The Ground We Held

A Novel of Valley Forge and the Men Who Survived It

De: William Ferrier Jr.

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

January 1778. No meat in eleven days. The shoes are done. The dead horse by the commissary road is covered in snow. The Continental Army is starving at Valley Forge — and Elias Finch is still here.

Elias is twenty-two, a private from Bucks County who enlisted after his father died and hasn't been home since. He shares a smoke-filled hut with eleven men, eats flour-and-water paste baked on a stone, and writes in a journal he bought in Morristown with a pencil he keeps sharp with his knife. He doesn't think about independence or the rights of man. He thinks about fire, shoes, and whether the men around him will last the week.

Around him: Sergeant Kehoe, a forty-one-year-old New Jersey farmer who knows how to keep men alive through the practical business of not doing stupid things in the dark. Corporal Dane, a free Black man from Philadelphia who carries seven letters from his wife that he cannot read. Captain Ware, a Connecticut schoolteacher whose broken spectacles are held on by twine. And Jonas, a seventeen-year-old from Massachusetts who arrives in February with nothing and becomes something no one expected.

From the frozen huts of Valley Forge through the brutal heat of Monmouth, the burning of the Iroquois frontier, the darkest year of treason and defeat, and the trenches at Yorktown, The Ground We Held follows one company of ordinary men through the extraordinary act of not leaving. This is not a novel about generals or strategy. It is a novel about firecake, frostbite, letters you cannot read, names you carry in a journal, and the ground beneath your feet — the ground you held because there was nowhere else to stand.

For readers of Jeff Shaara, Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels, Anthony Doerr, and Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried.