Free The Crossing by Howard Fast

went down to the main room of the inn and spread his blanket in front of the fireplace, where several people were already sleeping, among them the six Continental soldiers who had come along from Vealtown as Lee’s bodyguard. It was now about five o’clock in the morning. About an hour later, as the first hint of daylight came into the sky, five mounted Connecticut Militiamen rode up to the inn and banged at the door until they were admitted. They made enough noise to awaken Lee, and soon he came down into the main room of the inn, still in his slippers, with a coat over his wrinkled shirt. He was unshaven, and his shirt was dirty, so dirty that its condition was remembered and remarked upon not only by Wilkinson but later by the British as well.
    Lee asked Wilkinson some questions about Gates’s force, which Wilkinson had left not too long before. Wilkinson answered Lee’s questions. Then Lee made some bitter and pointed comments about the lack of intelligence in Washington’s movements, and he also commented unfavorably upon Washington’s qualities as a leader.
    The Connecticut Militiamen had been listening carefully. When they realized who Lee was, they approached him as a representative of Washington’s staff and demanded back pay, forage and provisions. One of them also wanted his horse shod.
    The Connecticut Militiamen were not a part of Lee’s command, and certainly there was no way in which he could oblige their demands, but he represented the military authority and he was a general officer, and he was there.
    Lee, British-born and educated, had no great love for Americans, but of all Continentals, he liked least the rustic Connecticut Militiamen, who were the opposite of his former British public school companions. Now he lost his temper completely and using his quirt drove the Connecticut soldiers out of the inn. Returning to the big kitchen, he continued to rage, his anger now directed toward his own guards, who were also New Englanders and possibly Connecticut men as well. Unwilling to withstand his fury or talk back to an officer, they slipped out of the inn and went around to the back of the building, facing the rising sun. There, wrapped in blankets, they sat and warmed themselves as best they could in the early winter sunlight and discussed their varying but similar opinions of General Charles Lee.
    At this point, Colonel Scammel, who was second in command under Sullivan, arrived at the inn. Sullivan had sent Scammel to Lee for orders concerning the morning’s march.
    Lee listened absent-mindedly to Scammel, who could not quite disguise his reaction to the tall, skinny, dirty, pockmarked Englishman whose breath was sour, whose beard was of two days’ growth and whose hair was uncombed and unwigged. Observing Scammel’s attitude, Lee became petulant. What did Sullivan want of him? He had no maps. Had Scammel brought maps? How could he plan a march without maps?
    Scammel had a map case on his saddle, and he went out to where his horse was tethered, got his maps and brought them to Lee.
    Lee sat down with the map and traced with his finger a route from Vealtown to Pluckamin, and from there eventually to Princeton. He then traced an alternate route from Bound-brook to Brunswick. He did this consciously as if he were performing for the people in the room, spelling out the routes for everyone to hear and follow his movements.
    Both Wilkinson and Scammel knew full well that Lee’s orders were to cross the Delaware at Alexandria and join General Washington. Here in this little company, three officers, an innkeeper and a waitress, Lee was parading his defiance of his commander in chief. He went on with this charade for a little while, and then he turned to Scammel and said sharply:
    â€œTell General Sullivan to move down toward Pluckamin; that I will soon be with him.”
    At this point Lee was intimating to Scammel and to Wilkinson that he would attack the British