Here the major general called a war council together with the mayor of Albany and the leaders of those men of the Five Nations who had come to join us—Mohawks and Oneidas—who advised us to continue on our way toward Quebec, where even now our fleet from Boston might be starting their assault.
But one week passed, and we were still encamped at Wood Creek while the major general sent out scouts, awaited word from Albany, held more councils, and weighed his options.
Wilde and I sat one night with our backs against the trunks of tall white pine trees, watching yet another war council.
“You see now,” Wilde said, “here you have two very different men, and it’s a lesson for you. On the one hand, you have Captain Schuyler, there”—he nodded to the younger brother of the mayor of Albany—“who clearly thinks we’re wasting time with all this talk, and should move on and fight. And on the other, you’ve our major general, who wants nothing more than to break camp and leave.”
I studied both men, trying to be generous to the major general. “It might just be caution. After all, not much has gone to plan.”
“You cannot take the measure of a man when things are working well,” said Wilde, as though it were a truth I ought to know. “It’s only when the plan goes badly wrong and everything is broken that you’ll see what he is made of—if he breaks, too, or builds something from the pieces that remain.”
Of the things I learned that summer, those few words perhaps have stayed with me the longest. I did take them to my heart, there on that evening underneath the pines, and they proved to be true.
The major general did break camp, with his excuses that it was now too late in the season, and too many of our men had fallen ill, and there were too few of us, and the men of the Seneca nation had not come to join us as promised, and all was poorly planned from the beginning, and, at any rate, this was the will of God, and not his fault.
But before heading back to Albany, he granted Captain Schuyler leave to lead a force of volunteers in an assault against the French of La Prairie.
The volunteers were meant to only be the Dutch together with their native allies, I believe, but then of course when Schuyler asked for men, Wilde stood.
I thought of what he’d said about the measure of a man, and it mattered to me suddenly to try to show this man that I was made of more than what I might appear, so I stood, too.
So the others left and our force carried on in our canoes, sometimes by night, always by stealth, building a new plan from the one that had been broken.
Of the battle that came after, if it can be honorably called that, there are men who’ve written histories of it, and I’ll leave the telling of that part to them. They were not there, of course, which makes it easier to praise or judge, depending on their point of view, but La Prairie was my first battle, and I did emerge from it more hardened in my mind, and with a stab wound in my shoulder from a blade that caught me unawares.
It had seemed clean enough when we had left the field, but on the march back down again it festered. By the time we came to Albany I was too ill to travel any further, and was put into the hospital.
I stayed there through that autumn.
Then one day I woke and Jacob Wilde was sitting in a chair beside my bed.
“I have some news to tell you,” he began. And that was how I heard.
He traveled back with me, and in Cross Harbor I was met with sympathy. A lawyer gave me documents to sign, and Wilde and our militia captain bore their witness to my signature, the captain making some speech about hardships and endurance.
It was Wilde alone who walked out with me to the farm, and stood beside me as I looked at what had been the house, and now was only blackened ruins.
I knew what had happened. He’d told me in Albany.
“The committee of safety, or so they do call it, that serves our new lieutenant governor, came to believe that Long Island was harboring Jacobites, so they did send over soldiers in boats who went round the north coast, into all the bays, searching. They broke open houses. They broke open mine,” he said. “Frightened my wife and the children. I was in the orchard, at work, or I might have done what your father did. When they reached your house, your father came out with his musket, and so did your hired lad behind him. Your mother apparently stepped in between. And that’s all we can tell you, for certain. I’m sorry.”
They’d all died. All shot, for a small piece of ground and the disagreements we’d transplanted from our old land to our new one.
How the fire started was a mystery, but it had done its work. Little remained of the house where I’d lived, that had looked to the water.