“Leave him have his b’ar, Luke,” Thomas Dorman said. “We ought to have somep’n to show we been at Bemis’s Heights.”

“If you’re going to keep that b’ar, Davis,” Captain Hitchcock said severely, “go on back in the rear rank where he won’t be under foot. It ain’t fitten, now we’re getting close to home, for soldiers to be put all out of step on account of having to stop and kick a b’ar. We’re heroes of Saratoga, and we got to try to look it.”

The men snorted. A few tittered dryly. I noticed, however, that all of them pawed at their accouterments, straightening them: set their hats at a better angle: pulled up their stockings. A sergeant emerged from a clump of trees with a bundle of spruce tips. He went from man to man, thrusting a sprig of spruce into the barrel of each musket. It was an old trick to make the men hold up their muskets, so the sprigs wouldn’t fall out. Captain Hitchcock walked the length of the company, scrutinizing their nondescript, mud-splashed garments with a tolerant eye.

They made a good appearance. They were lean and hard. Their hair was clubbed and tied. Their muskets were spotless. A bayonet scabbard hung at every hip. Their cartridge boxes had a comfortable, swollen look. Across their chests were the crossed belts of Continental troops. It’s true they wore homespun coats of various shades; and the breeches of some were leather and others cloth; but across every right shoulder was a brown blanket, every blanket rolled and slung as correct and shipshape as it could be slung by the best trooper in the world.

Some just stood there, staring across the brown marshes to the long, irregular sand dunes rising like toy mountains against the cold, gray ribbon of November ocean. Their eyes were remote, as if they brooded on a far-off battle; but they were, I knew, watching with a speculative eye the flights of ducks drifting across the marsh in long black streamers. The ducks were flying low, stirred by the rising southwest wind. Every man in the company, I suspected, would be up at dawn the next day to shoot himself a mess.

Hitchcock formed them in a column of twos while the drummer braced his drum and the fifer slatted moisture from his fife. The drum rattled and thumped: the fife shrilled into the rollicking strains I had last heard beside the Hudson on that still morning when Burgoyne’s regiments laid down their arms:

What happy golden days were those

When I was in my prime!
The lasses took delight in me,

I was so neat and fine;
I roved about from fair to fair,

Likewise from town to town,
Until I married me a wife

And the world turned upside down.