Why Britain Lost

PRIVATE YANKEE DOODLE (305 pp.)--Joseph Plumb Martin--Little, Brown ($6.50). The Revolutionary War often was fought with tactics that were quaintly old-fashioned or grimly futuristic. During the battle for Fort Mercer, N.J., in 1777, the Americans ran short of ammunition, and soldiers were offered a gill of rum (4 oz.) to retrieve 32-lb. British cannon balls that had fallen short of the mark. U.S. guns then lobbed them back at the British. Near Petersburg, Va., in the closing days of the war, the British captured 700 Negro slaves who had caught smallpox, and deliberately sent them among the rebels as an experiment in germ warfare.

But for most ordinary soldiers the war was waged almost as wars today are waged: with courage and cowardice, starvation and gluttony, ingenuity and stupidity. One such colonial dogface was Joseph Plumb Martin, whose Narrative of Some of the Adventures, Dangers and Sufferings of a Revolutionary Soldier, Interspersed with Anecdotes of Incidents That Occurred Within His Own Observation is the most complete surviving account of day-to-day life in the tents and trenches of the ragtag citizen army.

Soldier & Civilian. Martin was a farm boy from Mil ford, Conn., who signed up for six months' service in July 1776, at the age of 15, in part because all the kids in the neighborhood did (volunteers received $1), but also because "I collected pretty correct ideas of the contest between this country and the mother country." The following spring Martin re-enlisted, and for the next six years fought at New York, Monmouth and Yorktown, and under Generals Washington, Lafayette and Steuben.

"Three of our constant companions," wrote Martin, were "Fatigue, Hunger and Cold"; men ate birch bark, old shoes, pet dogs. "We kept a continual Lent as faithfully as ever any of the most rigorous of the Roman Catholics did and, depend upon it, we were sufficiently mortified." Yet given a small ration of beef and flour and a sack of straw, Martin and his colleagues "felt as happy as any other pigs that were no better off than ourselves." Such wit eased Martin's suffering, but he also had a sharp eye for the ironic moment or the dramatic scene. He describes General Washington's arriving late at

Yorktown, then ceremoniously striking a few blows with a pickax so that future historians might write "General Washington with his own hands first broke ground at the siege of Yorktown."

Punctuation & Perseverance. Martin was discharged as a sergeant, settled in Prospect, Me., eked out support for a large family as a part-time laborer and town clerk. But despite intelligence, energy and irrepressible good nature, he made a poor adjustment to civilian life. Without a veteran's pension of $96 a year, he would have starved. Martin was 70 when he wrote his memoirs, but the little volume, bound between two boards with a calf-leather spine, won its author no fame. The current printing, the first in 132 years, is ably annotated by Scholar and Editor George F. Scheer and should correct history's lapse.

Only a common soldier, Martin sketches no sweeping historical panorama as a background to his own adventures. But as an uncommon writer, the self-taught Yankee chronicler makes a corner of that panorama come alive as never before.

"If I cannot write grammatically," says Martin proudly, "I can think, talk and feel like other men. I never learned the rules of punctuation any farther than just to assist in fixing a comma to the British depredations in the state of New York; a semicolon in New Jersey; a colon in Pennsylvania, and a final period in Virginia;--a note of interrogation, why we were made to suffer so much in so good and just a cause; and a note of admiration to all the world, that an army voluntarily engaged to serve their country, when starved and naked and suffering everything short of death (and thousands even that), should be able to persevere through an eight years war and come off conquerers at last!"

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