He caught two officers by the arm. “I want every damned thing burnt,” he shouted. “Burn it! Burn the whole damned place! Burn the stores! Blow up the ships! Burn down those warehouses and that yellow house up there! If you can burn the docks, burn ’em. And start the women up Wood Creek in the bateaux!”

He went on shouting his orders to the men who surged about him. “Set every damned thing afire! Burn up the whole damned place! Send the women down to the bateaux. Tell ’em to hurry up! Send the sick down to the bateaux! Tell ’em they ain’t sick any longer!”

… We tried to burn Skene’s yellow house. We burned the horse stalls behind it where Nathaniel and Cap and Steven Nason and the rest of us lived. We burned Wynkoop’s good-for-nothing barracks, and kindled raging fires in the slashings. The whole side of the limestone mountain was aflame. The docks were blazing, as well as two of the vessels moored to them. The rocky ravine was an inferno, in which sooty-faced men ran shouting through the smoke, torches in hand, looking for something more to burn. Out of that inferno, over the falls of Wood Creek, clambered sick and wounded, women and children, barefoot sailors and ragged soldiers.

Through the hot and smoky twilight a straggling throng rowed furiously up Wood Creek to the slamming of British guns, hammering at the Trumbull and the Revenge, which alone remained unburned. Even as we looked, their flags came down, and that was the end of the fleet that had fought so valiantly at Valcour.

Our stores were in flames: our baggage gone: our cannon abandoned: our ammunition lost. The remnants of the Northern Army were scattered God knew where, without a meeting place. We had neither food, nor guns, nor ships, nor tents—we were destitute of everything; and pressing close behind us were the finest regiments of the British army, led by officers without a peer.

LVIII

IT IS twenty-three miles, the first half water, the second half land, from Skenesboro to the Hudson, but those twenty-three miles are hard ones. The end of the water part of the journey is Fort Ann, a tumbledown affair on the high land above Wood Creek, at the spot where it becomes impassable for bateaux. Twelve miles farther on, overlooking the Hudson, is Fort Edward, almost as tumbledown as Fort Ann. The road from Fort Ann to Fort Edward, if it can be called a road, winds through pine forests rooted in soil that, in the spring and early summer, oozes water like a saturated sponge. Slowmoving brooks meander everywhere, and the road is cut by a succession of log bridges, upon which an unwary traveler, if he stumble, is like to pitch headforemost into black murk smelling of corruption.