Part 15 (1/2)
Lee shrugged his shoulders, but as Lafayette sat immovable, his clear hazel eyes interrogating and astonished, he reluctantly gave the Marquis the order to wheel his column to the right and attack the enemy's left.
He simultaneously weakened Wayne's detachment and went off to reconnoitre. He afterward claimed that he saw what looked to be the approach of the entire army, and he ordered his right to fall back. The brigades of Scott and Maxwell on the left were already moving forward and approaching the right of the Royal forces, when they received an order from Lee to reenter the wood. At the same time an order was sent to Lafayette to fall back to the Court-house. With a face as flaming as his unpowdered head, he obeyed. Upon reaching the Court-house he learned that a general retreat had begun on the right, under the immediate command of Lee. He had no choice but to follow.
Hamilton, hardly crediting that his worst fears were realized in this unwarranted retreat, galloped over to Lee and urged that possession be taken of a neighbouring hill that commanded the plain on which the enemy were advancing. But Lee protested violently that the Americans had not a chance against that solid phalanx, and Hamilton, now convinced that he meditated the disgrace of the American arms, galloped with all speed in search of Was.h.i.+ngton.
The retreat, by this, was a panic. The troops fled like an army of terrified rabbits, with that reversion to the simplicity of their dumb ancestors which induces the suspicion that all the manly virtues are artificial. In times of panic man seems to exchange his soul for a tail.
These wretches trampled each other into the s.h.i.+fting sand, and crowded many more into the mora.s.s. The heat was terrific. They ran with their tongues hanging out, and many dropped dead.
Was.h.i.+ngton heard of the retreat before Hamilton found him. He was pus.h.i.+ng on to Lee's relief when a country-man brought him word of the disgraceful rout. Was.h.i.+ngton refused to credit the report and spurred forward. Halfway between the meeting-house and the mora.s.s he met the head of the first retreating column. He commanded it to halt at once, before the panic be communicated to the main army; then made for Lee.
Lee saw him coming and braced himself for the shock. But it was a greater man than Lee who could stand the shock of Was.h.i.+ngton's temper.
He was fearfully roused. The n.o.ble gravity of his face had disappeared.
It was convulsed with rage.
”Sir,” he thundered, ”I desire to know what is the reason of this?
Whence arises this confusion and disorder?”
”Sir--” stammered Lee, ”sir--” He braced himself, and added impudently: ”I thought it best not to beard the enemy in such a situation. It was contrary to my opinion--”
”_Your_ opinion!” And then the Chief undammed a torrent of profanity Was.h.i.+ngtonian in its grandeur.
He wheeled and galloped to the rallying of the troops. At this moment Hamilton rode up. He had ridden through the engagement without a hat. It seemed to him that he could hear the bubbling of his brain, that the very air blazed, and that the end of all things had come. That day of Monmouth ever remained in his memory as the most awful and hopeless of his life. An ordinary defeat was nothing. But the American arms branded with cowardice, Was.h.i.+ngton ign.o.bly deposed, inefficient commanders floundering for a few months before the Americans were become the laughing-stock of Europe,--the whole vision was so hideous, and the day so hopeless in the light of those cowardly hordes, that he galloped through the rain of British bullets, praying for death; he had lost all sense of separate existence from the shattered American cause. He did not perceive that Was.h.i.+ngton had reached the column, and resolved to make one more appeal to Lee, he rode up to that withered culprit and exclaimed pa.s.sionately:--
”I will stay with you, my dear General, and die with you! Let us all die here, rather than retreat!”
Lee made no reply. His brain felt as if a hot blast had swept it.
”At least send a detachment to the succour of the artillery,” said Hamilton, with quick suspicion. And Lee ordered Colonel Livingston to advance.
At the same moment some one told Hamilton that Was.h.i.+ngton was in the rear, rallying the troops. He spurred his horse and found that the General had rallied the regiments of Ramsay and Stewart, after a rebuke under which they still trembled, and was ordering Oswald to hasten his cannon to the eminence which his aide had suggested to Lee. Hamilton himself was in time to intercept two retreating brigades. He succeeded in rallying them, formed them along a fence at hand, and ordered them to charge at the point of the bayonet. He placed himself at their head, and they made a brilliant dash upon the enemy. But his part was soon over.
His horse was shot under him, and as he struck the ground he was overcome by the shock and the heat, and immediately carried from the field. But the retreat was suspended, order restored, and although the battle raged all day, the British gained no advantage. The troops were so demoralized by the torrid heat that at sunset both Commanders were obliged to cease hostilities; and Was.h.i.+ngton, who had been in the saddle since daybreak, threw himself under a tree to sleep, confident of a victory on the morrow.
”I had a feeling as if my very soul were exploding,” said Hamilton to Laurens, as they bathed their heads in a stream in the woods, with the bodies of dead and living huddled on every side of them. ”I had a hideous vision of Was.h.i.+ngton and the rest of us in a huge battle picture, in which a redcoat stood on every squirming variety of continental uniform, while a screeching eagle flew off with the Declaration of Independence. But after all, there is something magnificent in so absolutely identifying yourself with a cause that you go down to its depths of agony and fly to its heights of exaltation. I was mad to die when the day--and with it the whole Cause--seemed lost.
Patriotism surely is the master pa.s.sion. Nothing else can annihilate the ego.”
Laurens, who had performed prodigies of valour, sighed heavily. ”I felt as you did while the engagement lasted,” he replied. ”But I went into the battle with exultation, for death this time seemed inevitable. And the only result is a headache. What humiliation!”
”You are morbid, my dear,” said Hamilton, tenderly. ”You cannot persuade me that at the age of twenty-five naught remains but death--no matter what mistakes one may have made. There is always the public career--for which you are eminently fitted. I would begin life over again twenty times if necessary.”
”Yes, because you happen to be a man of genius. I am merely a man of parts. There are many such. Not only is my life ruined, but every day I despair anew of ever attaining that high ideal of character I have set for myself. I want nothing short of perfection,” he said pa.s.sionately.
”Could I attain that, I should be content to live, no matter how wretched. But I fall daily. My pa.s.sions control me, my hatreds, my impulses of the moment. When a man's very soul aches for a purity which it is in man to attain if he will, and when he is daily reminded that he is but a whimperer at the feet of the statue, the world is no place for him.”
”Laurens,” said Hamilton, warmly, ”you refine on the refinements of sensibility. You have brooded until you no longer are normal and capable of logic. Compare your life with that of most men, and hope. You are but twenty-five, and you have won a deathless glory, by a valour and brilliancy on these battlefields that no one else has approached. Your brain and accomplishments are such that the country looks to you as one of its future guides. Your character is that of a Bayard. It is your pa.s.sions alone, my dear, which save you from being a prig. Pa.s.sion is the furnace that makes greatness possible. If, when the mental energies are resting, it darts out tongues of flame that strike in the wrong place, I do not believe that the Almighty, who made us, counts them as sins. They are natural outlets, and we should burst without them. If one of those tongues of flame was the cause of your undoing, G.o.d knows you have paid in kind. As a rule no one is the worse, while most are better.
A certain degree of perfection we can attain, but absolute perfection--go into a wilderness like Mohammed and fast. There is no other way, and even then you merely would have visions; you would not be yourself.”
Laurens laughed. ”It is not easy to be morbid when you are by. Acquit me for the rest of the night. And it is time we slept. There will be hot work to-morrow. How grandly the Chief rallied! There is a man!”
”He was in a blazing temper,” remarked Hamilton. ”Lee and Ramsay and Stewart were like to have died of fright. I wish to G.o.d he'd strung the first to a gibbet!”