Chapter 12

I know that a lot of people that barely know me thought I was a bit of a coward staying out of Valley Forge. I guess that is a fair assumption on their part because I am none too proud of it either. In a way, I would like to believe it was because I was fearful of the random spread of disease in the terrible conditions that kept me away. I do have to admit I had this ingrained dislike of cold places after several months in the mountains of Korea when the temperature always read “minus something” on the Fahrenheit scale.

Our Pennsylvania encampment was now home to upward of a hundred souls with a burning passion to push the redcoats and their Hessian conspirators out of the new American nation sooner rather than later, if the truth be known.

I had a bad taste in my mouth from hobnobbing with the Tory elements and the pompous redcoat officers with an attitude that anything “colonial” was close at hand. I couldn’t help but wonder if they acted in their own country with this sort of attitude to the common folk that made everything run with precision. After all, it was the little people that filled the ranks with hardy souls to do the dirty work of Empire building and cannon fodder for the shadowy figures in Whitehall that pronounced and postured but never fired a round.

It never ceased to amaze me that the high ranking British officers seemed to have more of a spirit of kinship with their French counterparts than any sense of comradeship with their own colonial settlers. It was the American settlers that were spilling their blood to preserve their Anglo-American roots that stemmed primarily from the basic principles first established in the bloody period of the writing and implementation of the “Magna Carta” that preceded the American “Declaration of Independence” by centuries and not merely decades. In a sense, the adherence to “Toryism” was a rejection of the spirit of the Magna Carta in favor of unreserved loyalty to an insulated and absent “King”. That was the meat of the issue of Independence and the right of all men to be free.

I avoided Valley Forge because I wanted to complete my mission into the past and I confess the thought of shacking up in mud-splashed wooden “Hooch” was not my idea of facing the severity of a brutal winter in the wilderness. The whole thing bothered me as unnecessary because it was only a scant twenty miles from Philadelphia where the British were sleeping in well-constructed colonial houses under the auspices of the Townsend Acts and probably sleeping with a number of submissively compliant American females from the lowest slutty pub girl to the most influential members of American society like Peggy Shippen and her sisters and cousins with loose lips and tight feminine folds to keep the bored officers “comfy” in the American frontier.

There were females at Valley Forge as well, but they were mostly wives usually without benefit of ceremony and all of them were worked from dawn to dusk doing their utmost to bring order to the chaos and barely holding their own in the task.

Washington insisted in sleeping in a makeshift tent until the men were housed and he never took it in his head to remove to Mount Vernon and his mansion styled home with many fireplaces and a larder filled with supplies.

Fortunately, for the Continentals, a certain gentleman called “Von Stuben” was busy from December of 1777 to June of 1778 in organizing logistics and doing his best to keep as many of the soldiers alive despite the elements, the sickness and the lack of proper vittles to fill their empty bellies on a cold winter’s night. He was a hero like many others and lived to see the final victory at Yorktown still barely able to speak English and with many other German speaking Independence fighters he was the other side of the coin in Hessian hating when the grateful populace made him an honorary citizen and a pension after the war.

That summer of 1778 was a formative period.

The British regular Army came to realize the danger of their position in Philadelphia almost at a point in time that was too late for them to reverse the fortunes of war. First it was a trickle and then entire units began the exodus from Philadelphia with sense of annoyance that the pesky Americans had bested them in New York. It was a strange confluence of movements with the redcoats shifting from Boston to New York City by way of Halifax and points north, the withdrawal of the King’s forces from Philadelphia into New Jersey adjoining the disposition of troops remaining in New York City and the vital harbor for the ships of re-supply.

The Continental forces were still in the game and they moved from Valley Forge into New Jersey once again. They surprised the Hessians and decimated those mercenaries in a way that left no doubt that the continuation of the war was going to be quite costly to the British treasury now that France was allied with the upstart revolutionaries, all traitors to the King.

The two armies met in the vicinity of the Monmouth Courthouse and all seemed in agreement that the battle was a draw. Still, the fact that the supposed “Best!” army in the world was held to a draw by a bunch of ragtag minutemen gave the French hope that they were backing the right horse.