Chapter One "A Spirit of Independence" The day after Major General Johann von Robais, Baron de Kalb, and his entourage of officers crossed from Virginia into North Carolina, he found time to write to his wife in Paris. "Here I am at last, considerably south," he wrote, "suffering from intolerable heat, the worst of quarters, and the most voracious of insects of every hue and form." It was mid-June 1780, and de Kalb''s men, well-trained veterans from Delaware and Maryland, had sweated their way through swamps and pine forests before making camp outside Goshen, a town that cannot today be located on a map. They would pass the night at other long-forgotten settlements as they headed toward Charles Town, hoping to reinforce the garrison there and, if they were too late for that, to defend the rest of the South as the British sought to bring the entire region under their control. The war, by this time, had dragged on for years, without either the British or the Americans being able to defeat the other and bring it to a close. The first shots had been exchanged at Lexington and Concord more than seven years before. All the great events later generations would teach their children about--the Battle of Bunker Hill, Washington''s crossing the Delaware, the victory at Saratoga, the winter at Valley Forge, where de Kalb had suffered with the others--had come and gone, with still no end in sight. The last battle in the North, the inconclusive clash at Monmouth, took place in June 1778, exactly two years earlier.

After that, not much had happened, and the cause of independence seemed to have stalled. The British still held New York and Philadelphia, and, in the South, when de Kalb had arrived, they were moving on the port at Charles Town. Starting a war, a cynic might say, was easy. Ending a war--actually winning one--was another matter. If this war was to be brought to a successful conclusion, it would be in the South, and General George Washington, back in New Jersey, hoped that de Kalb could be of more use there than in the North. This trek to the Carolinas was hard-going even for young men born and raised in the mid-Atlantic colonies. For de Kalb, who was fifty-eight years old and had grown up in Bavaria and spent most of his life in northern Europe, summer in the American South presented daunting challenges. This old campaigner had known nights in rough barracks and drafty tents and on cold ground, but he had experienced nothing like the insects that hummed and buzzed and bit, morning, noon, and night.

This was something that his wife, ensconced with their three small children in an elegant townhouse in Paris, could only imagine. "The most disagreeable [of these]," he told his wife, "is what is commonly called the tick, a kind of strong black flea, which makes its way under the skin, and by its bite produces the most painful irritation and inflammation, which lasts a number of days." His body was "covered with these stings," which southerners to this day know not as ticks but chiggers. It would not get any easier for any of the men--especially those accustomed to the cooler weather of England and northern Europe--as they made their way deeper into the swampy lowlands along the southern coast. There, as the British commander at Savannah told Lord Charles Cornwallis, the heat was "beyond anything you can conceive." Malaria, smallpox, typhus, dysentery, and what were called "malignant fevers," "putrid fevers," and "bilious fevers" would spread through their camps, killing officers and men. This made it "the height of madness and folly," another British officer said, to do much fighting during the summer months. Diseases would sweep through the prison ships and the filthy encampments, and before long, the men were carrying the deadly microbes with them wherever they went.

De Kalb had arrived in early summer, when the temperatures were rising, and with them, disease. De Kalb would never make it back to his wife and children in France. Eight weeks later, when the British commanded by Cornwallis annihilated the main Continental army under General Horatio Gates at Camden, South Carolina, another 175 miles farther away, an enemy soldier struck de Kalb with a saber, opening an alarming gash in his head. Other redcoats then converged on him, and de Kalb was down, his body pierced three times with musket balls. All told, he would be wounded eleven times in the following seconds, and he would have been torn to pieces had not the Chevalier du Buysson, his young aide-de-camp, shielded his commander''s body with his own. Only when du Buysson told the British soldiers de Kalb''s name and rank did they relent. By the time de Kalb was hit, the firing elsewhere in this lopsided battle had more or less ceased, and Cornwallis himself rode over, paying his respects to his fallen adversary, as the unwritten rules of so-called civilized warfare required; these included treating defeated officers with gentlemanly courtesy. "I am sorry, sir, to see you," Cornwallis told de Kalb, "not sorry that you are vanquished, but sorry to see you so badly wounded.

" Cornwallis ordered his men to carry de Kalb into Camden on a litter. There he was tended to by British surgeons, but, after three days, he died. The British general saw to it that de Kalb was buried with full military honors, with the other enemy officers attending the ceremonies. He was born simply Johann Kalb on June 29, 1721, in Huttendorf, just northwest of Nuremburg, the son, official records say, of a "peasant." This was a time of constant warfare in Europe, and, for an ambitious and capable young man, a career as a professional soldier offered opportunities for advancement. Before he was twenty, he had joined the French army, serving in the Chasseurs de Fischer, a corps of partisans--what we would call guerrillas, partisans, or irregulars--under the command of Marshal de Saxe, one of the great military theorists to emerge from the War of the Austrian Succession. At twenty-two, Kalb was made a lieutenant in the Loewendal Regiment, a sophisticated, highly cultured, multilingual unit led by officers from all over Europe, also under Saxe''s command. By learning "how to lead troops, and gaining experience in all aspects of the art of military planning and combat," John Beakes Jr.

, de Kalb''s recent biographer, writes, he was making himself into a "very effective officer." Serving under early European masters of mobility in warfare--of the feint, of the hit-and-run, of the surprise attack, in units often far removed from the main army that operated with unusual independence--he was learning the kind of fighting especially suited to the American landscape. By 1747, when Kalb was twenty-six, he had fought in sixteen major battles and was promoted from lieutenant to captain with the designation aid-major. After that, he began to call himself de Kalb, as he would be known thereafter; the Baron would come later. By the end of the War of the Austrian Succession in 1748, de Kalb had grown into a tall, imposing figure, calm under fire, well regarded by the men who served under him, and admirably humane at a time when his peers could be cruel. He remained with the French army in peacetime, where he became something of a reformer. He proposed--without success--the formation of a special regiment of "marine infantry," trained to undertake surprise attacks on the English coast and its colonies. Any such regiment should include good numbers of Irishmen.

"All the world is aware," he wrote, "of the hatred cherished by the Irish against the English." But de Kalb also attended to matters involving individuals. When a court-martial issued a death sentence for a deserter who then returned to the army, de Kalb successfully argued that capital punishment was applicable only when the deserter was arrested on foreign soil. His efforts to reform some of the harsher protocols of camp life were not always successful, but he tried. Prostitutes were not to enter the barracks, and when they were discovered to have done so, soldiers they were there to entertain could be made to whip the women as punishment. Men who objected to this treatment were hanged for insubordination. Details are sketchy, but Beakes says de Kalb sought "more humane" responses to this too-common occurrence, "and it was his practice throughout his career to try to soften some of the more drastic punishments that prevailed in eighteenth-century armies. He was a firm disciplinarian, but he seems to have tempered this with a genuine concern for his troops.

" How he dealt with the prostitutes awaits further research. With the outbreak of the Seven Years'' War, which Americans called the French and Indian War, de Kalb was fighting again, as struggles between France and Great Britain spilled over into the New World--where, in Pennsylvania, the twenty-one-year-old Virginia militia officer George Washington, sent with a small force to protect construction of a British fort on what the French claimed was their territory, ambushed a force of Canadians and killed its commander. Again de Kalb was with the Loewendal Regiment and in 1756 was promoted to major. The following year he fought in the Battle of Rossbach, an ancien régime engagement unlike what he and other veterans of European wars would see in the New World. At Rossbach, Frederick the Great''s twenty thousand Prussians defeated forty thousand troops fighting for France and Austria. In the southern theater in the American Revolution, by contrast, it was not unusual for what was considered a major battle to be fought between troops totaling no more than two thousand or three thousand on both sides. Compare that to Leipzig, where, in 1813, half a million men would fight. But Fortune had smiled on America, Alexis de Tocqueville observed in 1840.

It had pl.