CHAPTER IX.
ON MONMOUTH PLAIN.
“Wut’s words to them whose faith and truth
On war’s red techstone rang true metal;
Who ventured life and love and youth
For the great prize o’ death in battle?”
—Lowell.
And it was June-time, too, in the far-off New Jersey country across which an army, glittering with scarlet and steel, took its way. Slowly it moved; for with it went a wagon-train conveying many of the refugees from the evacuated city of Philadelphia, people who could not crowd into the transports that went by sea, but who feared to meet the incoming Americans and so sought safety in New York. Children and delicately reared women slept in army tents, or sat in their coaches all day, listening to the crunching of the wheels in the sand and looking back through the slowly increasing distance to the horizon, behind which lay the deserted city where pleasure had held high carnival during the months just passed. And with them they carried everything that could be packed into coach or hidden in wagon; and though they went with the semblance of victory and almost of pleasure-seekers, it was a sad procession; for who could say when or upon what terms they might ever see their old homes again? Often Clinton looked back impatiently at the crawling train, for he had not liked to be so hampered, and yet had been quite as unwilling to abandon these people to the vengeance they imagined awaited them.
Almost before they had lost sight of the spires of the city, Arnold, with braying bugles, marched his column down the echoing streets, and set up the standard of the republic where late the British lion had wooed the wind.
For nearly a week that long train crept on its way, held back by its own cumbersome weight and the varying roughness of the route. And ever on its flank hung the lean but resolute army of the Continentals, waiting and longing for a chance to strike. All the suffering of Valley Forge was to be avenged. Every wrong they had sustained was whispering at their ears and tugging at their memories; every dead comrade seemed calling out to them for retribution through the sunshine or the midnight silence. And it should be theirs; the utmost atonement that arms, nerved with patriotic and personal vengeance, could achieve should be claimed—if only the hour would come. But still that long train moved onward, and there came no word to fight.
Then, from out the blue sky-reaches of that June-time dawned Monmouth day.