CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
January 2, 1777
Princeton Road
His eight thousand troops spread over nearly two miles of muddy New Jersey roads, General Cornwallis paused his horse to one side as the army trudged on. The uncharacteristic warmth of the winter sun felt good on his face. He imagined Jemima sitting in the solarium in a similar warm light, the kind that so greatly affirmed her health. A groan rose from the ranks to the front of the column. They had been marching since before dawn in their hurried push for Trenton. Cornwallis meant to dispatch Washington’s army by nightfall. Cornwallis frowned at the groaning troops as he turned in the saddle. The army, again, stood still. Forward cannons, specifically placed to lead the attack on Cornwallis’ order, stood mired in ankle-deep mud. Officers roared at weary soldiers and Cornwallis glanced again at the sun.
Noon. We should have taken Trenton by now.
He shook his head and walked his horse alongside the eastern edge of the road. The deep forest on the east side was full of snow as far as he could see. On the west side, high grasses and scrub forest stretched toward the Pennington Road. The southern-exposed faces of the surrounding terrain had warmed enough to begin melting, adding to the water along the road and slowing the army. The heavily traveled Princeton Road proved treacherous, but he’d known the risk the moment General Grant ordered him to retake Trenton from the colonials. Washington was still there by all reports, fortifying the town through the days and nights. Word amongst the colonists was that the newly reinvigorated army would establish a northern headquarters in Trenton for the winter and resolve to take New York in the spring.
No, Cornwallis thought. Washington would run back across the Delaware to the Pennsylvania hills and dare the British to cross the semi-frozen river. He wouldn’t dare attack New York and he certainly would not attempt to maintain a headquarters when virtually surrounded by the enemy with an often impassable river at his back.
What are you doing, old man? Where are you planning to fight? It’s not Trenton. Maybe not New Jersey. Where do you think you’re going? Cornwallis looked to the lead and trail elements of his army, as they slid out of view in the gentle bowing curve of the Princeton Road. Field captains rested their men in place because there was nothing else to do.
“Sir!”
Cornwallis turned to the voice. A young artilleryman with mud up to his knees ran up alongside and saluted. “Sir, the forward battery is almost clear. Another hundred yards and the ground is firm enough for the cannons.”
“How long?”
“Ten minutes, sir. Maybe less.”
Cornwallis frowned and spun in his saddle, looking to his staff in the center of the column. In the breeze, he smelled something burning. There was a pop and a hiss in the eastern tree line. He whipped his head around to see a full battery of guns erupt from behind massive snowbanks in perfect camouflage. The first cannons fired in the direction of his forward elements. By the sound of the detonation, they were firing canister at fairly close range. The shotgun-like rounds shredded his lines and soldiers fell in droves.
Another battery fired, and then another rippling canister fired down the column’s length. The overlapping fires cut great swathes through his forward forces. He heard his officers, the ones that lived, yelling orders for the men to form up and fire. Another battery, and then another, fired from the wood line in rapid succession. Their interlocked fires made their way through the first half of the army. In the brief pause, Cornwallis waved to his staff to form up around him. Another series of cannons froze his arm mid-gesture as they tore into the rear of his formation firing one after the other. As soon as their firing ceased, Cornwallis drew his sword and pointed into the trees. He couldn’t quite make out the positions of the rebel cannon, but that didn’t matter. His army would cut the rebel cannon to shreds with well-aimed and controlled fires.
He turned to scream at the nearest regiment and a thunderclap of musket fire erupted from the grasses to the western side. A young cannoneer reeled to one side and fell into the mud. Blood covered the man’s face. Like the cannon, muskets raked his column from south to north for what appeared to cover the entire force. Cornwallis heard his officers responding to the ambush. Calling the men to arms, forming them into their firing lines. Smoke obscured the road in many areas. He could hear the injured moaning and screaming from the road in both directions. Many of the units nearest to him stood and prepared to fire. They could still seize the day, Cornwallis believed.
Another volley of canister came from the forest and seemed to reach as far as Cornwallis could see in both directions. Even more men fell into the mud. A line of infantry managed to fire a ragged volley before they were cut down. In the quick silence after the cannon fusillade, he heard rebel commanders calling to their troops in the grasses.
“Ready, up!” A line of infantry dressed in white jackets and hoods leapt to their feet like ghosts in the smoke. “Fire!” At such close range, his men could easily defeat Washington’s ragged army. Their shots whizzed harmlessly through the air around him.
“To your rifles!” Cornwallis commanded. A few of the men who could hear him looked incredulously up at him. He brandished his sword and pointed into the nearby grasses. If the rebels wanted to fight like the cursed French, then he could take the fight to them. “On me! On me!”
He nudged the horse into a trot and felt his tricorne hat torn away by a musket ball. Another clutched at his coat as he crossed the road. Cornwallis raised the sword high over his head and prepared to scream an order to attack. Something smacked his right leg. Another struck him and he watched a fine red mist erupt from his chest. He looked down at the gaping wound, saw the gray, bloody shards of his ribs, and grasped for the pommel of his saddle to steady himself. Arms failing to move, the sword fell from his hand and bounced harmlessly off his mount’s back and into the mud.
A moment later, his vision swimming with blackness at the edges, Lord General Charles Cornwallis fell from his saddle mortally injured. He lay in the mud, gasping for breath, and saw white-covered figures running like ghosts toward the road and screaming incoherently. Hundreds of them raced toward his men, and the remains of his army ran like scalded dogs. Cornwallis turned his head slowly toward the wood line and the hidden artillery. A moment later, Cornwallis saw a horse come through the forest toward them.
There you are, old man.
There you are.
* * *
Mason came up from his position after the final volley. “Assault through! Assault through!”
Five meters from the edge of the road, the majority of the hidden army could have thrown rocks at the British and accomplished a similar victory. The broken English soldiers, the ones who were alive or injured with a degree of common sense, tried to run or surrendered en masse. Around him, soldiers cheered as they pushed through the shredded British units. Redcoats lay everywhere. The victory had been sudden and swift. Mason looked up and saw Washington approaching on horseback.
Martinez stood on the road’s edge. “Take all weapons and magazines! Leave the personal effects! Take all weapons and magazines! Leave the personal effects! Secure the cannons!”
Mason slapped his friend on the shoulder and turned to see Koch running his way. “Central cannons are in good shape. The forward ones are pretty mired. Should we leave them?”
“Can you get them out?”
Koch grinned. “Of course we can.”
Mason shook his head. “Get as many men as you need. Get those cannons out and fall back to Trenton. You’re in charge of collecting and inventorying the captured artillery.”
“You got it.” Koch grinned and saluted.
Mason returned it with parade-ground precision. “Get going. The general wants to be back in Trenton by nightfall.”
Koch glanced over Mason’s right shoulder and then ran toward the front of what had been the British column. Mason turned to see Washington’s familiar long strides coming toward him. The general had dismounted to observe the carnage firsthand. Mason came to attention. “Sir, we’ve defeated the enemy march.”
“So you have, Captain Mason.” Washington kept walking. “Come with me.”
Halfway up the column, Mason followed Washington through a weaving journey to find a man lying in the mud by his sword. Wig askew on his head, the man’s face was a calm mask of death. Washington knelt next to the man, grasped the dead man’s hand, and looked up at Mason.
“Do you know who this is, Mason?”
“Sir?” Mason knelt in the mud and stared at the British officer whose hand Washington held.
“This is Lord General Charles Cornwallis, Mason. Tell me about him from your time.”
Mason took a deep breath. “General Cornwallis, four years from now, would have been the supreme commander of all British forces in the colonies. He surrendered to your forces in 1781 at Yorktown, sir.”
“That shall never happen, now.” Washington stood and looked down the massacred British column. His eyes were suddenly soft and concerned. “Is this honorable, Mason? To fight from behind cover and surprise the enemy in this manner?”
Mason stood and let his eyes wander over the scene. While technically he was a veteran of Trenton and had seen the carnage waged by modern weapons of war up close, he’d never seen a battlefield torn asunder. The decimated British corpses lay in the rows where they’d marched, oblivious to the army hidden along the road. They never saw their fate coming. “You’re worried they never had a chance to fight?”
Washington snorted and still watched the army clear the site with a haste and drive that had waned in the months up to Trenton. Mason could see it, too. The army, and the nation, needed a victory like these. But, with history changed and the future now uncertain, advantages were to be pressed. “I fight to win, Mason. It never occurred to me that I had to let the enemy set the time and place of the battle.”
“We need every advantage to end this war faster, and with far fewer casualties, sir.”
“Speed is not an advantage in war, Mason. I could do many things quickly, but only a very few things correctly.” Washington looked up and down the road. “And what of this?”
“A great victory, sir,” Mason said. “One that changes the future in ways we cannot see.”
Washington took a slow breath. “I wish I could share your optimism, Mason. Somehow I feel this will simply bring the full measure of His Majesty’s army to our shores come springtime. We must be ready to fight them here, but in other places as well.”
Mason nodded. Thankfully, he knew the right people for the job.
* * *
The march back to Trenton passed quickly. Boisterous troops sang and yelled the entire way. Mason walked at the head of the column with his fellow cadets in tow. Their final mission together had been a rousing success and would likely change the course of the war. He’d not told them of their next duties. They would agree, perhaps with the notable exception of Martinez, who’d unexpectedly blossomed into a quality combat leader. As tight a unit as they’d become, the young officers simply could not stay together.
“You okay?” Murphy asked from his left shoulder. “Seems like something is on your mind.”
“Yeah, lots. Sorry.”
Murphy touched his shoulder. “You know it’s okay, right? We came back, survived, and didn’t mess up. Everything is going to be all right, Mason.”
“I wish I believed that, Murphy.” Mason shrugged. “We can’t get home either.”
“Maybe we’re not supposed to,” Koch said from Mason’s right shoulder. “Maybe we’re supposed to do all those things we can dream of, you know?”
They walked in silence for almost a minute. Mason wondered if their minds were on the possibilities in front of them or the ones they’d collectively left behind. Martinez jogged up to walk with them. His thinner face was just a shadow of the fact that he was a greatly changed young man over the last week. “Time is going to move a lot slower than we’re used to, I think.”
Mason laughed and tugged at the left shoulder pocket of his ACUs. “Like our phones don’t work, right? I haven’t even looked at it in days. I guess I can charge it—look at the pictures and shit—but it’s worthless now, huh? Especially if Kennedy’s charger ever shits the bed.”
“Right now it is,” Koch said. “We need to make sure all of that stuff goes with Higgs, too.”
“I want my music, man,” Martinez grinned.
“Learn to sing,” Koch grunted.
“This new world ain’t ready for me, brother!” Martinez guffawed and Mason found himself laughing for the first time in days. It felt really good. They walked with their heads up, muskets held at the low ready, in their field-made snow ponchos at the front of a very different American army. A few days before, Washington pleaded with them for six more weeks of service at a bounty of ten dollars per man. Most of the army stayed. Joined by the southern elements of Cadwalader and Ewing, Washington’s army now sported more than three thousand men. After taking nearly eight hundred Hessian prisoners in Trenton and with the trail elements escorting more than three thousand redcoats and leaving lots of them on the Princeton Road, Washington could expect the press to influence men across the country to join his forces in the coming weeks.
“Are we going to be able to feed these prisoners?” Martinez asked. “I thought our supplies were running low. A few thousand prisoners will suck that up quick.”
Koch cleared his throat. “This army’s logistics suck, man.”
“We’ll figure that out,” Mason replied. “We’ll also have to figure out how to stay in touch with each other.”
Murphy exclaimed. “Hey! When was Alexander Graham Bell born?”
Mason shrugged and the group remained silent.
“We need to hurry up and establish the phone system so we can text and email each other.” Murphy grinned. “My handwriting is too terrible for letters.”
Mason laughed. “I think that makes you a great candidate to be a politician in this day and age.”
January 4, 1777
Trenton
Murphy would leave for Baltimore in two days’ time to work with the Congress. His hope to work with Franklin crushed, Murphy reveled at the chance to be with the Founding Fathers. Washington hadn’t eliminated the possibility of moving Murphy to Paris, but the young man didn’t need to know that just yet. He had work to do. Martinez was headed to Baltimore as well, but he would team up with Colonel Richard Gridley.
There was one final request from Washington to administer—which was an order, really, just put out very politely. As they sat down, Mason took a deep breath and said, “We have to turn over all of our technology.”
“Like our phones?” Martinez said. “They’re worthless to anyone else.”
“And without our power source,” Koch said, “they’re going to die anyway. You can have mine.”
“The solar panels go too,” Mason said. “All of the phones, our radios, our weapons, all of that goes. Everything extra from…the salvaged gear. Higgs has been instructed to keep it secured and everything quiet and get it to Virginia for safekeeping.”
“Virginia?” Murphy asked. “The Congress is in Baltimore.”
“Our stuff isn’t going to the Congress, Murphy,” Higgs said. “You’ll have to keep your mouth shut until we can develop ways to manufacture more of it.”
“The technology doesn’t even exist to manufacture interchangeable parts,” Martinez said. “Unless that’s part of what you’re doing?”
“Wait. Our stuff is going with you, but to who specifically?” Murphy squinted at Higgs.
Higgs nodded. “Everything is coming with me, that much I know. I just don’t know who’ll be spearheading this effort.”
“Anybody want to go find a quiet place in California?” Booker asked with a grin.
Mason nodded. The urge to run and find a quiet corner of the country was still there, but muted. There was a mission to complete. Porter and Kennedy would have wanted them to complete the mission. “Make sure and hand over all of your magazines and ammunition to Higgs. The weapons are the most critical. Keep your boots. We’ll use the extras to see if someone can manufacture something similar in the next few years. We don’t know how long this war will go. We might have changed it for the worse by killing Cornwallis.”
“And we may have changed it for the better,” Higgs said. “What matters is that before us the English came back in thirty or forty years and try it all again. The War of 1812, remember? We’ll have to be ready for them. With what we’re going to do, we can defeat them and anyone else.”
“Could we invade England?” Koch asked. The group looked at him incredulously.
“Would we want to?” Murphy asked.
“Maybe,” Martinez said around a mouthful of peanut butter and crackers. “But we’re a long way from that decision, right?”
Mason nodded and conversation lulled. Theorizing beyond the next few days overwhelmed them. The squad ate silently, out in their own thoughts. Mason believed there was so much at stake that a nascent American government could be taught ways to avoid conflict for the next several hundred years. Eliminating slavery was just the first step. Uniting the southern states to the glorious cause would be next. The French were still in play and, should the war continue, they would come to the aid of the United States.
So much at stake and so much left to do.
There was a knock at the church door. “I got it,” Martinez said. He rolled to his feet and strode to the door. Mason hoped it was information on Stratton. Shot in the head at point-blank range, the round had merely chipped the skull and torn away a considerable amount of scalp, yet Stratton would live to fight another day.
“Can we help you?” Martinez asked and jarred Mason’s thoughts back to the present.
A vibrant voice carried into the church. “Good morning, I’m looking for a Miss Higgs. Please inform her that her carriage has arrived.”
“Come in,” Martinez said.
A tall man walked in and looked them over. Mason stood. The smiling man’s eyes lingered over all of them and their weapons for a long moment. He wore an open coat with ruffled collared shirt. Under his arm was a walking stick. He turned to Mason. “You must be Mason.”
“I am,” Mason said. “You’ve been cleared by General Washington?”
“I should say so,” he said. “I have come to personally escort Miss Higgs and Lieutenant Monroe to parts unknown, but likely in Virginia. General Washington has most certainly given me all of the information I need. But, I believe you have more information for me still.”
Mason scratched his head. He’d seen the man before, he was certain. “You look very familiar to me, sir.”
“That makes me feel rather good,” the man said. “Being known by a man from two hundred years in the future says I managed to leave a small, lasting legacy through my work.”
“And what kind of work is that?” Mason asked.
The man squatted down and fingered the barrel of Martinez’s disassembled rifle. “Making sense of things from a scientific perspective and other things. To be fair, I work in politics and the like, but I’m also concerned with how things work and finding ways to do them better. Things like this that have little meaning but could change everything. Like every single bit of equipment you’ve brought from the future, I’m told.”
“I know I’ve seen you before,” Martinez said. “Who are you, sir?”
The man stood and stepped forward to Mason with his hand extended. “My name is Thomas Jefferson and I’m very pleased to make your acquaintance. Now, show me these otherworldly rifles from another time. In fact, show me everything. Leave no stitch unraveled, so to speak.”
Mason shook Jefferson’s hand. “A pleasure, sir.”
Jefferson looked them over with a quizzical eye that Mason saw was only half as lackadaisical as it seemed. When Jefferson faced him, the look in the older man’s eyes was almost wicked. “No, my new young friend. The pleasure is all mine.”