“General Washington says you and Ramsey are to hold the enemy in check here upon this hillside until he can re-form the rear.”
And the blue line swung about and steadied, and met the English face to face; and Richard Clevering’s battle-cry rang full and clear amid the yells that well-nigh drowned the roar of the musketry. About that sun-scorched knoll there fell the fiercest part of the fray. The palsy of hesitation was gone, and desperation had made the men invincible. Again and again that red wave from the open space before surged against them, broke and recoiled and gathered and came again like some strong billow of the ocean that rolls itself against a headland—fierce, blind, futile.
Then came the climax of the splendid tragedy. Upon Wayne’s right was a Continental battery from which a great gun sent its deadly challenge to the foe. Again and again its whirring missives tore great gaps in the red ranks, until Clinton gave orders to silence it at any cost.
Careless of danger, unconscious of his impending doom, the gunner loaded his piece anew, and lifted the rammer to send the charge home. Behind him stood his wife, who had left the safety of the wagons to bring him water from a wayside ravine, for the sky was like copper and the dust blew in suffocating gusts. She saw what he did not, the shifting of the enemy’s gun in the plain below, the turning of its deadly muzzle full upon the knoll where they stood. But there was no time for so much as a warning cry; for instantly the flame leaped out, the ground shook with a strong reverberation, and a groan went up from the Continentals as they saw the dust fly from the knoll and their own brave gunner throw up his arms, swing sidewise, and then fall dead. For one awful moment no one moved; then two men from the line sprang forward to take his place, but some one was before them—some one with the face of an avenging Nemesis. There was the flutter of a skirt, a woman’s long black hair streamed backward on the wind, and Moll Pitcher stood in her husband’s place like an aroused lioness of the jungle. Fury gave her the strength of a Boadicea, and the rammer, still warm from the dead man’s grasp, went home with a single thrust; the flame flashed over the pan, and with a roar that shook the heavens, the big gun sent back into the red ranks the death it had witnessed. When the smoke had lifted, the breathless men saw the woman, one hand still upon the great black gun, stoop down and kiss the dead husband she had avenged; and all down the Continental line eyes were wet and throats were cracked and dry with cheering.
All the rest of that fateful day, with the eyes of her dead love watching her staringly, Moll Pitcher held her place beside the gun, solacing her breaking heart with its flash and roar, holding back her woman’s briny tears until the silent vigils of the night, when her mission was accomplished.
And in the meantime, in the rear, the voice of a single man, with its trumpet tones of inspiration, was bringing order out of chaos. Regiments were re-formed, scattered companies gathered, batteries turned, and defeat robbed of its surety. Men, who a moment before had been panic-stricken with the confused marching and counter-marching of the day, looked into the face of the commander and felt their hearts beat with an answering calm. Confidence was restored, and the routed corps were turned into attacking columns. And so when that red wave broke for the last time against Wayne’s and Ramsey’s divisions on the hillside, reënforcements were close at hand.
But they came too late for some of the brave men who had saved liberty and honour that day, for the red wave, receding, took as its flotsam all the men in buff and blue who, in their enthusiasm and temerity, had advanced too far beyond the ranks.
And among these prisoners went he whose battle-cry had been, “For home and Joscelyn!”
