Chapter 15

I remembered it was my thought that the history textbooks that I was given to teach high school students at a recent point in my current-day past were sensationally slanted in ways that were both subtle and innocuous.

I had finished a book that I had written covering the period of 1492 (When Columbus sailed the Ocean Blue) to 1892 (a year of no other significance except the fact that it was the four hundredth anniversary of the beginning date). The title of this book was called appropriately, “The 400 Year War”. One of my hopefully unbiased conclusions was that the conflict was only “accidently” genocidal rather than intentionally designed like so many in the past in different places by other less altruistically minded people.

That is why when I moved south with my dangerous force of just over three hundred killers that I thought of the poorly described conflict between the Native American Indian tribes and the European settlers. The Indians in my entourage were for the most part grizzled veterans of the French and Indian Wars and they had been supporters of the English settlers against the incursions of the French and their Indian allies primarily into the Hudson River Valley complex with some spillover into the Alleghenies due to French future designs on the Middle American colonies. It was hard for me to imagine the confusion in the Indian mind about the “in-house” squabble between the British King and the settler children in a far distant land. Still, it was natural for them to fall into the category of supporting the fight for freedom because they knew the settlers at least knew the territory and the unique factors that needed “boots on the ground” to form an alliance with an indigenous people that revered the land as their mother and mentor.

The fact was that the strength of the regular British Army was in fact its greatest internal enemy because the discipline needed to form up in the face of enemy fire was counter intuitive to the instinct of survival and one that most Indians and settlers alike would find ludicrous and without merit. That same sort of blind mentality stayed European in nature right up to the “trench warfare” of the War to End All Wars that destroyed the flower of European manhood for a full century. Of course, it was the follow up war in the next generation that sealed the deal of humankind folly and led us into the current millennium with tentative understanding of the struggle between good and evil. That underlying conflict is the reason for my time travel adventures into the midst of the American Civil War, the American Revolution and the final stages of World War II when the globe was involved in global warfare on a scale never seen before.

Right now, my unit was moving at a fast pace ever southward in a leapfrog tactic that I had learned at an early age making retrograde movements away from far superior opposing forces.

The town was in an out of the way backwater in the foothills of the interior mountains and it had been subjected to several raids by the British forces along with their Indian comrades with an eye to gathering rations and fodder for their animals as well as putting the Patriot militias off kilter on their sense of a secure base from which to operate in repulsing the redcoat assaults.

In their enthusiasm for extracting information from the populace, the less scrupulous British Officers, no gentlemen, to be sure, had used the threat of rape to scare the females into divulging their secrets about the location of the enemy positions and any other plans or plots that presented a threat to her Majesty’s deployed field forces.

Into this volatile mix, came Mary Reilly and her beautiful sister Helen with glorious red hair that tended to annoy most British Officers because they resented any reminder of the Irish people that often gave them pause to reconsider their military superiority.

The two girls were placed in a holding cell that had no less than six female prisoners in various stages of undress and being ogled by the rank and file with obvious relish in the hope that the officers might throw them a bone or two.

Mary watched poor Rebecca Cummings being subjected to dreadful blows on her rump by a Major’s riding crop that not only reddened her skin but actually drew blood in several locations like she was being torn apart by beasts on a battlefield. Of course, Rebecca was sobbing in an uncontrollable manner. Mary knew it was because of the display of her naked bottom and not from the pain of the whip because Rebecca was a fanatically religious girl with modest views about love and romance that kept her from engaging in any sort of sexual conduct that would be viewed with disapproval by her devout mother already widowed by the conduct of the war against the Crown.

In fact, Mary knew that Rebecca was quite likely a virgin in reality and not just words from a less than truthful mouth. On the other hand, she was fully aware of the fact that both she and her sister could not say the same because their nasty older brother Hank had done the both of them behind the barn robbing them both of their cherries and telling them to keep their mouths shut if they knew what was good for them.

She had been filled with a sense of revenge and would have gotten it except for the fact that he was killed by the British in the very first raid and he was gone and forgotten from both their minds and better left unmentioned if the truth be known.

Now, both she and Helen were prisoners of the British and their brutish fumbles at interrogation dismayed her more with its ineptitude rather than its lack of structure.

They had even allowed one of the enlisted men to address poor Rebecca from behind with his dubious looking shaft as if he was a grand inquisitioner in the underground recesses of the Pope’s domain in Rome. She saw with relief the young girl had subsided into a coma of sorts that would likely do her in good stead during the next few minutes since the skinny fellow looked a bit on the pale side from fright. He probably knew all of the enemy civilians in the room were marking him as the perpetrator rather than the rowdy officers laughing at the poor girl’s amusing distress.