The Looting of Washington City - Part Five
The ugly soldier, betrayed by a woman, prepared to face his brutal beating for deserting the British Army. Paul, his new teenage friend and would-be partner in looting, escaped capture but could do nothing to help.
Paul crouched among some tall grasses and milkweed and under his breath he counted the lashings. The ugly soldier did not scream but whimpered loudly, and the strokes proceeded at a mechanical rhythm. After the one hundredth lashing the ugly soldier was untied, and he collapsed to the ground. Only now did he utter a long, howling scream. Another soldier came and slopped water into the ugly soldier's gaping mouth and, in a strangely off-handed manner, tied yellow rags around the enormous bloody open wound of the ugly soldier's back.
Paul regarded the yellow bandages sadly a minute. The ugly soldier did not move, except for a very faint breathing motion of his chest. After a number of minutes he lifted his head half an inch, then it fell back again. His features were still and colorless; even the blood vessels over his nose had paled. Beyond him several soldiers carried barrels from the Armory. They moved in and out, in and out, toting barrels around rather excitedly. Others loitered near a fire in various attitudes of boredom, watching two soldiers construct a spit over the flames. Glistening skinned hares hung upside down from a nearby tree.
Paul felt despondent, tricked, although he could not say by whom. He had gained nothing by all of this. He began dourly to think of traveling back to Baltimore, of that long dusty walk, when there was a noise. It was an unusual low noise, like the short huff of a fat man, but something in it lifted the hairs on Paul's arms, and he glanced around in time to see the Armory rise quickly several inches from its foundation, then explode outward and tumble soldiers about, before Paul himself was heaved up and backward and his head knocked hard against the earth, creating thick white clouds in his vision which he stared at and blinked against, unthinkingly, feeling vaguely alarmed. He heard and saw dimly various unknown objects passing overhead.
As his ears slowly cleared, he began to hear men screaming. After a minute he lifted himself up on an elbow and saw that the buildings of the armory had been torn into fragments and splinters and flung in every direction. An enormous thick black column of smoke rose from where the armory had been. Men too had been ripped apart, or pierced with pieces of wooden shrapnel, and they were making the screams.
Paul crawled a distance away into the woods and lay upon some mossy earth. Overhead he saw the sky darkening, in all directions. It appeared to Paul that this was not only the smoke of the armory.
He gazed at the gathering weather with a sense of dubiousness. He had only seen such black clouds once before, when he was quite young, during a storm which had driven he and his mother to the cellar where they had listened to the sound of the chicken coop blowing over and the chickens calling in terror. His mother had held him very tightly. This was a good memory. The reappearance of such clouds now seemed suspect, perhaps a sort of inversion of the white clouds he had seen when he struck his head, and he felt discouraged by his distrust of his own mind and senses.
The tree limbs overhead grew frantic. That's wind, he thought. He lost consciousness for a time, and woke with unpleasant abruptness to the splashing of water upon him. He sat up, and squinted into masses of falling water. Great black clouds like fragments of night scudded overhead. When the wind gusted up it blew curtains of horizontally moving rain. Branches broke loudly from the trees.
Without any sense of direction, Paul began to crawl. It seemed if he stood upright in this wind he would be carried off some miles. He came to a shallow ditch and lay flat in it. The wind was a terrible thing, a vexed screaming beast trying to escape some malicious torture. It took up the things of the world and hurled them about, it rushed on and on above him. He had never seen the like of such a storm, and he lay under it in a mindless awe. The ditch began to fill with water, and soon it ran rapidly from his feet toward his head. He only lifted his face high enough to breathe. He began to fear that he would need to climb from the ditch to avoid drowning, and that in doing so would be blown away to his death.
The maelstrom abated very suddenly, however, and a blinding sunlight burst into the air. Paul pushed himself up and peered about. He crawled from the ditch and lay drying on a grassy hummock. After everything -- the many dead and the end of a government and the burning and destruction and looting and explosion and hurricane -- this last stroke of glorious, crushing weather left Paul wallowing in sensations dazzling and profound. It was vast and monstrous and beyond understanding. That he had seen and survived all this -- it made him feel his smallness. He lay watching a few white clouds in the sky. He was a ball of grapeshot hurled into an untracked landscape. His smallness was a revelation. His mother had imposed scripture upon him relentlessly, but it had never taken, he had never gained from it any sense of a god. The force of his mother in his life had been too vast. But now it was as if before he had seen the world only through a tunnel, perhaps from the bottom of a well, and now he was out and the world about him was immense past all imagination. And from within his diminished state he saw, to his great surprise, the future, the possibility of days into weeks into years beyond the day or two before him. That indeed one day even his mother might be forgotten. It was wondrous and dreadful, and he felt a sweeping sympathy for himself, for the dead and the living, for his nation and for the British as well.
He roused himself and saw the British moving about dazedly, slowly reassembling their units, beginning to assess the wounded and to aid those they could. Paul began crawling toward them, then saw, not fifty feet away, the ugly soldier slumped under a tree, his legs spread before him, staring down at his own crotch. The tree he sat under had lost its crown, nowhere to be seen. Paul moved toward him, the poor man, foredoomed to the long, long march of days ahead with that face.
Paul touched him on the knee. "Come with me," he whispered.
The ugly soldier slowly raised his head. Rivulets and spatters of blood marked his cheeks and one of his buck teeth had been chipped. He gazed uncomprehendingly at Paul for several seconds, then he closed his eyes and bowed his head. "I've paid my punishment. It's over. I might as well go on with them." He sighed. "I think perhaps I would like to go home one day."
Paul scowled. "You could go home rich."
The ugly soldier said nothing. Paul sat on the earth beside the ugly soldier and rested there a while, just sitting, gaping a little. The ugly soldier did not move or speak, and eventually Paul stood and walked away into the city.
Roofs had been torn off a number of houses, and some structures had been demolished entirely. The streets were now deep with mud and swampy standing water. Everywhere lay a detritus of fallen branches and leaves, loose shingles and slats of siding, fragments of paper and cloth. A surprising number of chickens wandered about, pecking or perched on rooflines. For a moment Paul watched a woman with a goiter chase a screaming piglet in circles in the street.
That night he lurked in the brush and watched the British encampment. The soldiers built up their fires to great, roaring intensity. In the glare it was difficult to see the men, and he looked for the ugly soldier but did not find him. He sat watching and eventually fell asleep. When he woke, at the first light of dawn, the fires were still moldering and sending up streams of smoke, but the British and all their horses and artillery were gone.
Paul watched a few ragged civilians wander into the field where the British had been and poke into the guttered fire pits. Others came and looked, then ran off shouting. Paul turned and walked again into the streets of the city. The storm had put out the fires, and the British were gone. For the moment, the city was empty of any authority at all. Paul looked round and saw a muddy, savaged little town existing precariously within wildernesses and swamps which might readily overwhelm everything here human. The British had begun the job of erasing this place, and the storm had reinforced their work. The ugly soldier had been wrong; this place would not be rebuilt. It was inevitable, Paul thought, that President Madison and the government would now abandon this raw spot, leave the burned ruins to nature, and return to New York or some other well-established city. Without the government here, the residents would drift away, the weeds would fill in, and then the trees would slowly regain the ground they had been cut and burned out of, like an animal's eye briefly opened to the summer sun, closing again, lazily.
Well, and what did he care for this place? The feeling was deepening in him that all this was his, for a short while only. And what would remain his was only what he could take with him. The future had moved far away again; the opportunities were not of the future but now. Thumbing the Spanish bullion in his pocket, he came into the broad muddy rubbish-strewn track of Pennsylvania Avenue. In the distance stood the President's House, charred and roofless. It too had been abandoned by the British, and, as Paul watched several small running greedy figures were converging toward it. He had a flickering, wondering thought about the silverware, gilt lamps, gold platters, and silken garments that James and Dolley Madison might have abandoned in their cupboards and closets. Paul began to run.
