Okay, the woman was not going to answer my question.
She really wanted me to tell her the story of the Battle of Long Island!
‘Can I stand up?’
This got blank looks.
“I always do this story standing up, it adds to the,” I shrugged, ‘atmosphere. It’s not the same if I can’t wave my arms around.”
Lieutenant Adams waved for me to go ahead.
For a moment there was a look in her eyes that might have been a reaction to my surreptitious voyeuristically veiled – I hoped – scrutiny of her bust; but probably had more to do with which part of my anatomy she planned to order the torturers to break first.
‘You have to imagine we’re standing on Brooklyn Heights,” I explained.
Detective Inspector Danson murmured: “that’s about twenty miles to the west of here overlooking the East River and the bridge between Long Island and New York.”
The woman frowned as she tried to sort out her geography.
“Is that north or south of the Admiralty Ship Yards at Wallabout Bay?”
“South.”
“Oh, there,” she sighed.
“The date is late on the evening of Tuesday 27th August 1776 and in the course of the day some nine thousand men of the citizen Continental Army – to all intents the only rebel army – have been driven back onto the Heights, which in those days were more high ground in open country rather than mountains of any description, by a British force of over twenty thousand professional soldiers including around eight thousand Hessian mercenaries under the command of Major General William Howe. The American, sorry, the rebels on the other hand are mostly civilian-soldiers. Among them are a number of sharp-shooters but man for man they are no match for the British.”
I could tell Lieutenant Adams was impatient.
Danson, on the other hand, was a man who like a good story.
But the lady was a woman in a hurry.
“The British already hold Staten Island and they have a fleet anchored in the Upper Bay well out of range of the guns guarding the Hudson and the East Rivers. The rebels had assumed the British intended to force the Hudson and drive north, splitting the so-called ‘United Colonies’ in half. George Washington, among others, had been so fixated fortifying and defending the Hudson that he had regarded the British build up on Long Island as some kind of feint. It was a classic case of two sides completely misunderstanding what the other regarded as the main objective of the campaign. William Howe did not want to conquer a hostile wilderness and spend the next couple of years mopping up the surviving continentals; he wanted to bring to action and to destroy the whole rebel army in a single battle. And by dusk on the evening of 27th August 1776, that was pretty much what he had achieved.”
“Washington?” Lieutenant Adams reminded me.
“By that evening the continentals have already suffered over a thousand casualties and as many as half the regiments engaged that day had simply broken and skedaddled to the rear when the British charged their positions. The man who had been in charge at the outset was a fellow called Israel Putnam; although our friend George Washington had crossed the East River during the battle to see what was going on and ordered several more regiments to follow him before he realised how truly hopeless things were.”
“Washington actually made things worse then?” Danson put to me.
“That’s one way of looking at it. Anyways, the Continentals have been driven into defensive works with a more or less open flank in the south with their back to the East River and the Upper Bay. On paper there are as many as two or three thousand other rebels on Manhattan Island, but only a small proportion of them are front line troops, many are ill, not fit for service, untrained or required to man Fort George at the southernmost tip of Manhattan. And,” I said, trying to be melodramatic as I began to pace – two steps this way and two back, time and again, “as dusk falls the British fleet, which has been awaiting its moment on the western side of the Upper Bay is preparing to set sail. On Manhattan Island they don’t know if this is the long-expected attempt to ‘force the Hudson’ or to blockade the East River and trap the Continental Army on Long Island. To sum up the situation: one, the Continentals have lost the battle on land and are trapped; two, if the British fleet fights its way past the batteries guarding Manhattan and the western shore of Long Island ten thousand men – minus the thousand or so who have already been killed or wounded – will be captured; three, most of the Continental Army’s senior men are on the wrong, Long Island side of the East River; four, if something is not done now everything is lost. But, one man has a plan!”
“This man George Washington, presumably?” Lieutenant Adams prompted, wearily.
I was not communicating with these people!
“Okay, I’m George Washington,” I informed the two cops. “I’m going to tell you the way it is.”
Nobody shot me so I took that as a green light.
“My name is George Washington,” I continued. This was ridiculous but I had no idea what these people wanted from me except, most likely, my hide; so, what did I have to lose? “Like I said, it’s Tuesday night and the last few days have been the most sanguinary of my whole life. I’m not a career soldier like Howe, Clinton, Cornwallis and the other generals on the English side. I’m a forty-three-year old Virginia planter who got railroaded into being appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army – which didn’t exist at the time – the year before.”
I had got to quite like old George over the years.
“My forebears were landed English gentry, my great-grandfather emigrated to Virginia in 1656 but my own wealth mainly derives from my marriage – a very happy marriage, I might add – to the widow Martha Dandridge Custis. I’m a tall fellow, some say handsome; despite my physiognomy being somewhat pocked by a brush with smallpox in Barbados in 1851. Physically, I tower over the majority of my peers. However, as to my military credentials, those are tenuous. My peers assume that I have been given my command on the basis of my Virginian ‘connections’, my ‘commanding presence’, and not a lot else and broadly speaking they would be correct. Back in the days when I was one of six ne'er-do-well surviving siblings of a merchant gentleman beset with financial embarrassments I had trained as a surveyor. That was back in the late 1740s and early 1750s. Frankly, although tiresome, the outbreak of the French and Indian Wars rescued me from my chosen profession in 1753. Unfortunately, not in a good way. My reputation was somewhat sullied in the action at Fort Necessity, and only redeemed when I accompanied General Edward Braddock on his ill-starred Monongahela Expedition. I would go so far as to say that my experience of that war taught me much of what I know now about how not to conduct military operations!”
I was getting into character now.
“Others had recognised in me characteristics and qualities of leadership that, frankly, I had not seen in my own person until I was offered command of the Virginia Regiment, a commission I held with pride between 1755 and 1758 charged with protecting the outlying districts of my colony against French marauders and their native confederates. I lost some three hundred of my one thousand men in the course of a score of trying engagements and skirmishes. To my chagrin I came to recognise that my superiors did not have a care for their men during the campaigns of those years. My Virginians were attacked by friendly formations during the Fort Duquesne expedition, suffering some forty or more casualties on account of the negligence of senior officers. Subsequently, I confess, that it was with no little relief that I hung up my sword in 1758 and returned to civilian life; never, I confess ever thinking to take up the profession of arms again!”