Involuntary Enlistment in the Continental Army
They came at dawn. Six hardened men on horseback, each one armed with a musket, surrounding the gangly boy while he was bent over by a creek fetching water. At first, the boy thought maybe they were there for asking questions, but he was wrong. They were there for him. Involuntary enlistment in the Continental Army.
He shoulda know better than to keep his back to the road. Late last night he’d seen riders on the ridge, their tattered blue coats wearing months of hard travel, scrapes, and black powder smoke. His ma saw them first. She hustled him back inside to hide before they got too close, no sense in advertising anything. She walked down the dirt path in front of their meager cabin, trying to put as much space between them and the boy. As they approached, she greeted them with rehearsed words, hoping they’d move on.
The lead rider and his mother made small talk, he pressed his face close to the window trying to hear what she was sayin’ but the words were lost on the wind. After a few minutes, they turned and rode off in a gallop. She turned and marched back to the cabin with an angry step.
“I told you to keep hidden, boy. When you gonna learn?”
As the men walked him towards that hard road, his mother came out the cabin like a jackrabbit. “My son ain’t of age,” she cried stepping forward. There was no tremor in her voice, but her hands had gone to fists at her sides.
“Ain’t enough men of age,” the leader replied. “That’s the problem.” He gave her a slight knowing look, just for a split second before adding, “shoulda kept him away from that there window, we mighta missed him.”
She knew they were speaking the truth, even if now that truth was taking her only son to fight in a war none of the folks in the area even cared about. At least the soldiers weren’t roughing him up. They didn’t drag him, or throw chains around his wrists, instead they gave him just enough space to make it feel like a choice, as if walking with them meant something other than what it was. He looked at his mother one last time, looked really hard. He saw the fear there wrapped tight under something harder. She didn’t tell him to run. There was no place he could go that a musket ball wouldn’t find him. He was already a soldier and running meant deserting. Deserting meant an early trip to meet the maker.
“Take your coat,” she said shakily, and that was it.
The men stayed quiet for most of the trip, only stopping twice. Once to gather up another boy about the same age as him, and once to look over a broken-down wagon off the side of the road. By suppertime they arrived at the makeshift camp these fellas called home. It wasn’t much more than a messy pile of canvas and smoke, set in a low valley where the ground stayed damp and the air held the smell of sweat, black powder smoke, and burning timber. Men moved through it with a purpose; no one sat for too long and conversations were reserved for another day. Long brown muskets leaned against barrels, some were stacked in careless rows, others looked like Indian tents without the outside covers on them. It wasn’t the army he had imagined, not that he had known what to imagine. It looked more like a place where things came to be used up.
“Get these recruits something to eat and a place to sleep,” the leader called out to one of the others.
Recruits, that’s what we were, he thought as he looked at the other boy. They’d been together all day and neither one of them ever said as much as hi to the other. It didn’t matter. They’d probably both be dead in a week.
They put a musket in his hands the second day, a Bown Bess one of the others called it. It was longer than his arm, heavy in a way that gave you struggle just to hold it steady. A .75 caliber lead ball with a flintlock fire. The first time he squeezed the trigger, the kick drove back into his shoulder like a blacksmith’s hammer; it left him gasping, ears ringing, smoke filling his mouth with the taste of burnt powder. The men around him laughed, not unkindly, just used to it. Everyone started somewhere.
New recruits came in every day. A few old men, but most were boys like him. They got lumped into the same group as him and the other boy he came here with. He didn’t bother to learn any of their names either.
He learned fast because he had to. There was no room for slow learnin here, no patience for mistakes, get it right the first time, that was what you did if you wanted to survive. He watched the others with intent, the way they packed powder, the way they held their breath just before the shot, the way they moved when the line shifted. He copied without asking, adjusted without being told. By the end of the week, he wasn’t the worst of them anymore. By the end of the second, he was one of the best in the group.
“You got a good eye,” one of men wearing stripes told him, after watching him bring down a target that the other boys had missed. “Steady hands. Don’t waste it. When it means something, you’ll understand.”
The words stuck. Don’t waste it.
The first time they saw real fighting, he understood. It came sudden and loud, a crack of muskets from the tree line that sent men scrambling for formation. There was no time to think, no moment to step back and watch the others show how it was done. He was ready because the moment decided he was ready. He found himself in line with the others, shoulder to shoulder, musket in hand, heart hammering so hard it felt like it might split his ribs.
“Hold!” someone shouted, and the word cut through the noise like a sharpened blade.
He held. He didn’t know how, but he did. His stomach tightened as the seconds passed. The world narrowed to the sight down the barrel, the shape of movement through the smoke. When the command came, he fired with the others, the recoil no longer a surprise but something now expected; something he absorbed and worked through. A strange reward for a job well done.
The volley had the desired effect. The attackers moved off, dragging their bloodied ones by the arms, fleeing deeper into the woods. The sergeant sent a few men to chase and keep them on the run.
After that, it came easier.
Not easier like comforting or happiness, but in the way of understanding. He began to see how everything worked, the lines, the timing, the way men moved as one or broke apart when they shouldn’t, even the holding. He listened, watched, learned, and then he started to anticipate. He saw openings before others did, saw where a push might break the other side or where a step back might save their own.
“There’s wasting you in the back row,” one of the older soldiers told him after a skirmish that left more men on the ground than standing. “Good shot like you, well you ought to be up front.”
He took that to heart; let it fester but in a good way.
It didn’t take long before he believed it.
The officers didn’t notice him; none of them had time to see who was a better shot than who else. They had bigger things to worry about, men moving, horses, food, you name it. That’s what mattered. But the other men, they noticed. They saw the way he held steady when others faltered, the way his shots found their mark more often than not, the way he spoke with a certainty that felt like something solid to lean on. He held himself like a seasoned vet, not some still wet behind the ears kid.
Unconsciously he began training the others, not just the new recruits but even the men who’d been there for a while. “Do this,” he would say, low and quick, adjusting a man’s position. “Not like that. You’ll get yourself killed.”
And oddly enough, they listened. When they came through a fight with fewer losses than they might have had, it fed something in him. It made the line between knowing and leading feel thinner than it was. In his mind, he was well on his way to a promotion, maybe even get some of those stripes one day.
The day it went wrong, the air was thick with heat and a kind of tension that settled over a camp before big things had happened. They had been marching since before light, boots grinding dust into the road, shoulders aching under the weight of gear that never seemed to get lighter. Word had come down of redcoats ahead, though no one seemed to agree on where they were or the size of the force.
They formed up in back of a clearing bordered by trees on three sides, the fourth side opening out to a field that sloped uphill. It wasn’t a good position, not really. The slope meant the redcoats could fire down on them, and if they decided to advance, they’d be moving a lot faster than usual, meaning reloading time would be cut in half, maybe worse. It didn’t matter much; they lined up there because that’s what they were told to do.
“Hold the line,” the officer said, voice carrying just enough to be heard. “Wait for the command.”
He stood on the front line, musket at the ready, eyes scanning the hilltop again and again. He could feel the unease in the men around him, the way their hands gripped their muskets, the way they shifted their weight uncomfortably. With trees behind them and the hill ahead, they could easily be pushed into a mess in the middle if the redcoats came from both directions at the same time.
“They’re going to trap us,” he said to the man beside him, his voice low but certain.
“Orders are to hold,” the man whispered, not meeting his eyes.
“If we hold here, we’re as good as dead,” he said.
His words came easier now, carried on the confidence he had built piece by piece. He looked down the line, saw others who had started to notice the same thing, the box they were in felt like a tomb, the same wrongness in the stillness.
“We need to move and do it now,” he said to no one directly. “We need to get to higher ground an out of this clearing. We can’t wait for them to box us in.”
“That ain’t your call recruit,” someone muttered down the line.
But others were listening. He could see it, could feel it. He wasn’t in charge, but they’d followed his lead in smaller ways before, trusted his instincts when it mattered. Some of them wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for him. To them, this felt like the same thing, just bigger.
“Come on,” he said, louder now. “You know I’m right.”
For a moment, it hung there, balanced on the edge of decision. Then one man stepped forward. Another followed. It didn’t take much after that. The line shifted, not cleanly, not as one, but enough to matter.
Without orders, they moved across the field, toward the rise, boots tearing at the dry ground, the formation becoming more like a small crowd as a sense of urgency took over. For a heartbeat, it felt like the right call, like he had seen what others hadn’t and acted when it counted.
Then the first redcoat volley broke the silence.
It tore through them from the trees on both sides, a steady crack of musket fire that dropped men where they stood. The sound was deafening, the smoke immediate and blinding. With no one in command, panic set in, instead of spreading out in a fast retreat the men clustered together, some shouting, trying to find direction where there was none. In the chaos, there was little to no return fire.
“Back!” someone screamed, though it was unclear to where back even was.
The error was blatant and getting more deadly with each passing minute. The tight group was an easy target, no cover, no advantage, just exposure. Another volley came, closer now, more precise, the redcoats were coming in to deliver the final blow. He could see the bayonets fixed as they charged the remaining distance. He felt the impact before he understood it, a hard, brutal force that knocked the air from his lungs and dropped him to his knees.
For a moment, his vision narrowed, he was taken back to that first time he had fired a musket. He felt a sudden weakness, the noise of the battle faded, the chaos growing dimmer. In the distance he could see more redcoats coming over the high ground he had wanted to take. Instead, his ambitions to command left them in the open, how it had never been the right move, not like this, not without the rest of the line, not without the command that would have held them together. If they had stayed where they were told to be, they could have fired a full volley and then fell back into the safety of the trees.
He tried to stand, but his legs didn’t answer. The musket slipped from his hands, falling to the ground with an unceremonious thud.
Around him, the slaughter continued; officers shouting, what was left of the men scrambling to recover what could be recovered. He was outside of it now, no longer important, just another recruit without a name.
As he fell to his back, he looked up at the empty sky, and for the first time since they had come for him at dawn, he felt his age again, all fourteen years of it, thin and unfinished. He thought of his mother, the look on her face, the pain of it all. The confidence that had carried him this far slipped away, leaving behind the simple truth of it.
He had learned fast.
Just not fast enough.
Hubris.
Additional Reading
R.J. (Ralph) Schwartz is an American poet, author, website owner, and online publisher. His writing spans several poetry collections—ranging from spiritual and romantic to fear-driven explorations—and even extends into science fiction. Notable works include:
- Normal Was the First Casualty – A Collection of Dystopian Poetry
- Hope – Inspirational and Spiritual Poetry
- Things That Go Bump in the Night – Poetry of Fear and Fright
- The Lover’s Thread – Poetry for Couples
- Poetry of the Human Condition – The Ups and Downs of Modern Living
- The Secrets of the Moon (a sci-fi novel co-authored with his son Sebastian J. Schwartz)
Schwartz’s work is described as purposefully wordy, richly descriptive, and thematically grounded in nature, romance, antiquity, and forgotten histories. He writes regularly on platforms he manages, including The Creative Exiles, a collaborative venue for writers, and The Gypsy Thread, which delves into offbeat histories, pagan lore, and poetry.
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