Chapter 23

(The French fleet saves the day)

Strangely, even though I was fully aware of the outcome of this all-important battle, I had grave doubts on that fateful morning when the British artillery managed to hit our gunpowder reserve with a lucky shot that destroyed nearly seventy percent of our powder with just one shot in midst of our largest magazine.

That event added to the loss of an entire cohort of sappers snuffed out when one of our tunnels collapsed either by accident or sabotage by unknown parties. Thankfully similar circumstances had hit the enemy camp as well and they had suffered the wetting of their plentiful gunpowder reserves right on the eve of battle.

The day of the final surrender started with a steady bombardment of the coastal defenses by the naval forces. The chaos and confusion was serious enough to cause most of the town’s merchants and politicians to plead for respite and to negotiate terms of surrender since no amount of fighting would benefit the British position unless they received immediate reinforcement from the forces still lingering in the New York City area.

There was a feeling in the air that the early and unexpected arrival of the French fleet and the disappointment of the absence of the British fleet had already sealed the outcome of the battle about to begin and no amount of negotiation or deal making would reverse the winds of war.

The mood on the British side of the lines was subdued and most of the Tory residents remaining under British control were unanimous in wanting Cornwallis to allow them to withdraw to a safe harbor out of harm’s way.

The British high command advised to not take that step despite the fact that it was both logical and well in line with the treatment of a civilian populace in time of war. The time to activate that plan came and went and slowly the strangle hold on the British core of resistance grew tighter and their ability to move their forces from one hot spot to another deteriorated to the point that only chaos remained on both sides.

Most of the wounded and dying on both sides were simply scooped up from where they lay on the bloody ground and they were flung onto flatbed platforms that were the mainstay of the loading and unloading of transport ships down at the docks. The handlers were not soldiers but dark-skinned laborers that did the heavy work at the piers with muscular arms and sturdy legs that had developed over years of hard labor either as slaves or as contract workers with a fixed term of employment. They spoke a language that was a sort of “lingua franca” of the island workers that moved cargo with great expertise in most of the ports of the Caribbean Sea.

I should interject that the ranking officer in charge, General Cornwallis was a gentleman above all else and he was quite incensed at the brutality of some of his junior officers when treating with the Rebel prisoners. He had always felt that he was unsuited to a military life and his main interests were in French Literature and the restoration of older estates in the heart of England. He was not enjoying the lack of good cuisine and almost no wines of any importance in his mobile kitchen. The General had requested that a veterinarian of notable repute be shipped in from Bristol to tend to his pair of mating Great Danes suffering from lack of exercise and the inability to mount a program of proper grooming to keep their prize winning coats in perfect condition.

I mention this because at the same time, almost no preparations had been made to attend to the wounded almost certain to increase to huge numbers in the final stages of the battle for the port city region.

The main medical facility was a former jailhouse that had suffered a close hit from a ship fired cannon. The rear quarter of the building was a gaping hole and the rain water poured in from that weakened section roped off with shipping cord that was most difficult to cut even with a sharp knife.

I stood on the top of a slight rise near the docks and saw that the entire harbor was filled with the sails of French ships. Only a few of the ships were actively firing their cannon into the British positions and even that small fraction of the firepower sitting on Cornwallis’s doorstep was enough to deliver the wanted chaos and disorder to the British defenders.

On that final day, I observed that the main British core had withdrawn to an open area detached from the disorderly mob scene below. My agents in the Patriot headquarters had informed me that negotiations were already underway to bring this scene of mass pandemonium to a conclusion with benefit to both parties.

With my advantage of “look back” knowledge, I was able to digest that fact without any sense of doubt because the ultimate result would be mostly to the benefit of the Continental Army and much to the disrepute of the British Army caught in a trap of their own making and unable to extricate themselves with any degree of success without complete surrender.

Later, when we visited the “Medical Center” we were able to see that the nurses and doctor trainees were truly not qualified professionals like those to be found in places like London, Paris and even in New York City. I do not mean to disparage their devotion to duty but it was work best suited to a butcher or a tradesman rather than a surgeon of some merit. I saw a pile of dismembered limbs stacked in the corner near the bombed out section and fully expected to find a head in the bloody mess. Of course that was just my imagination and I knew that it was the only way the medical people had any chance of nipping the terrible curse of Gangrene in the bud before it started with deadly earnest.

I had seen my fair share of field medical stations, sometimes as a patient, and I knew that such places were not in any sense as smoothly operating as a “MASH” unit on American television of the twentieth century.