The Crossing by Howard Fast Page A

of man and woman.”
    It echoed and reechoed up and down the frozen bank of the Delaware, until there hardly was a man in the Continental army who did not know the words; and all things considered, there certainly must have been some who detested them. Paine’s first Crisis paper, of course, has increased in stature with the passing years, but one can hardly imagine that the reiteration of platitudes to the bitter, defeated army of shivering and hungry men on that winter day gave them any great purpose or passion.
    Washington’s old, good friend, General Hugh Mercer, had been doubling as a physician, and since the crossing of the Delaware on the seventh of December, sickness had increased. Rash, dysentery, jaundice—apparently there was no end to it. On the same day, December 19, while Tom Paine’s words were being read aloud at the corporal’s guard, General Mercer wrote to Joseph Blewer, the secretary of the Philadelphia Council of Safety: “With regard to my people’s sleeping, we have only three rugs and three blankets …”
    So to all effect and purpose, it had come to an end. The fine and grand volunteer Continental army had run headlong into the brutal animal game of war, and it had been defeated and shattered. The braggarts, the vainglorious, the loudmouths, the thieves, the cutthroats—all those who come together out of the heady variety of a nation when some great common project is under way—all had deserted; others were in the British prisons or had died, and still others packed the hospitals with their wounds and scurvy and disease.
    The officers began to turn surly and to take it out on the men, and the Connecticut dowsers predicted the worst winter in years and the days grew shorter and bleaker, until the solstice was only two days away.
    So the first part of the crossing was finished.

THE SECOND
CROSSING
    West to East

[1]
    A LEX SCAMMEL WAS a Harvard graduate, then a schoolteacher and then a surveyor. He was over six feet tall and very good-looking and possibly vain of his hair, which he wore long and ribboned at the back. He had been in love with Abigail Bishop of Medford, Massachusetts, and when she wouldn’t have him, he lost all interest in the law he was reading in John Sullivan’s office; and when Sullivan said to him, “I’m closing up the office because other more important things have come up,” Alexander Scammel replied that he was with him all the way. Sullivan became a brigadier, and Scammel was given a colonel’s rank over the 3rd Massachusetts Continentals. It did not matter that Sullivan was a lawyer and Alex Scammel a teacher, because the soldiers they led were no more soldiers than they were officers.
    However, time had its way with the lot of them, and when Sullivan took command of the army–after Lee had been captured–Alex Scammel became his immediate aide and second in command. Scammel had turned into a good leader, and the 3rd Massachusetts was one of the most effective regiments in the army.
    Sullivan had marched his men almost on the double since Lee’s capture; they were exhausted after crossing the river, and Sullivan rested them while he sent Scammel riding down to McKonkey’s Ferry to see what the Virginian desired.
    Washington’s headquarters were at the Keith house, but as often as not he centered his affairs and his command post at McKonkey’s. For one thing, McKonkey ran a public house; and if a hundred men in wet boots and dragging spurs clumped in and out in the course of a day, well, that was what the house was for, and Old Man McKonkey liked the trade, not only for the money it brought but because he was heart and soul a rebel. He was flattered with the big Virginian and all the other fine gentlemen giving him their patronage, and since he had never catered to so genteel a trade before, he could never quite get over their courtesy. He took to bowing to ladies and changing his shirt