THE EARLY days of the war were strangely quiet for Joel, and for all Vermont. With most of the fighting on the high seas between gunboats and frigates, the foot soldiers and cavalry were not called into action.
An uneasiness lay on Joel at the utter sameness of his days. Groom stout horses. Groom ribby ones. Clean and oil saddles and bridles. Wash blankets. Help the smith with a colicky animal, help him shoe a nervous one. Joel tried to make believe that each horse was Little Bub and so do a better job. But it was no use. These creatures were as unlike Justin Morgan as water is unlike wine.
As the slow days dragged by, Joel tried to reason with himself. “Maybe Bub wouldn’t know me if I did find him, and maybe I wouldn’t know him.” Yet all the while he could see the purple-brown eyes, and feel the lips nuzzling at his neck, and hear the funny neigh that started out so high and fierce and pinched off into a rumbly snort.
“Sergeant,” he said one night as he lay sleepless on his cot in the smith’s tent, “this be a half-hearted war! If I had my ’druthers, I’d ruther be in the fight or else stayed to home.”
The smith was sitting cross-legged before the open flap of the tent, smoking and looking out into the starry night. He took his pipe from his mouth and faced around to Joel. His words came hard and fast-spoken. “The tide has turned, son. Ye may as well know the worst—the British are fixin’ to attack New York State! Why, this very moment they’re swingin’ down from Canady at such a pace that Colonel Totten up in Plattsburg is cryin’ out for help.”
Joel sat bolt upright. The blood pounded hotly through him. “What we waiting for, sir?”
“For Governor Chittenden to make up his mind.”
“What’s holdin’ him back?”
“Conscience, mebbe.”
“Conscience!” Joel choked out the word.
“Aye. He don’t feel he’s got a right to send our militia out of Vermont.”
“But, sir, Plattsburg’s only a whoop and a holler across Lake Champlain!”
“Aye. And my guess is that the Governor might be layin’ awake this minute, making a mighty important decision.”
The smith’s prophecy came startlingly true. In the dark watches of the night Governor Chittenden relented, and while he still would not order the militia to Plattsburg, he did not forbid the men to go.
When morning came, how they cheered the news! All up and down the ranks hands went up and voices shouted, “I’ll volunteer!” “I’ll go to Plattsburg! I’ll go!” Even the horses neighed as if they, too, welcomed action.
The town of Plattsburg sat perched on high ground overlooking Lake Champlain and the Saranac River. When Joel and his troop of men and mounts arrived, they found a battleground in the making. On a spit of land jutting out between the river and the lake, blockhouses and forts, storehouses and a hospital had already been built, and now the dirt was flying from trenches being dug.
Meanwhile, out in Plattsburg Bay, four American frigates were riding at anchor, their flags spanking in the breeze.
A September haze hung over land and water, and Joel felt as if it were charged with suspense, ready all in a moment to ball up into thunderclouds and rain down rockets of fire.
The feeling of excitement and danger grew in him as he learned that, even with the Vermonters, there were only four thousand Americans to face fifteen thousand British—fifteen thousand veterans, fresh and jubilant from their victory over Napoleon. Already the news had leaked out: The British are coming—marching down from Montreal, steady of pace, steady of purpose, some afoot, some mounted. Fifteen thousand strong!
The American plan of action had leaked out, too, and the men, instead of being filled with terror, were full of eagerness to try it. Two roads led into Plattsburg from the north, one the Dead Creek Road that hugged along Lake Champlain, and the other the Beekmantown Road a few miles inland. Colonel Totten’s plan was to divide his small army and send them northward to annoy and delay the enemy until the trenches were finished. Up the Beekmantown Road he sent the regulars, and up the Dead Creek Road he sent Colonel Appling with the mounted riflemen from Vermont.
As his platoon jogged north along the lake road, Joel thought he heard an oncoming sound. Could it be the first rumblings of thunder, or the muffled tap of drums? He thought he heard it, and then he knew he heard it, above the hoofbeats of the horses. A rolling boom of noise! Now he saw movement—denser than cloud shadow, brighter than autumn leaves. The Redcoats!
“Open fire!” came Appling’s sharp command.
Joel felt his mount tremble beneath him, felt his own rifle add to the fierce volley as if someone else had pulled the trigger.
With a crack of musket fire the marching British replied, while from their guns, hidden in the hills, screaming bombs and hissing rockets rained down on the Americans. To their amazement, the British saw the Americans fall back as if the volley of fire had overpowered them!
But already the Colonel’s plan was beginning to work. Deliberately the Americans were bewildering the British. Deliberately they were challenging and vexing them by hindering their drive. They felled trees across the road, and broke up bridges as they withdrew.
The temper of the British rose to the boiling point. Their triumphal march had been spoiled by these stubborn Americans! They had to stop to heave the big trees aside, and they had to build makeshift bridges, while time spent itself.
All the way along, the Vermont cavalrymen annoyed the British veterans, coaxing them, teasing them down, down Dead Creek Road and into Plattsburg. When at last they were there, the Americans clattered across the final bridge to the safety of the peninsula. Then they destroyed that bridge, too, while the ships in the bay welcomed them with loud and mighty salvos.
Joel’s heart thumped wildly as he saw that the regulars on the Beekmantown Road were now crossing and destroying the upper bridge and joining forces with them on the little spit of land. “It worked!” he shouted to himself. “The plan worked!”
But the real test of the few against the many was still to come. Across the river, the two armies—British and American—now eyed each other like cats ready to pounce. The American was the hunting cat, waiting. The British waited, too, waited for the Royal Navy to come sailing into Plattsburg Bay to give added strength and courage.
An hour went by, two hours, three hours. Joel tried to study the horses tethered across the river, but they were so many blobs with sticks for legs. Dusk closed in like a fog. The day went by. Then night and morning and brassy noon, and night again. Two days, three days, with only an occasional rattle of musket fire from both sides. Four days. Five days, while dry leaves lazied to earth and the sun set and rose, and men and mounts grew restive.
But on the sixth day a flotilla of British sloops and gunboats sailed regally into the bay. Suddenly the world was all noise and flame as the gunboats opened fire on the American ships.
At the same moment the British troops on land began their attack. Using planks and barrel staves for rafts, they tried to cross the Saranac, to climb up the steep banks of the peninsula.
“Follow me! Follow me!” Appling shouted as he wheeled his horse to meet the enemy.
Joel and the smith rode in tandem, following teams pulling gun caissons to the line of action. Their eyes were everywhere at once, on the teams, on the mounts up ahead. Horses stumbling or breaking into a crazy gallop were signals to them of bullet wounds or shell shock. Often before a horse fell, Joel had galloped to his side and caught the cheek strap of the frightened animal. Then he would tie the creature to a tree behind the lines where he would be out of danger.
All that morning of September 11 the land battle seesawed back and forth—first the British gained the river bank, then Appling’s Vermonters raced up and fought them back.
But out in the bay the British were having the worst of it. Their fine vessels were splintering like matchboxes, tossing helter-skelter on the waves. By afternoon there was scarcely a gun in position. The captain, knowing the battle to be lost, ordered his vessels to strike their colors in surrender.
News of the surrender sent the Americans on land into a frenzy. They suddenly felt giant strong. Band after band let out whoops of joy. The sound was so loud it ricocheted to the hillsides and back again until it seemed as though untold numbers of new recruits had arrived. It was the clamor and shouting, as well as the Americans’ spirit, that frightened and defeated the British on land.
To conceal their retreat, the British kept up a barrage of fire, but in the midst of it a black storm spilled from the heavens and poured down on the battlefield. In haste they abandoned their guns and fled. Only their dead and wounded, both men and horses, were left behind.
Now seemingly from nowhere came the American medical aides, their lanterns winking yellow in the rain. Colonel Appling sent for Joel and the smith to help with the wounded men of both armies. They improvised stretchers by thrusting muskets through coatsleeves, and they carried the wounded to the hospital building. All the while Joel worked, his mind kept remembering a mother robin who year after year built her nest on his window ledge. He remembered how she would hop onto the rim of the nest, worm in her beak, and whichever nestling squawked the loudest got the worm. It was the same on the battlefield, he thought: whichever man moaned the loudest was cared for first.
All night long Joel worked in the rain-soaked field, helping wherever help was needed. By midnight every wounded man was in the hospital. Then, at last, he could go to the horses. Suddenly new strength came into him and he felt his heart beat faster. What if one of the British horses were Justin Morgan? Dead or alive, he had to know.
The smith’s weariness seemed to lift, too. “Joel!” he called out. “You handle the flesh wounds. I’ll take the bad ones.”
Joel worked quickly now. He filled an empty powder horn with alum, carrying it to the horses who, unlike the men, did not moan. In the thick darkness it was hard to tell the hump of a horse’s body from a hummock of earth. He felt each mound carefully, letting his fingers tell him whether to stop and minister, or to go on. In the British sector he found a mud-slathered gray with a gaping wound in his thigh. With steady hand he poured alum into the wound, talking to the terrified animal as if it were a small child in trouble. He made himself look into the face of every horse, alive or dead, that he could find.
“I declare!” said the smith when they came together for a moment. “It puzzles me if ’tis the alum or your voice that stanches the blood and quiets the animals.”
Toward morning the rain spent itself and a pale glimmer of dawn showed above the horizon. Joel, his work done, dropped down in exhaustion beneath a tree. Before he let sleep claim him, his lips formed a prayer of thanksgiving. “Dear God, I do thank thee that Little Bub weren’t on the battlefield. But, O dear God, if it please thee,” he whispered, “let me find him soon.”
Then he pillowed his head in his arms and slept.
