Chapter 17

When I left the strangely dissimilar sisters Mary and Helen along with their charming maid Denise in the upcountry lands, I had every intention of joining them as soon as the final battle was concluded.

I have to admit that my control of the time situation was entirely out of my hands because I never knew from one moment to another if I would suddenly on my way back to my own time.

Excuse me if I call the twenty-first century as my time because it is the one that I sense is my anchor in time and one that I will eventually return to if all goes well in the past.

If you have noticed that I seldom refer to the “future” in my journal, it is more because I have an underlying sense of caution about venturing into that unknown land of indefinite possibilities. I suspect that any tinkering with future circumstances even in the slightest will result in an alternate dimension in my current reality in 2015.

One example of that is the unintended consequence of regressing biologically in terms of age in a like and equal time in the current time period. It was entirely unexpected but I took it as a welcome perk of the process and was grateful that the other direction was not the result.

Because I had some fear of travels into the unknown future, I came to the conclusion that my time travel depended on that in which I was reasonably certain as opposed to that in which I had absolutely no knowledge at all.

I was called down to General Washington’s field headquarters in Virginia. It was in an unspecified location but we were assured that the scouts would escort us right to his doorstep. I could easily understand his caution in this regard because the Tory traitors had placed a bounty of a small fortune on his head and they were convinced it they could cut off the head of the snake the snake would simply wiggle and experience a sad and lonely death. It was just the opposite of the American patriot concept of a snake in thirteen separate sections but all close enough to stay united in the face of a much more powerful foe.

The two scouts were in the lead and our entourage of five including two war-painted Indian scouts of our own followed closely behind because they were making some haste to reach our destination in response to the order to be prompt and timely.

The General’s headquarters was in a sturdily built barn in the Pennsylvanian style that functioned in four separate sections, each with their own purpose. The central section where Washington held court was considered to be the decision-making section and consisted of the exhausted General and a cortege of military academics along with some newly acquired French advisors. I could see the wisdom of that because the French had a long history of fighting the British regular army as well as extended deadly competition at sea.

There were a number of record-keeping clerks scribbling down constant orders and replying to a flow of communications from various confrontations on the battlefield that extended along the entire eastern coast of the newly constituted American country called “The United States”. It was a chilling reminder that the thought of Unity was on Washington’s mind as the Continental Congress fought each day to go in different directions with thirteen different agendas as their primary motivation. The thought of “United We Stand, Divided We Fall” was never more to the forefront that at this particular stage of the American Revolution.

Up in the loft was another section that dealt with matters of a more secretive nature. It was here where the Intelligence services did their job of ferreting out the double agents floating in our midst, it was here where our own fledgling undercover operations were working diligently to infiltrate the British regular army camps and even a small German-speaking contingent to decipher those German language communications captured on the battlefield. The interrogation section consisting of two General officers and a French Fleet Commander commanded a group of several interrogation teams to be dispatched for special duty in the field when a high-value source was captured. I was told that it was part of the Benjamin Franklin operational organization and that he would visit now and again to check on its proper functioning. Some strange looking civilian types, both male and female, were working on the use of invisible inks for the passing of intelligence notes from locations behind the enemy lines which constantly changed with each passing day.

I found this section to be of great interest because most history books never mentioned their activities and I found them strangely similar to the working of a G-2 operation in a battlefield situation back in my current day time period.

Out in the back was a plethora of mixed tents looking more like a Gypsy camp than a military headquarters. Apparently, they were the nerve center for the different military operations taking place all over the colonies. The flags of the various colonies were in front of several tents that served as a center for the operational control of that colony’s military presence in the struggle for independence. Most of the men were in field battle dress and not the full dress uniforms that had no place in a combat zone.

Briefings were taking place so rapidly that it was confusing to me how it was possible to keep track of which colony and which battle was being planned or executed in real time.

Special runners in civilian clothes stayed close at hand to deliver and return communications from the field passing through lines without much difficulty because the country was still divided fifty-fifty in regard to affiliation with one side or the other. Sometimes, the populace would change their minds and shift to the other side depending on the most recent battle’s result and the impact on their desire to be on the winning side no matter what the future held in store.