9

THE LONG WAR

THE ARMY was across the Delaware, safe for the moment on the south bank, when Paine decided to go to Philadelphia with old Israel Putnam and publish the paper he had written. Come out of the worst crisis they had known yet, he called it that, Crisis, and both Washington and Greene agreed that it might help. Putnam, a tired, aging man was going to try to find volunteers, to quiet the city and keep order, but he didn’t put much faith in his mission. Jogging into the city with Paine, the two of them on moth-eaten nags, he muttered to the effect of its being over.

“Well, it’s not over, if that’s what you mean,” Paine said.

“Almost—” Putnam pointed out that he, Paine, was young; he, Putnam, was an old man; he had rheumatism; and he hated Philadelphia; he was a Yankee himself, and he hated the midlanders.

“They’re like other folk. You won’t find much difference anywhere, plain people are plain people.”

“Are they, the damn, dirty bastards?”

Paine had had a letter from Roberdeau, a pleading, apologetic letter. Understanding took time, Roberdeau said. All before the campaign had been like a storm coming up, and no one believed it, and now the storm was here.

Paine spoke more forthrightly than he should have; lashing into old Putnam, he said:

“All of you officers are the same; nothing matters but a military victory, and as far as you are concerned the men you lead might as well be tin soldiers!”

“Less than that.”

“You old fool, haven’t we done enough in just being! Did you expect it to be over in a week?”

Putnam glowered and closed up, and after that they rode on in silence. The snow-covered pike was bare and cold and lonely; everywhere in the Jersey and Pennsylvania counties now, houses were shuttered. It was a suspicious, surly land, and both men felt it. They were relieved to see the church spires of Philadelphia in the distance.

This was a frightened city. He saw a house burning, and nobody moved to fight the flames, and as ominous as the devil a pall of smoke rolled eastward on the wind. Frightened and not the city of brotherly love—a shop window smashed, a printing press wrecked in the street, a cart of household goods overturned. People ran, slowed to a walk, and ran again, and on a street corner an itinerant Quaker preacher called out, “He who takes up the sword must perish by the sword!”

And there were deserters everywhere spreading the news of what had happened on the long, sad march from New York to Trenton, how it was that the army had dissolved into nothing, and Washington, the blundering foxhunter, had hanged himself, surely, and Charles Lee was a prisoner of the British, taken in a bawdy house, and the soldiers were eating the leather of their shoes, and Greene had turned traitor and murdered George Washington, and Howe had Washington prisoner and the Virginian was going to lead a Tory army against his own people.

There were sad people going away with all they owned piled high on rickety wagons: The enemy is here, don’t you know?

And hard people with set faces who walked to their work with muskets in their hands: Let them come!

And people who understood nothing of what was happening, when only yesterday it was peace.

It was not the city Tom Paine had left. The world goes on, and then suddenly something happens, and then never again is there peace and quiet. The thieves and cutthroats become bold, for they are the first to sense that an era has come to an end, and that never again will things be the same.

Bell would not print what Paine had written. “Mon, mon, do ye think me mad?” He was dismantling his presses. “When Congress goes, I go,” he said.

“You’re afraid.”

“Aye, mon, and no’ ashamed of it.”

Paine was patient, a different man, Bell realized, a bulking, ragged man with a musket slung over his shoulder, but patient and explaining:

“You are wrong, Bell, the British will not take the city, and there are some things that have to be done, whether they take it or not. You see, this has to be printed; I call it The Crisis. We’re in the first crisis, and we’re going through it.” Wheedling, “You and I can set it in one night.”

“No!”

“God damn you, Bell, you made a fortune out of Common Sense. You’re going to print this if I have to hold a bayonet at your throat!”

“No!”

For a moment they looked into each other’s eyes, and then Paine whispered, “God damn you,” and turned away.

Paine sold it to the Pennsylvania Journal, to an editor who told him, grimly smiling, that Congress had already left for Baltimore.

“Courage,” the editor smiled, “is a nebulous conception. Of course, we must preserve the government.”

Paine apologized for asking for money. He hadn’t written this thing for money, just as he hadn’t written Common Sense for money; but when a man’s stomach is empty a few shillings become as necessary as breathing.

“Philadelphia is worse than the army,” Paine explained. “The army is freezing and starving, but there’s always a crust of bread. But you don’t last long in the city without a shilling in your pocket.”

The editor nodded, and wondered whether the army could use him. He was fed up with the city.

“Don’t go away,” Paine said somberly. “There are few enough left who dare to print what has to be printed.”

They worked together, setting and printing, and then they began to smile as they pulled copy after copy of the black, sticky manifesto that Paine had written on a drumhead.

“It’s fire,” the editor said. “I’ve seen a lot of writing, but nothing that was hot as this.”

“I hope so,” Paine agreed. “By God, I hope so!”

He met Roberdeau in the street, and Roberdeau shook his hand and asked where was he staying.

“Nowhere.”

“Then come home with me.” It was strange how calm the general was in this panic-stricken city. “Come along.”

“You have worries enough.”

“No, come along.” Roberdeau was older and leaner, a shadow in back of his eyes that Paine had not noticed before. When asked about the Associators, he shook his head. He told Paine that then it had been a game.

“Of course, I didn’t know. No one knew, I think. Is it all through with Washington?”

Paine was able to smile now. “You don’t know him.”

“No—I don’t.” He told Paine that he had read The Crisis. “Do you know what it made me feel? That I was rotten—all through rotten.”

Paine nodded; he had felt much the same, writing it.

“It must be printed, you know, as a pamphlet.”

“Nobody has guts enough for that now. I asked Bell, and Bell ran from the city with the Congress. The printers who stay are going to climb a fence and stay there.” Paine fingered his neck and said ruefully, “You know, I begin to think of a rope myself. It doesn’t matter so much with me, I have nothing to lose and nobody would care a lot—but to be hanged by the neck—”

“I know,” Roberdeau shrugged. “Let’s see about having it printed.”

“Let’s have a drink.”

A few drinks loosened them up. Paine told Roberdeau what he had thought of him at Amboy, and Roberdeau, smiling grimly, suggested that Paine have a bath. They shook hands, Paine thinking of how a soft man past middle age can change and stay in a city that was dead, and not worry too much about being hanged by the neck. They went off to find a press, bought a small one, and lugged it in a cart to Roberdeau’s house. Paine was dead tired and wanted to sleep, dead tired and dozing in the tub that Roberdeau and his son filled with hot water, and then sleeping restlessly while the general went off to find paper. When he woke, he had forgotten where he was, a feather bed that gave under his hands, quilts, and a bright room with good furniture.

When Roberdeau returned, Paine was sitting in the parlor, drinking black coffee and talking to a handsome girl of twenty-four, Roberdeau’s niece. He had told her of the flight from New York, and she was leaning back, seeing it with her eyes half closed, her face and hands tense.

“But we begin again,” Paine said. “It isn’t over.”

“I can see that,” she nodded. “The way you tell about them, it wouldn’t be over, ever. But how long—will it be years?”

Paine shook his head.

“But doesn’t it matter to you?” she persisted.

“Not to me, no. You see, that’s my life, nothing else. When it ends here, it starts somewhere else, and I go there.”

“As if to say, where freedom is not, there is my place?”

Paine nodded.

“I pity you,” she said.

“Why? I’m happy enough.”

“Are you?” She felt like weeping; she rose and somehow left the room.

Roberdeau returned, successful in that he had been able to buy several hundred pounds of varying stocks and a few gallons of ink. He had also found a printer with guts enough to set on his own, a small man called Maggin who could print only a few hundred a day in his old-fashioned vise-type press. That night Paine set type, and all the following three days they printed, hardly sleeping, dirty with ink and working like madmen to turn out copies of the pamphlet before the city fell. Their courage was contagious, and other printers climbed off the fence. Within a week, Crisis I was circulating by the thousands, injecting new life into the Philadelphia bloodstream, bundles going to the army where they were read aloud, bundles smuggled into New York, which the British held, a sticky manifesto that screamed with rage, hope, and glory.

On Christmas Day, at night, Washington did the impossible. His army dissolving as quickly as wet sand, he found it beyond his power to do as once he had planned, retreat westward and further westward, beyond the mountains if necessary, but never risk an engagement with the British. After being battered and defeated time after time, he was coming to the realization that his course was not to fight a war of battles but a war of spaces, a war which might last for many, many years, but so long as his army was intact, one that he could not lose.

But his army was no longer intact. Unless some victory were achieved, some deed to spur the imagination of the people, it would cease to exist entirely. And at Christmas Day, at night, he recrossed the Delaware and attacked an encampment of drunken, sodden German mercenaries.

He took over a thousand prisoners; it was the first victory, sorely needed, and things that were almost at an end began again.

For the time, the city was saved; people who had fled came back to Philadelphia, even the Congress, and to half a dozen of them, in a coffee house, Paine said things that were not easily forgotten. He was a little drunk. To Roberdeau he made poor apologies, “Yes, I was drunk. How else can a man watch them?” They were planning campaigns on a tablecloth, and they had it figured up and down, forward and backward, how Washington could win the war in a month. “To hell with the lot of you!” Paine said.

They asked him what he meant, and he said he meant that some had stayed in the city and some had run away.

“Without the Congress, the revolution ceases to exist,” they parried.

“Without the Congress!” Paine roared. “God save us—but tell me, what has the Congress done? A city like this with a thousand men to hold the houses and barricade the streets could last forever—forever, I tell you, and the whole British Empire could not force its way through it. But the Congress went, and the city lost its head, and I tell you, not you but Washington, not you but a few hundred poor ragged devils saved this cause! Not you!”

He was drunk, but they didn’t quickly forget what he said. And between themselves, they decided that Paine might very well be dispensed with, that Paine was more a nuisance than an asset. They pointed to the clothes he wore, clothes not fit for a beggar, to his old, battered wig, to the fact that he carried a musket in the streets.

The armies had settled into the torpor of a cold winter, and Paine found a room where he could write. Another crisis was over, and the devil sat on his pen; he no longer had to seek for words; they came to him easily now, and every word was a bitter memory. “… Never did men grow old in so short a time,” he wrote. “We have crowded the business of an age into the compass of a few months—” He would sit back and think of those months, and though he wrote easily enough, what he sought for did not come to him; he sought a rationalization, a scheme, and a progress for revolution; he wanted the whole and this was only a part. When through the murk a half-formed vision of a world remade appeared, his own impotence and futility drove him half mad. Then he would drink, and the righteous souls could point to him and be sustained.

There were few pastors in Philadelphia that winter who did not preach a sermon on Tom Paine. One roared, “Look you upon the unrepentant! What cause is served or benefited by a foul mouth and a drunken brain? Is this liberty, this mocking specter that prowls the streets and defames all that is precious to mankind?”

To the few who stood by him, Paine said, “No, it’s not war, not revolution; those who hate us sit on their asses and eat their three meals and sleep on feather beds, and who gives a damn that an army lies out there in the snow?”

Bell agreed to publish the second Crisis, providing Paine supplied the paper stock. Paine, who hadn’t a coin in his pocket, stared at Bell speechlessly.

“Mon, mon, take a quiet look at it,” Bell said, spreading his arms. “There’s no stock coming in, and a mon does not make a penny, turning himself upsidedown to print a throwaway.”

“And was Common Sense a throwaway? I didn’t ask an accounting, but are you a rich man or a poor one for printing it? How many hundred thousand did you sell?”

“Ye’re talking fables.”

“Am I?”

“These are hard times.”

“Do you know how hard they are?” Paine smiled. “You lined yourself well on my book. Be careful, Bell, more than one man has found himself a cist straddling a fence.”

“Are ye threatening?”

“No, no—forget that. I want a good press, and I don’t give a damn whether Satan himself drives it. Will you print if I find the stock?”

“That I will.”

They shook hands on it, and then Paine went to find paper. Roberdeau was gone from town, as was Jefferson; Franklin was off in France, and his son-in-law was one of those who thoroughly despised Paine. Aitken hadn’t enough stock to print ten copies. Paine, weary, without food for a day past, pressed his way through town trying to sell his credit, what it was worth, for a few thousand sheets of paper. John Camden and Lenard Frees, two merchants who had cornered sizable quantities of newsprint, had been warned to keep far from the author of The Crisis. They could not be reached; Paine stormed and threatened and pleaded; a skinny clerk said persistently:

“I am sorry, they have no paper for sale.”

He could have bought a hundred thousand of foolscap, but the owner would sell only for cash, and British cash at that. To no avail, Paine insisted:

“I tell you, don’t look at what I am! People have forgotten Common Sense, and I’m a damned beggar, dirty, a drunkard, I know, but ask them if ever I defaulted on a debt? Ask them that! Ask who in Philadelphia Tom Paine owes a penny to? Ask them!”

He sought out Aitken again.

“Go to see the Jew, Simon Gonzoles,” Aitken told him.

Black and big, Gonzoles had a curly beard that swept down his chest to his waist. He wore a velvet gown and a skullcap, and looked curiously at a Gentile who smelled so strongly of liquor. Sniffing with his beaked nose, he nodded at the name of Paine, yes, he should cross the threshold. There was a girl in the big, twilit room, round and soft as a peach, and she stared at Paine, half in fright, half in wonder.

“I know little of paper,” Gonzoles said. “In furs I dealt once, and what have you done to the fur trade, with your revolution and fury?”

Paine shook his head, said nothing, but pleaded with his tired eyes.

“For disciples of the Book,” Gonzoles said, “we Jews know surprisingly little of that on which the word is printed. If I desired to help you, where would I go?”

“I can buy—for English gold,” Paine begged him. “For two hundred guineas a hundred thousand of foolscap—that’s a fine paper, not like common print or book stock, a writing paper, you understand, for genteel purposes, but believe me, what I wrote needs to be said. That’s all I can buy.”

“I know what you write,” the Jew said, not without a trace of bitterness, yet Paine never took his eyes from him as he went to an iron-bound strong box and counted out the money.

“I look like a beggar,” Paine said. “I smell like a drunkard—but I pay my debts.”

“This isn’t a debt.”

“I swear—”

“Don’t swear!”

Paine stood a moment, stiff, trembling a little, then took the money and left, hardly able to keep from running, clutching the gold in both his hands, hiring a cart on the way to take the paper to Bell’s.

All that night, he worked with Bell, all the next day, his hands wet with ink, the good, pungent smell filling the air about him.

Roberdeau came back and saw him on a street corner, looked as he would at a ghost, and then grasped one arm and cried sharply, “Paine!”

“Yes?”

He wasn’t drunk, Roberdeau saw. “Come home with me,” he said.

“Yes—”

He led Paine home, but he had to walk slowly, so that the stumbling figure could keep up with him. Roberdeau’s niece was there as they came in, Paine edging shabbily forward clutching his hat.

“Irene, Mr. Paine is staying to dinner,” Roberdeau told her.

Paine nodded and smiled and said nothing, nothing at dinner in the way of conversation; he ate slowly with control, but he ate and ate, smiling apologetically now and then. Bluntly, Roberdeau asked, “When did you eat last, Tom?”

“Two days, I think, or three.”

The girl turned her head; Roberdeau, staring down at his plate, said brutally, “You can change the world, but you can’t keep body and soul together. My God, Paine, are you mad?”

A shrug in reply, no words.

“What are you going to do now?”

“I don’t know. I’m writing a crisis—we need one.”

“You’re writing a crisis—Paine, don’t you realize that life goes on, even in wartime, that you’re doing no one any good, not you, not Washington, not our cause by being a beggar and a drunkard on the streets of Philadelphia—”

“Shut up!”

“No, I’ll talk, because you’re worth something more than a damned filthy drunkard. I heard you at Amboy, and now you’ll hear me!”

“I’m leaving,” Paine said, rising.

“The devil you are. Irene, get out of here!” The girl left, but paused at the door a moment, giving Paine such a look of sympathy, of warm human kindness, that between that and the pressure of Roberdeau’s heavy hand Paine sank back into his chair. Roberdeau sat facing him; he took some snuff, offered the box to Paine, and then filled two glasses with brandy. They drank and sat in silence for about five minutes.

“Say your piece,” Paine nodded, and in that moment Roberdeau reflected upon a man who had sucked in the whole soul and being of America, even to the speech. In the unshaven, hook-nosed, wigless head, there was something both fierce and magnificent, a grinding savagery that might be sculpted as the whole meaning of revolution, unrest and cruelty combined with a deep-etched pattern of human suffering and understanding.

“Suppose you made this uprising,” Roberdeau said carefully. “Let us say that without Common Sense there could have been no United States of America. Let us say that without the first Crisis we couldn’t have pulled through the January of this year. What then: is it the beginning or the end? How many times have you said that we don’t know yet what we’ve raised? At the rate you’re going, you’ll be dead in six months.”

“I’m tougher than that.”

“Are you? I don’t think so. There are those who love you, Paine, but how many hate you?”

“Enough, I suppose.”

“All right. You have to fight, and you’re in no condition to fight. You have to live, and you haven’t a penny to your name. Now listen to me, the Committee of Secret Correspondence is going to be reorganized as a permanent Office of Foreign Affairs. There’s a post open for an official secretary, and I’m going to have Adams put you up for it.”

“Through Congress?” Paine smiled.

“Through Congress.”

“To hell with them,” Paine muttered. “I’m a revolutionist, not a dirty, sneaking politician.”

But Roberdeau said quietly, “Stay here with Irene. I’m going to see Adams.”

He was gone a long while. Paine sat in a deep wingchair and listened to the girl play on the clavichord. He must have dozed a bit, because when he opened his eyes, she had stopped playing and was watching him.

“Tired?”

He said, no, he wasn’t tired, and asked her what she had been playing.

“Bach.”

“Please play again,” he asked her.

The little instrument rustled like a harp; Paine watched the girl’s back, the motion of her head, the strong muscles that played her fingers.

She was less beautiful than strong and handsome; there was a tawny color in her hair that spoke of a Norman strain somewhere in the family, yet in every motion and gesture she was French. Through playing, she turned to Paine and she was startled by something in his eyes. For some reason Paine thought she would go. He asked her to stay.

“Yes, of course.” She sat down near him and said, “Tell me about yourself.”

He began to tell her, speaking in a soft voice, his eyes half closed. In a little while Roberdeau would return, and there might be a good chance that he had succeeded. Politics was a career, and Paine was very tired.

“I think you’re the strangest man I have ever known,” she said. “I think—”

“What?”

She walked over and kissed him, and then Paine was smiling strangely. “Of course, it’s no good,” she admitted. “You’re damned, aren’t you?”

Paine said nothing, and then they just sat and waited for Roberdeau.

To his amazement, Paine got the office, in spite of a fervent objection by a small clique, headed by Witherspoon, a Scotch pastor and one-time supporter of the bonnie Prince Charlie. Witherspoon hated Paine, not only because he was a fearless writer, but because he was both a Quaker and English. The clique accused him of everything from murdering children and being a secret agent for the British, to being an apostate and a devil without horns. But Adams and Jefferson and others stood up for him, and at the time there were reasons for the two parties to make a deal. Tom Paine became secretary to the committee of the new Department of Foreign Affairs, with a salary of seventy dollars a month.

It was a new feeling, respectability. Seventy dollars a month was not a fortune; indeed in the recently issued continental currency, it threatened to become nothing at all very soon; yet it was more than enough for Paine’s simple needs, enough to pay the few debts he had, to buy him a decent suit of clothes, clean if not spacious quarters, pen and paper to write with, and no danger of starving.

And the respectability, of course; Paine the revolutionary was nothing; Paine the writer, whose book had been read and reread by almost every literate person in the thirteen colonies, and spoken aloud to most of those who were not literate, whose book had caused the British ministry to curse the day when the written word had been made available to commoners, was a mere scribbler; Paine the pamphleteer, who had done as much as any man in America to hold the army together in its worst hour, was a rabble rouser and no more: but Paine the secretary to the Committee of Foreign Affairs was a person of some consequence, on the inside among the circle of the gods that be, able to do a person a favor and say the right word in the right place. Or so they thought, and more hats were tipped to him, more hellos said, more waists bent than ever before.

And Paine came to live in the world within, where the ivory tower protected even the most sensitive. Soon enough he discovered that where the quaint inner circle of colonial politics began, reality stopped. That war was being fought by a haggard, desperate little army led by a quiet and stubborn man called Washington, mattered so little to the Continental Congress of the United Thirteen Colonies that it was only by deliberate resolution that they could recall the nature of the situation.

On their side, it might be said that they were as impotent as any governing body could conceivably be; able to make treaties, they could not force observation of them; they had the right to coin money, but no power to buy gold or silver, and with the power to wage war, they could not raise a single soldier. In the one worst moment of crisis, when Washington’s shivering and defeated troops had finally crossed to the southwest bank of the Delaware, they had abdicated voluntarily, fled in panic from Philadelphia to Baltimore, and given to Washington the full power of a dictator.

Their knowledge of warfare was confined to the continental military tracts they read so feverishly; each had his own personal military theory and fought for it, and the only military fact they agreed in was that it would be ridiculous to fight the war in the one style Americans knew, the silent, terrible bushwacking tactics that had torn a British army to ribbons between Concord and Lexington.

They were split into parties, the pro- and anti-confederation, the northern party, the southern, the pro-reconciliation and anti-reconciliation, the pro-Washington and anti-Washington. There were the isolationists who believed revolution was a property peculiar to Americans of pure British descent and of the eastern coast of North America and that all other persons and places should be excluded; and there were the internationalists, those who would rally the insular Dutch, Irish, Scotch, Swedes, Jews, Poles, French, and Germans, and add to them whatever liberal and anti-British feeling existed on the continent of Europe. Not the Sons of the American Revolution but the non-fighting ancestors were already working feverishly to make the roster exclusive.

And to add on the coals, they had discovered the good American device of lobbying.

They lobbied for everything: to have their local towns, counties, cities protected by troops; the Southerners to have tobacco adopted as a necessity for the troops; the down-easters to convince all that no one could fight without a liberal ration of rum; the wool-runners to sell woolen blankets at four times the price they had ever sold them; the midlanders to sell their grain; the New Englanders to have the troops fight on curds; the New Yorkers to have them fight on beef.

And they could agree on nothing, not on the style of the confederation, not on post-war aims, not on a constitution. The honest, sincere men among them fought and broke their hearts, and somehow things were done and somehow the war blundered along.

And into this Paine came, a revolutionist whom all regarded with suspicion. He did his work, he wrote another Crisis; he sat in a cubicle and pushed his pen as a clerk, and sometimes, when he closed his eyes, he would see men in rags with a rattlesnake banner. And he saw Irene Roberdeau and said, “Look at me. Do you like it?”

“I think you look better than you ever looked.”

“Do I? And I tell you, something is dying inside of me.” She noticed then what a flair he had for the dramatic.

“I can’t stand much more of this,” he decided.

“I hear you’re greatly appreciated.”

“You do? They’re waiting for a chance to be rid of me, and the sooner it comes, the better. This is a people’s war, and some day the people may awake to that.”

“And can’t you forget the war even for a while?”

“You told me I was damned,” Paine smiled.

“But not beyond redemption,” she said.

The carts came into Philadelphia with half a hundred badly wounded men, and Paine worked with others, feeding them, making them comfortable in the old Quaker meeting house to which they were taken. Some he knew; he was Common Sense to them. He found his Crisis papers among their belongings; a paper read a dozen times would end as dressing for wounds or wadding for a gun.

“A stout heart,” he would say.

He sat all one night holding the hand of a boy who was dying, and the next day he washed the body and laid it out himself. It was before the time when women would go near a dying or a wounded man; the male nurses were tobacco-stained, filthy old devils. Paine told Irene Roberdeau soon after, “I’m going away, I must.”

“Where?”

“To the army—I’m no good for this sort of thing.”

She pleaded with him, asked him whether it was not enough to throw herself at his feet.

“I’m no good for you,” he said. “I’m no good for anything except this stew I’ve brewed.” Yet he lingered on in Philadelphia.

It was spring again, and the armies were moving in the field. Plowing over, farmers picked up their muskets, cleaned off the rust, and drifted down the country lanes toward Washington’s encampment. Last summer was forgotten; the shop clerks forgot and left their shelves, and the mechanics laid away their tools. A lark and a campaign, and the war would be over. Spring does that, coming suddenly with the sky bluer than ever it was during the winter. The few thousand regulars, lean and hard, mocked the way Yankees mock at the summer soldiers, the militia who took their fighting as they would bird shooting, in between the planting and the harvest. “Where were you at Christmas Day?” became the taunt, harking back to the time they turned like wolves at bay and crossed the Delaware. This was the year for ending the war; they could prove that by the almanacs, by the stars, by gypsy fortune tellers. Ho and away; there were rations in plenty, and up from New Orleans by the bosom of broad mother Mississippi had come a thousand fat hogsheads of gunpowder, lead weight to cast a million of shot and three thousand shining Spanish bayonets. There was no treaty with Spain yet, but rustic farmers, suddenly turned astute politicians, winked and nodded their long heads as they ran a hard forefinger over the Toledo steel; one knew about those things.

It was in Washington’s mind to make a campaign in the north against Burgoyne, but the middle country was screaming to be protected. Howe had packed his British and Hessians into their great ships and sailed away with them, and who knew where they would land? They were sighted off Delaware, and then word came that they were sailing into Chesapeake Bay. The American army, swelled to a considerable size now by the influx of militia, began to march south.

Paine watched them strut through Philadelphia. It was summer and hot, and stripped to the waist, their muskets slung over their backs, barefooted most of them, they appeared fine and ready and trim.

Paine was neither seen nor minded; he stood in the packed crowd that cheered and hooted and waved at the sunburned marchers, bright and gay with sprigs of green tucked under their caps and behind their ears. Washington rode by in his buff and blue, looking healthier and younger than he had this midwinter past; alongside of him was the boy Paine had heard of but not seen before, young Lafayette in white twill and satin, beribboned all over with gold braid. Hamilton was there and fat Harry Knox, nursing along their lumbering guns, and Nathanael Greene to whom Paine waved—but a man is not to be seen in a crowd.

Paine went to Roberdeau’s home, but Irene was not there. She left a note for him that she had gone to watch the parade.

And then they were defeated at Brandywine Creek, slashed to pieces, cut and routed, the old story of men who were willing to die but didn’t know how: the old story of mistakes, a listing of blunders, each one worse than the last.

With a dead, white face, Paine heard the news, walked to the office of the Committee with dragging steps. “Of course, Congress most leave the city again,” everyone said. No one had the truth of what had happened; they were running around like chickens freshly slaughtered; they were frightened.

The whole city was catching the virus of panic, the Tories with fear that the rebels would take their revenge before they left, the rebels with fear that the Tories would not allow them to leave. Neither party quite knew the strength of the other. But the British would march on Philadelphia; that, at least, was obvious.

Paine found Irene, and she said to him what she hadn’t dared to say before,

“Come with me—out of all this. Haven’t you done enough and suffered enough? It’s over now, and if they go on, how long will it be, ten years? or twenty? Paine, I’ve never loved anyone else—and if you leave me now—”

“And if I stay with you? What kind of happiness would you have with me! I have nothing, Irene, except an old shirt and a pen to write with. I’m a camp-follower of revolution, a scribbler, and a pamphleteer.”

“I won’t ask you again, Tom.”

He nodded and went without kissing her, without saying anything else, and the next day he heard that she and her uncle had left the city. They were not alone in leaving. The Tories made a show of strength, brawls and gunshots and now and then a woman’s scream—the city was dying and not gently. As during that last time when the city had been threatened, Paine tried to plead with the leaders of the Associators. Congress had gone, but there were one or two left, friends of his, with a little influence, and between them they managed to call a meeting in Carpenter’s Hall. Less than two hundred persons appeared, and when Paine addressed them, they listened in silent apathy.

“A city,” he cried, “is the best fortress in the world, the forest of the citizen soldier! Every street can become a fortress, every house a death trap! The army lost a battle, but this is a people’s war, and the British army can break its back on the stout heart of Philadelphia—”

There was no stout heart in the city. Paine sat in his room and wrote a Crisis paper, and below him the streets were deserted. One by one, the pro-continental citizens went. At night, a pistol bullet whistled past his ear. There was a parade of Tories, with a great banner reading, “Death to every damned traitor!”

Paine carried his musket now; he saw them tar and feather a harmless old man, whose only sin was that he swept the hearths in Carpenter’s Hall; he died after Paine and a few others had taken him from the stake to which he was bound. A round dozen had the nerve to remain—sullen, desperate men with guns in their hands, and they buried the old man openly. Paine said softly, “God help them when the day of reckoning comes.”

Houses were burning; the volunteer fireman’s association had gone to pieces completely; the houses burned and left their trail of smoke across the blue sky.

Paine reflected curiously upon what such a situation does to men, for among the few rebels who stayed was Aitken, a somber, aging man who nodded when Paine told him about the new Crisis paper.

“I’ll print it,” he said.

“And when the British come?”

Aitken shrugged; he didn’t seem to care. Paine begged him to make some provision for leaving the city and getting his presses out, but he shook his head stolidly.

“A man does what a man can,” he said. “I have no other place to go.” And he stayed behind. When Paine came to say good-by, the Scotsman handed him five hundred freshly printed leaflets.

“Go on,” he told Paine. “Get out before it’s too late.”

Paine found an old, swaybacked nag, bought a saddle for a few dollars, and rode out of one end of Philadelphia as the Hessians marched into the other. And on the Baltimore Pike, he drew up his horse and sat for a while, listening to the beating of the British drums.

He asked himself, “What am I now, propagandist without presses? Rabble rouser lingering at the scene of death after the mob has fled? Revolutionist surveying the dead corpse?” He rode slowly on the old nag, and often he looked over his shoulder at the city that had nursed a thing called America. He lay down to sleep in a copse, hobbling the nag first and keeping his musket by his side, but his dreams were not good. And the next day he stopped at a farm and called:

“Halloo!”

It was shuttered; a musket poked through a slit in the wood told him to be off. “Where is the army?” he called “God damn you and the army,” the slit said.

And wasn’t it always that way when they suffered defeat, the countryside growing black and sullen, the houses shuttered, the cattle locked away, the whole face of the land becoming black and fearful? It had been so in New York, in Jersey, and now in Pennsylvania, and Paine began to wonder who it was that made and fought the revolution, when the fat, staid prosperity of the land was so awfully against it. He rode on and in circles, and once when he faced a farm, a bullet ripped the cloth of his jacket. In a cornfield, his horse tethered beside him, he lay and watched the blood-red sun setting; and never before had he been so lonely a stranger in so lonely a land. He saw once, far off and down a road, three men of the continentals, unmistakable, gaunt and barefoot and ragged as they were, but as he whipped his nag down on them they raced into the woods. And a milkmaid, whom he would have asked for a drink, parched and hungry as he was, fled into a barn when he made toward her. A frightened land. Paine rode in broad, slow circles. He rode out of dawning and into sunset, a lonely Englishman, a renegade Quaker who pursued a will-o’-the-wisp called revolution; he lay alone and hungry, and remembered Irene Roberdeau’s eyes and voice, her throat and her swelling breasts, and he cursed himself, his fate, all his destiny and all that was Tom Paine.

And then one evening, he was stopped by a fierce, half-naked sentry, who wore a bloodstained bandage over his matted hair, and demanded:

“Who goes there?—God damn you, answer up or I’ll blow out your dirty guts!”

“Tom Paine.”

“The hell you say!”

“Then look at me. What is this?”

“General Greene’s encampment. Let’s have a look—”

He sat having dinner with Greene, the flies of the patched tent thrown back, a fringe of autumn trees dropping their leaves against the orange light of campfires, and Greene saying:

“I tell you, Paine, you brought back my soul, I was so filthy tired and done in. Do you understand?”

Paine nodded; how was it that Greene looked on him as a savior, that Greene held his hand and tried to let Paine know how it had been at Brandywine? In appearance, they were closer now, Greene’s handsome face worn and lined, incredibly aged for a man so young, Greene’s buff and blue uniform faded and ragged, his boots worn through at the toes.

“So we lost Philadelphia,” Greene said, after Paine had told him. “Not a shot fired, not a hand raised, but we gave it up to them. It could have been a fortress, and was it you who said this was a people’s war?”

“I said it.”

“Are you tired, Paine?”

“Tired, yes. There’s nothing good about war, nothing decent, nothing noble. You say, I will take up a gun and kill my brother, because the ends justify the means, because my freedom and my liberty are my soul’s blood, and how can I live without them? Make men free so that the land will shine with God’s holy light! And then they run away, they leave their own houses, they close their shutters and blow out your brains, if, God forbid, you should want a drink of water, and they damn you for a banditl If we were like the Jagers, it would be different, but we’re little men, general, little, tired, hopeless men.”

“Yes—”

“And now what?”

“God knows. We are beaten and beaten.”

“And him?”

“Washington?” Greene shook his head. “We’re going to attack—he’s bewildered, well, we all are. We had a count and we still have eleven thousand men left—that’s strange, isn’t it? And they’re at Germantown with less than seven thousand, so we’re going to attack. But we are afraid; go outside later and talk to them, Paine, and you’ll see how afraid we are. We had a talk about it, and no one knew what to do. But Wayne, you know him?”

“I know him.”

“He sat in a corner and pretended to read a book, didn’t say anything, just fire in him and sometimes he’d look at me as if I hadn’t the guts of a rat left, and finally Washington asked him what would he do, what had he to say, and he answered, ‘I’d say nothing, I’d fight, sir, fight—do you hear me, fight, not run away, but fight!’” Greene’s voice slipped away; Paine prodded him.

“And then?”

“And then we looked at each other, because we were all afraid—and tomorrow we attack. For God’s sake, Paine, go out and talk to the men.”

“Yes.”

As he rose, Greene caught his arm. “What will you tell them?”

“About Philadelphia—”

“Do you think—”

“They ought to know. It’s time for them to begin to hate. This isn’t a revolution, it’s civil war.”

The nightmare of the Battle of Germantown Paine would not forget until his dying day. And a nightmare it was, so impossible a nightmare that not for months afterwards could the actual action be pieced together. In four columns, the American troops drove on the British and Hessians who were very nearly trapped. But the columns could not co-ordinate; it was dawn, and fog lay over the field like a pall of heavy smoke. Paine rode with Greene and was separated from him; lost, he ran into a whole regiment of continentals who were also lost. They fired at him; screaming with fury, he got into them and saw that half were drunk, the other half too weary to do more than stand oafishly. Then a storm of firing broke out ahead of him, and the men scattered. Riding toward the firing, Paine came on a steady stream of wounded. Most of them lay on the road, too weak to move. The fog made it dark as evening, and only by voice did Paine recognize Doctor Mulavy, who had been with Greene at Fort Lee. In a bloodstained apron, he yelled at Paine to find water, mistaking him, mounted as he was, for an officer.

“Water, I say, water!”

“What’s up there?”

“Paine?”

“Yes, what’s up there?”

“God knows. Paine, where am I to find water?”

He rode on, blundering into a column of Jagers, green-clad, roaring in German as they rushed past him, taking no notice of him. Then, above the sound of the battle, he heard Harry Knox’s booming voice. He followed it and through the haze saw naked artillerymen swinging into position a battery of twelve-pounders. Knox was bleeding and sweating and yelling, and when he saw Paine he ran to him and pointed to a great stone house that loomed vaguely in the drifting mist.

“Look at that! Look at that!”

Appearing like magic from the mist and smoke, half a hundred figures raced over the lawn for the house; suddenly, it exploded with fire, and the figures twisted, dropped like punctured bags, some of them lying where they fell, others crawling away. A perfect fury of musket fire broke out from another direction, and Knox shrieked at his artillerymen.

“Load, you bastards! Load, you dirty bastards!”

A group of men appeared, running with all their strength, and no one knew whether it was an advance or a retreat, and an officer came by, spurring his horse out of the mist and then back into it again. Paine’s nag bolted, and it ran until it was caught in a slow-moving band of cavalry. They were speaking Polish, most of them, and they moved on slowly, Paine with them, walking into a burst of grape that tore them to pieces and sent their horses in every direction.

Coffee was served, and corn cakes and cheap molasses, all put down on the claw-leg table, hot and steaming as they came in, one by one, and stood around. It was nine o’clock in the morning, a day later, and they had been invited to the little Dale house to have breakfast. They stood around, and no one had an appetite, Paine and Greene and Sullivan and Wayne and Knox and Stirling and the Pole, Pulaski, and Stephan, as sorry and bloodstained and tattered and dirty a high command as had ever been seen. There was no talk, but rather a dazed, sullen expectancy as they waited for Washington. And then Hamilton came in, went to the table, and began to cram his mouth full, saying:

“Good, you know, have some.”

“Where is he?”

“He’ll be here. This is good breakfast, and you don’t know when there’ll be more.”

“Angry?” Wayne asked.

“Just as always.”

There weren’t enough chairs. Some sat, others backed against the wall. Greene grasped Paine’s arm and nodded. Then Washington came in, walking straight through and looking neither to left nor to right, pouring himself a cup of coffee and taking a piece of pone, and telling them, not harshly:

“Go ahead and eat, gentlemen.”

Nevertheless, they were afraid of him. Paine had coffee; Greene stood with his legs planted wide, staring at the floor, as if there were some complicated problem there that defied his understanding. Pulaski pulled at his mustaches while tears welled into his very pale blue eyes, and Wayne bit his nails. And the big Virginian, eating slowly, said to them:

“There is no point in discussing yesterday, gentlemen. Tomorrow is more pertinent.”

They looked at him, but no one answered.

“Make out your reports concerning the battle. We will go on and perhaps our fortunes will fare differently—”

Then something broke the dam, and they all began to talk at once—hoarse, strained voices trying to pierce through the haze that almost destroyed them the morning before. And Washington, taking Paine by the arm, said:

“Tell me, sir, you were at Philadelphia, and was it bad?”

“Very bad.”

“And do you think it very bad with us?”

“No,” Paine said definitely.

“Why?”

“Because you are not afraid,” Paine said quietly.

“Just that?”

“Just that.”

Then they shook hands.

Marching south to prevent reinforcements for the enemy from sailing up the Delaware, and failing in that. Failing at Fort Mifflin and Fort Mercer. Failing in a child’s ambuscade against a few hundred Hessians; failing in a simple maneuver because the men tripped and fell from weariness. Failure and failure and failure. Twelve miles through the rain and muck, and a panicky scramble from a dozen British dragoons. Two thousand men slop along from dawn to dusk, and then one day the ground turns hard. The roads that were swamps, cut or worn in between the two shoulders of meadowland or forest, as most roads were at the time, become as nasty and sharp as corrugated iron. A cow’s track in the muck freezes and becomes a deadly weapon. A ripple of mud drives its point through a paper-thin sole. A bloodspot stains the road, and then another, and then still another. Flakes of snow fall as if a down quilt were ripped open and fluffed across the sky. As a mark on the road, as a sign is the bright red blood in the cold white snow. Now march north again, for word has come from the tall Virginian to join him. There is a place called the Valley Forge.

“I tell you, comrade, that our cause is just!”

Paine is changing, and his flesh is gone. He was a strong man with broad shoulders and hands like flails, but the flesh is gone, the cheeks sunken, the eyes hollow. With his big musket a killing weight on his shoulder, he walks in the ranks, coughing, stumbling, falling as the others fall, leaving his own trail of blood. How else are comrades bound? “I tell you, our cause is just,” he says, and Greene, who leads this pathetic army, thinks to himself, “They will kill him some day, because you can’t whip dying flesh.”

They don’t kill him, they listen. And twenty who would have deserted hear a man say in a whisper:

“Men live by glory, so listen to me, comrades. All things come out of this, and the deed we dared is beyond my understanding and yours. But if you want to go home—”

“God damn you, Paine, we’ve heard that before!”

“Go home.” And then silence until someone says, “Go ahead, Tom.”

“Men are good,” and he looks around at the circle of beggars.

“Why?”

“Even the simple fact that we want to go home. Bad men don’t want to go home. We are good men, quiet men, little men. And we are taking the world for ourselves; they drove us like slaves for five thousand years, but now we are taking the world for ourselves, and when our marching feet sound, my God, friends, who will be able to stop their ears? But this is the beginning, the beginning—”

“I want you to stay with me,” Greene told him one evening. “Tom, I need you. I want you to take a major’s commission.”

Paine shook his head.

“But why? I don’t speak of rewards, that’s a long time off, but where is the virtue in being nothing, in not drawing a shilling’s pay, in knowing that if you’re captured, you’ll be hanged an hour later?”

“I’m not a soldier,” Paine said.

“Are any of us?”

“This is your war to fight, Nathanael, and mine to understand. I am not even an American, and where is the end for me? You’ll be free, but I’ll have my chains—”

“I don’t understand that.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Paine said uneasily, and then smiled a bit as he reminded Greene that he was still the secretary for the Office of Foreign Affairs.

As they approached Valley Forge, Paine came down with an attack of dysentery. Colonel Joseph Kirkbride, whom Paine had first met at Fort Lee, was due for a leave, and asked whether the other wouldn’t share it with him.

“You can stand a rest,” he told him.

Paine, who could barely stagger along by now, agreed. Greene provided the horses, gripped Paine’s hand, and begged him to come back again.

“I’ll come back,” Paine smiled. “A bad penny turns up, doesn’t it?”

Kirkbride lived in Bordentown, in a comfortable frame house, hearths five feet wide, a feather bed at night, a steaming bath in the kitchen, and, best of all, books. He had Swift, Defoe, Shakespeare, Addison, Pope, Clairmont, the vulgar little novels of Dreed. Paine was sick and weak and tired, and he let go of reality, curled in front of the fire and wandered with Lemuel Gulliver, prodded the amorous filth of Gin Row with Muckey Dray, recaptured Defoe’s England, dreamed, whispered parts from Hamlet and Lear, ate and slept. They had few visitors, and both men wanted to be left alone, to forget for a while. They drank a good deal, not to drunkenness, but to the warm, sleepy contentment of satisfied animals. They talked little; they looked out of the windows and watched the snow fall, the drifts pile up, always with the comfort that they could turn around and see the flame roar in the hearth.

In that way, two weeks passed before Paine rose one morning and announced, as if the thought had only just occurred to him:

“I’m going back.”

Riding along a frozen road where his horse’s hoofs drummed like musket shots each time they bit through the crust of ice, Paine saw a blur in the meadow beside him, and going over knelt beside a man frozen stiff and dead, musket beside him and face turned up to the sky—a deserter but a continental, a life gone and cold loneliness in a lonely land.

That was the way it was and had ever been, winter and the land against them, closed doors and closed shutters, no different in Pennsylvania than it had been in Jersey.

At night he crouched close to a small fire; a step could mean death and he kept his musket beside him; he warmed his hands; he lay in his blanket and looked up at the cold winter sky. It was not safe to ask one’s way nor to declare one’s party. He was looking for a place called the Valley Forge, and only one man whom he spoke to had anything to say about it, “A sad spot, mind me.”

He stayed one blessed night in a Quaker household, a big, square man, soft-spoken, and a woman whose smile was innocent as a child’s, and trying to thank them and tell them who he was, received from the man, “Nay, we know thee not, but as a stranger cold and hungry. And if thee are one of them, keep thee council.”

“You don’t like the continentals?”

“We love man, but hate bloodshed, murder, and suffering.”

“And is it murder to fight for freedom?”

“Thee will find freedom a thousandfold more within thee.”

Leaving, Paine said, “The road to the encampment?”

“The Valley Forge?”

“Yes.”

“Thee will find it. God has chosen a place of perdition on earth. Look thee in the sky, and where the devil stands, they be.”

This was the Valley Forge. When he came, it was night, and a sentry, muffled in a blanket, barred his path. There was a bridge across the Schuylkill and a pink sky over the snowy hills. There were dugouts, lines of them back and forth like dirty lace, half dirt holes, half log. On a frozen parade ground, a flag waved. Fires burned, and dark figures moved in front of the flames. The hills jutted like bare muscles, and the leafless trees swayed in the wind.

“I am Paine,” he told the sentry, and the man coughed, laughed, showed his yellow teeth at the feeble pun.

“So we all are, citizen.”

“Tom Paine.”

The man sought in his memory, found a reminder, and shook his head. “Common Sense?”

“Yes. Where’s the general?”

“Yonder—” The man had lost interest, huddled back in his blanket.

“Yonder” brought him past dugouts, an artillery emplacement, a log hospital where the wounded groaned, sang and screamed, and other sentries to whom he gave the same answer:

“Paine.”

“Go on.”

He had walked a mile through the encampment, along the river with the hills over him and to his left, when he saw in the dusk the fieldstone house that was Washington’s headquarters. There was a drift of smoke from the chimney, a light in the windows, a sentry in front and a sentry in back. They let him in. Hamilton, a thin, hollow-eyed boy, years older than when Paine had last seen him, stood in the vestibule, recognized the onetime staymaker of Thetford, and smiled and nodded.

“Welcome.”

Paine blew on his hands and tried to smile.

“You like our little place?” Hamilton asked.

There was something in his tone that made Paine ask, uncertainly, “Is it worse than what I’ve seen?”

“That depends on how much you have seen.”

“I walked through from the bridge.”

“Then the best is yet to unfold,” Hamilton said bitterly. “You must go to the dugouts, Paine—you must go and talk to them, and probably they will cut your throat. Do you think you have seen them at their worst—but we are breeding a new brand of beast here. Why don’t you ask why?”

“I know why,” Paine nodded.

“Do you—but you worked for that swinish Congress of ours. Do they know that we’re starving, naked, dying of hunger and disease and cold, rotting—rotting, I tell you, Paine!”

Going up to him, Paine took him by his jacket and said quietly, “Get hold of yourself. I don’t even know where Congress is. Get hold of yourself.”

Hamilton giggled and swallowed. “Sorry.” He giggled again. “Go in there—he’s in there.”

“Don’t be a fool.”

“Sorry,” Hamilton said.

Washington rose as Paine entered the room, peering for a moment to identify the stranger, and then smiling and holding out his hand. He looked older, Paine noticed; war was making old men of this young and desperate group; thinner, too, and strangely innocent as he was now, wigless, in a dressing gown with an ancient cap on his head, his gray eyes larger than Paine had ever imagined them to be. He was genuinely glad to see Paine, begged him to sit down and take off his coat, and then, in a very few words, described the tense and terrible situation at the encampment, the lack of food and clothing, the alarming increase in venereal disease, due to the abundance of women who lived with the men, some of them camp-followers, some of them wives, the daily desertions, the shortage of ammunition, the increasing anger even among the most loyal at the fact that they had not been paid for months.

“All that,” Washington said softly. “I tell you it is worse than last year, and you remember that. Unless the country helps, we will break, I can tell you that, Paine. I can tell no one else, but, Paine, we are close to the finish—you must know. Not through the enemy, but ourselves, and then the revolution will go like a bad dream.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Go to Congress and plead. Go to the country and wake them up. Make them understand—tell them!”

“I want to stay here.”

“Don’t stay here, Paine. Here it is hell, and I don’t think even you can help us. Go to Congress, and somehow we will last out this winter—I can’t think of the next. Somehow, we will endure.”