|
Philipstown Potpourri "Eulogy for a Redoubt"
(Part 2 of 2)
Leather Buckle, it is imagined, was of no great expanse, since by definition, a "battery is an emplacement of 2 or more pieces of artillery under a single command, while in size is the smallest and basic unit of field artillery." Scarce little is known whether actual encounters with the enemy ever occurred at Leather Buckle. A local article of long ago does, however, give hint to warfare of at least some dimension having taken place at the redoubt, in view of the mention of several wounded soldiers having been attended to at a nearby camp.
In reading of the perilous camp, morbidly titled, "Camp of The Invalids", as well as the fort itself, a justifiable comparison with Valley Forge (though on a far lesser scale) could be forthcoming: aggressive painful winters, diseased and starving soldiers, periods of almost total depletion of clothing and shelter, while food rations were oftentimes found in uncertain supply and substance. At one point in the bleak sevenyear history of the redoubt an enlisted man and an officer were slain, directly attributable to a mutiny, evidently yigorous in violence! Numerous had succumbed at both Fort Leather Buckle and Camp of The Invalids during their lengthy run in history, many of whom, surely, welcomed an eternal respite from a bitter and wearisome war in a humble graveyard just north of the post.
Nature herself is all that remains of the agonized redoubt. Artil-lery pieces have long rusted into immeasurable time. Camp Invalid exists not even in old, tattered history books. Wailings and moans of diseased and hungry warriors no longer echo through the darkly canopied, mystically quiet hillside. The nearby cemetery of respectful antiquity, long since decayed, had long ago mourned its own passing, covered over with nature's centuries old mantle of itself. As insignificant as the worth of Leather Buckle may have been in those somber days of the American Revolution, it had, nonetheless, become an instrumental piece of fabric however minute, woven into the final quilted mural of American independence.
| Click ads below
for larger version
|
