To Try Men's Souls - George Washington 1 Read Online Free Page B

camps, and all semblance of an orderly preparation, which once darkness closed in was to have been unleashed by a fast rush to the boats and then across the river, was already falling apart.Now the far shore was an indistinct blur, waves kicking up midstream, ice floes crashing and bobbing as they swirled by.
    The plan had been threatened with collapse even before it was supposed to start. Only now were troops beginning to move toward the river, and boats that should have been in place were still being maneuvered out of concealment. His hopes of bringing the boats alongshore at a dozen points for loading and then off-loading on the far shore were dashed by the rising of the river, tossed now with waves and blanketed with ice floes. Every single man, horse, and gun would have to be funneled to one narrow dock at the ferry and then off-loaded at an equally small dock on the opposite shore. Already it was obvious it would take twice, three times as long to complete the crossing.
    A shiver ran through him.
    A company of riflemen and several companies of his trusted Virginians, who would be the first to cross and establish a picket line, sloshed past him, kicking up icy slush. The riflemen at least had some semblance of uniforms, their famed round hats and fringed hunting jackets, long ago white, now filth-encrusted and stained to gray, brown, and black, patched and repatched; a lucky few still had boots or shoes, but many had burlap strips wrapped around their feet, and more than a few were barefoot. They did not see him standing in the shadows and passed in loose order, complaining and cursing.
    “Damn this, damn all of this,” a voice echoed, and they staggered past, not recognizing their general in the shadows. “I tell you the captain said it’s off, he heard from . . . Come next week I’m going for home . . .”
    “Just shut up and keep moving,” a deep voice boomed. “This is going to work.”
    He marked with his gaze the last man in the column, a sergeant from the looks of him, someone who still believed and was urging his men onward.
    The sergeant fell out for a moment to retie the burlap around his feet; obviously an older man, for in the fading light Washington could see his gray beard. He had the look of a man who, in spite of allprivations, was as tough as seasoned hickory. Looking up as he finished retying his foot wrappings, the sergeant saw who was watching. He merely stood up, gave a casual salute, and without comment or flourish turned and pressed on, disappearing into the shadows and mists.
    He could not help but smile. A time perhaps, he thought, when I looked like that. I was too young for a graybeard, but the hunting smock, loose leggings, a lean, strongman, moving with a casual ease that spoke of experience in the woods——that was once me.
    Was it really twenty years past that he had marched with Braddock to that ghastly defeat near Pittsburgh? The years prior to that surveying the valley of the Shenandoah, venturing even as far as the Ohio. So many nights like this one, but huddled under a lean-to in winter storms, a good fire going, the day’s take of game roasting, there was no battle ahead to worry about, other than a concern that the natives might decide to change their views and pay a visit during the night. More than one of his comrades of those days had simply disappeared into the wilderness, a rumor perhaps drifting out later of a quick death in an ambush or a very slow and lingering death by torture.
    Yet he had ventured westward as a young man, and at times still he dreamed of those days when he had gladly accepted the risks. That in part had been the thrill of it all. To explore land seen by only a handful of white men, to never know what he would experience around the next bend of the trail, to stake out more land in a day than an English baron could ever dream of owning.
    Good days those, fine days. He could climb a ridge and see the unexplored world spread out before him, a