenanted by a corpse,
perhaps of a near and dear friend. It was thus that I came upon the body
of Major John Eisenlord, and later upon what was left of poor Barent
Coppernol, lying half-hidden among the running hemlock, scalpless and
cold. It was from one of these recesses, too, that I saw stout old Isaac
Paris shot down, and then dragged away a prisoner by the Tories, to be
handed over to the hatchets of their Indian friends a few days hence.
Fancy three hours of this horrible forest warfare, in which every minute
bore a whole lifetime's strain and burden of peril!
We knew not then how time passed, and could but dimly guess how things
were going beyond the brambled copse in which we fought. Vague
intimations reached our ears, as the sounds of battle now receded, now
drew near, that the issue of the day still hung in suspense. The war-yells
of the Indians to the rear were heard less often now. The conflict seemed
to be spreading out over a greater area, to judge from the faintness of
some of the rifle reports which came to us. But we could not tell which
side was giving way, nor was there much time to think of this: all our
vigilance and attention were needed from moment to moment to keep
ourselves alive.
All at once, with a terrific swoop, there burst upon the forest a great
storm, with loud-rolling thunder and a drenching downfall of rain. We had
been too grimly engrossed in the affairs of the earth to note the
darkening sky. The tempest broke upon us unawares. The wind fairly roared
through the branches high above us; blinding flashes of lightning blazed
in the shadows of the wood. Huge boughs were wrenched bodily off by the
blast. Streaks of flame ran zigzag down the sides of the tall, straight
hemlocks. The forest fairly rocked under the convulsion of the elements.
We wrapped our neckcloths or kerchiefs about our gunlocks, and crouched
under shelter from the pelting sheets of water as well as might be. As for
the fight, it ceased utterly.
While we lay thus quiescent in the rain, I heard a low, distant report
from the west, which seemed distinct among the growlings of the thunder;
there followed another, and a third. It was the belated signal from
the fort!
I made my way back to the hill-side as best I could, under the dripping
brambles, over the drenched and slippery ground vines, upon the chance
that the Brigadier had not heard the reports.
The commander still sat on his saddle under the beech-tree where I had
left him. Some watch-coats had been stretched over the lowest branches
above him, forming a tolerable shelter. His honest brown face seemed to
have grown wan and aged during the day. He protested that he had little or
no pain from his wound, but the repressed lines about his lips belied
their assurance. He smiled with gentle irony when I told him of what I had
heard, and how I had hastened to apprise him of it.
"I must indeed be getting old," he said to his brother George. "The young
men think I can no longer hear cannon when they are fired off."
The half-dozen officers who squatted or stood about under the tree,
avoiding the streams which fell from the holes in the improvised roof,
told me a terrible story of the day's slaughter. Of our eight hundred,
nearly half were killed. Visscher's regiment had been chased northward
toward the river, whither the fighting from the ravine had also in large
part drifted. How the combat was going down there, it was difficult to
say. There were dead men behind every tree, it seemed. Commands were so
broken up, and troops so scattered by the stern exigencies of forest
fighting, that it could not be known who was living and who was dead.
What made all this doubly tragic in my ears was that these officers, who
recounted to me our losses, had to name their own kinsmen among the slain.
Beneath the general grief and dismay in the presence of this great
catastrophe were the cruel gnawings of personal anguish.
"My son Robert lies out there, just beyond the tamarack," said Colonel
Samuel Campbell to me, in a hoarse whisper.
"My brother Stufel killed two Mohawks before he died; he is on the knoll
there with most of his men," said Captain Fox.
Major William Seeber, himself wounded beyond help, said gravely: "God only
knows whether my boy Jacob lives or not; but Audolph is gone, and my
brother Saffreness and his son James." The old merchant said this with dry
eyes, but with the bitterness of a broken heart.
I told them of the shooting and capture of Paris and the death of
Eisenlord. My news created no impression, apparently. Our minds were
saturated with horror. Of the nine Snells who came with us, seven were
said to be dead already.
The storm stopped as abruptly as it had come upon us. Of a sudden it grew
lighter, and the rain dwindled to a fine mist. Great luminous masses of
white appeared in the sky, pushing aside the leaden clouds. Then all at
once the sun was shining.
On that instant shots rang out here and there through the forest. The
fight began again.
The two hours which followed seem to me now but the indistinct space of a
few minutes. Our men had seized upon the leisure of the lull to eat what
food was at hand in their pockets, and felt now refreshed in strength.
They had had time, too, to learn something of the awful debt of vengeance
they owed the enemy. A sombre rage possessed them, and gave to their
hearts a giant's daring. Heroes before, they became Titans now.
The vapors steaming up in the sunlight from the wet earth seemed to bear
the scent of blood. The odor affected our senses. We ran forth in parties
now, disdaining cover. Some fell; we leaped over their writhing forms,
dashed our fierce way through the thicket to where the tell-tale smoke
arose, and smote, stabbed, stamped out the life of, the ambushed foe.
Under the sway of this frenzy, timorous men swelled into veritable
paladins. The least reckless of us rushed upon death with breast bared and
with clinched fists.
A body of us were thus scouring the wood on the crest of the hill, pushing
through the tangle of dead brush and thick high brake, which soaked us
afresh to the waist, resolute to overcome and kill whomsoever we could
reach. Below us, in the direction of the river, though half a mile this
side of it, we could hear a scattering fusillade maintained, which bespoke
bush-fighting. Toward this we made our way, firing at momentary glimpses
of figures in the thicket, and driving scattered groups of the foe before
us as we ran.
Coming out upon the brow of the hill, and peering through the saplings and
underbrush, we could see that big Captain Gardenier and his Caughnawaga
men were gathered in three or four parties behind clumps of alders in the
bottom, loading and firing upon an enemy invisible to us. While we were
looking down and hesitating how best to go to his succor, one of old
Sammons's sons came bounding down the side-hill, all excitement, crying:
"Help is here from the fort!"
Sure enough, close behind him were descending some fourscore men, whose
musket-barrels and cocked hats we could distinguish swaying above the
bushes, as they advanced in regular order.
I think I see huge, burly Gardenier still, standing in his woollen
shirt-sleeves, begrimed with powder and mud, one hand holding his spear,
the other shading his eyes against the sinking sun as he scanned the
new-comers.
"Who's there?" he roared at them.
"From the fort!" we could hear the answer.
Our hearts leaped with joy at this, and we began with one accord to get to
the foot of the hill, to meet these preservers. Down the steep side we
clambered, through the dense second-growth, in hot haste and all
confidence. We had some friendly Oneidas with us, and I had to tell them
to keep back, lest Gardenier, deeming them Mohawks, should fire upon them.
Coming to the edge of the swampy clearing we saw a strange sight.
Captain Gardenier was some yards in advance of his men, struggling like a
mad Hercules with half a dozen of these new-comers, hurling them right and
left, then falling to the ground, pinned through each thigh by a bayonet,
and pulling down his nearest assailant upon his breast to serve as
a shield.
While we took in this astounding spectacle, young Sammons was dancing
with excitement.
"In God's name, Captain," he shrieked, "you are killing our friends!"
"Friends be damned!" yelled back Gardenier, still struggling with all his
vast might. "These art Tories. _Fire_! you fools! _Fire_!"
It was the truth. They were indeed Tories--double traitors to their former
friends. As Gardenier shouted out his command, these ruffians raised their
guns, and there sprang up from the bushes on either side of them as many
more savages, with weapons lifting for a volley.
How it was I know not, but they never fired that volley. Our muskets
seemed to poise and discharge themselves of their own volition, and a
score of the villains, white and red, tumbled before us. Gardenier's men
had recovered their senses as well, and, pouring in a deadly fusillade,
dashed furiously forward with clubbed muskets upon the unmasked foe. These
latter would now have retreated up the hill again, whence they could fire
to advantage, but we at this leaped forth upon their flank, and they, with
a futile shot or two, turned and fled in every direction, we all in
wild pursuit.
Ah, that chase! Over rotten, moss-grown logs, weaving between gnarled
tree-trunks, slipping on treacherous twigs, the wet saplings whipping our
faces, the boughs knocking against our guns, in savage heat we tore
forward, loading and firing as we ran.
The pursuit had a malignant pleasure in it: we knew the men we were
driving before us. Cries of recognition rose through the woods; names of
renegades were shouted out which had a sinister familiarity in all
our ears.
I came upon young Stephen Watts, the boyish brother of Lady Johnson, lying
piteously prone against some roots, his neck torn with a hideous wound of
some sort; he did not know me, and I passed him by with a bitter hardening
of the heart. What did he here, making war upon my Valley? One of the
Papist Scots from Johnstown, Angus McDonell, was shot, knocked down, and
left senseless behind us. So far from there being any pang of compassion
for him, we cheered his fall, and pushed fiercely on. The scent of blood
in the moist air had made us wild beasts all.
I found myself at last near the river, and on the edge of a morass, where
the sun was shining upon the purple flowers of the sweet-flag, and tall
rushes rose above little miry pools. I had with me a young Dutch
farmer--John Van Antwerp--and three Oneida Indians, who had apparently
attached themselves to me on account of my epaulettes. We had followed
thus far at some distance a party of four or five Tories and Indians; we
came to a halt here, puzzled as to the course they had taken.
While my Indians, bent double, were running about scanning the soft ground
for a trail, I heard a well-known voice close behind me say:
"They're over to the right, in that clump of cedars. Better get behind a
tree."
I turned around. To my amazement Enoch Wade stood within two yards of me,
his buckskin shirt wide open at the throat, his coon-skin cap on the back
of his head, his long rifle over his arm.
"In Heaven's name, how did you come here?"
"Lay down, I tell ye!" he replied, throwing himself flat on his face as he
spoke.
We were too late. They had fired on us from the cedars, and a bullet
struck poor Van Antwerp down at my feet.
"Now for it, before they can load," cried Enoch, darting past me and
leading a way on the open border of the swale, with long, unerring leaps
from one raised point to another. The Indians raced beside him, crouching
almost to a level with the reeds, and I followed.
A single shot came from the thicket as we reached it, and I felt a
momentary twinge of pain in my arm.
"Damnation! I've missed him! Run for your lives!" I heard shouted
excitedly from the bush.
There came a crack, crack, of two guns. One of my Indians rolled headlong
upon the ground; the others darted forward in pursuit of some flitting
forms dimly to be seen in the undergrowth beyond.
"Come here!" called Enoch to me. He was standing among the low cedars,
resting his chin on his hands, spread palm down over the muzzle of his
gun, and looking calmly upon something on the ground before him.
I hurried to his side. There, half-stretched on the wet, blood-stained
grass, panting with the exertion of raising himself on his elbow, and
looking me square in the face with distended eyes, lay Philip Cross.