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AT HEADQUARTERS 145 arrived packet, letters that the brothers could share as they lingered over their port in the Admiral's spacious cabin. There had been a third brother, George, who was also a soldier. He was now dead, killed by a Frenchman's bullet in 1758, at that same Fort Ticonderoga which Johnny Burgoyne had recently captured from the Yankees. The shoreline outside the cabin windows was obscured by the heat haze. When a wind rose to carry the British fleet further up into Chesapeake Bay, the two brothers would part, the General to try Washington and gain Philadelphia, the Admiral to patrol the North American coast and the West Indies. Sir Henry Clinton was more consciously concerned with Burgoyne's descent of the Hudson River to Albany than was Sir William Howe, the commander of all British troops in North America. Clinton was in New York City with an army of four thousand regulars. Howe had left him there to hold the city and the port. In an offhand and casual way that deceptively shifted responsibility, Howe had also instructed him to aid in Burgoyne's invasion. But Henry Clinton's army was too small for him to send a part of it up the Hudson, where an American army barred the highland. He must await the reinforcements which were known to have left England in June. So General Clinton waited, too, in his pleasant, well-appointed headquarters in New York. Through the hot month of August he waited for the troopships 146 MARCH TO SARATOGA making the slow passage from England to New York. He waited for messengers making the dangerous journey through the rebel lines that separated him from his friend John Burgoyne. Still far out to sea the troop ships butted the North Atlantic trade winds, making slow progress. The messengers would never come; they hung from the limbs of trees with the ripening apples, the placard "Spy" pinned on their chests below the taut rope that bit deep into their necks. The occasional courier who did get through gave Clinton little cause for alarm on behalf of the army to the north. Burgoyne wrote of his hope to reach Albany by 22 August. Neither British general had yet been convinced that the rebels would fight, though both had been at Bunker Hill. On 10 August Clinton had written to Burgoyne that he believed the rebellion would soon be over. August had gone by and September was half over when a haggard messenger got through from Burgoyne to Clinton with the alarming news that the northern army was still forty miles above Albany at a place called Saratoga. Concern splashed the cool façade of Sir Henry Clinton's studied Guardsman's calm. He looked down the harbor, where for so long he had expected to see the troopships coming through the Narrows. It was more than a week before they finally came. Clinton did not wait for the new troops to disembark and find their land legs after the three months' passage. He gathered up three thousand infantrymen AT HEADQUARTERS 147 and headed up the Hudson, to divert the Yankees and to assist General Burgoyne. At last, in a clearrevelation of the events of an indolent summer, Clinton was making a desperate attempt on a desperate occasion." 12 Q and A Captain de la Naudiere, immaculate except for a day's stubble awoke General Burgoyne at the Duer House headquarters as soon as word came of the defeat of Baum and of Breymann's desperate situation. Aides, their stocks hastily tied and their eyes heavy with sleep, galloped down the river road from Fort Miller to rout out the 47th of Foot, bivouacked at the mouth of the Batten Kill and there- fore in closest proximity to the retreating Brunswickers. Burgoyne himself arrived in time to lead out the six companies of Wolfe's own 47th to the aid and succor of the mauled grenadiers. Colonel Breymann met Burgoyne with punctilious correctness: a doffing of his hat and a short bow from the saddle. At the movement, a sharp stab of pain ran up the German's injured leg, but the flush in his heavy face was not that of fever. It came, rather, from the inner hurt of smoldering self-anger, of truculent self-defense, of patched-up pride, and of unexpended fury. With an inherent courtesy, Burgoyne acknowledged the greeting with a low bow, in a mark of respect which gave no hint of mockery or censure 148 Q AND A 149 toward the colonel of his beaten troops. Turning to Nicholas Sutherland, the colonel of the 47th, General Burgoyne requested him to have his regiment line the road. So it was that Breymann's grenadiers marched back into the perimeter of the invasion army's camp, between the correctly respectful files of their British comrades-at-arms. The grenadiers sang in their ranks. In front of them Burgoyne and Breymann rode in silence. In the rear of the German column the wounded dragged along under the awed stare of the stiff ranks of the 47th, who had not yet met the Yankee rifleman. Behind the retiring army, the rutted, muddy, pitted road wound away through the forest to Cambridge, to the Sancoik mill, where the streams marked a ragged cross at the edge of the Hudson Valley, and on up the Walloomsac River into the green hills around Bennington. Of Baum's seven hundred and fifty men, only a scattered handful returned to the camp of Burgoyne's army. These were the frightened, haggard men who had found their way through the dense woods, avoiding alike the Yankee rangers and Stockbridge Indians, and their own scalping, scavenging Indian bands. The four guns of the Hesse-Hanau Artillery ornamented the tavern green at Bennington, where bound Tory prisoners cringed under the scorn of former neighbors, and blond German boys tended minor wounds, turning dull, expressionless eyes to the curious Vermonters who came to stare at the hireling mercenaries. 150 MARCH TO SARATOGA Of Burgoyne's Canadian Indians, only those with scalps and loot to turn into cash returned to the Hudson, As they packed up their traps, they told the officers, who came to remind them of their promises and to urge them to stay, that the sun which once rose so bright was now obscured by dark and gloomy clouds threatening a deluge. Blaming the weather, in this obvious parable, the last of the Indian warriors who had danced on the banks of the Bouquet River now left the British army. As the Bennington force retreated, Eraser's advance corps already on the west bank of the Hudson fell back. They had crossed on a bridge of rafts, and were only waiting for word from Bennington that Baum had captured the magazine of stores and the Yankee horse lines before they moved on down the Hudson to the commanding heights at Stillwater. Without the stores the advance corps could not go on, and after the torrential rains of 15 August swept away their bridge, Fraser found himself isolated and vulnerable on the western shore of the river. Lieutenant John Schank of the Royal Navy ferried them back to the east bank in a fleet scratched together from any available bateaux and scows. While across the river, Thomas Anburey, a gentleman- volunteer accompanying the advance guard, was given the opportunity that he had sought when he volunteered to follow the army. There had occurred a vacancy in the complement of officers of the 24th Foot, which Anburey was invited to fill. He accepted the invitation with alacrity, and a brother officer lent Q AND A 151 him a hank of red-dyed horsehair to sew into his cap, and a silver epaulet for his shoulder. Once again in the old bivouac on the Batten Kill, Anburey found time to write another letter to his friend in England. The new bit of braid was ever present in the corner of his eye, as he bent over the tablet on his knee, writing of his hope of becoming the captain of a company by the end of autumn. His was the eternal optimism of the soldier: he was immortal in a dead man's shoes; death could not come to him. Yet the end of the campaign had come for many officers and men. Of the German contingent alone, twenty-six officers were casualties of the Bennington expedition: all the dragoons, nine officers of von Earner's light infantry and Jäger corps, and many cavalrymen had fallen, dead or wounded, to the long brown rifles of the "Yankees" In the days following Breymann's return, the camp was filled with men convalescing from their wounds. Colonel Breymann hobbled about, using his gold-headed cane as a staff rather than a rod, while his men, chastened after their panic, pointed out to each other the five crudely patched rents in his campaign coat, where bullets had passed him close by. Lieutenant Hannemann, his neck swathed in linen bandages, hoped that by lying very still he would recover in time to go on with the expedition. But when Captain von Geyso, who came in every day to have a flesh wound dressed, ordered him back to Canada, Hannemann could neither voice a protest nor shake his head in refusal. For the wounded, bound for Canada, the road was 152 MARCH TO SARATOGA long and painful. Lieutenant Hannemann found the jolting of the Canadian cart, returning empty, too painful to endure, so he got out and walked. He did not try to keep up, trusting his luggage to the driver and only hoping to find it intact at the boat landing on Lake George. From the point of the army on the Batten Kill to Fort Edward, the wounded Jäger walked through the British wing of General Burgoyne's army. He met work parties of the 9th, the 20th, and the 21st patching and repairing the road. The soldiers looked at him blankly, without compassion, as though he were an alien instead of an ally. He found German friends around Burgoyne's head- quarters at the Duer House, where he rested, catching a glimpse of cool white summer dresses beside the tea table in the shade of the tall elms. At Fort Edward, Lieutenant Hannemann stopped at the hospital to get a clean dressing for his neck. On the island and on the bank of the Hudson, the army was building up its main stock-pile, which it would carry forward on the march to Albany. The quarter- masters stood, their legs apart, checking and counting barrels of flour and pork as squads of sweating soldiers rolled them down planks at the open tailgates of the carts. Everyone was working hard and cheerfully at tasks which they knew to have urgent importance. Bateaux lined the river bank, while on the shore caulkers with their wedges and mauls tamped the long strings of greasy brown tun into the open seams, readying still more boats for the river road. John Schank, his white shirt open at the throat, stood knee deep in the muddy brown water, helping a Q AND A 153 squad of sailors launch a strange-looking pontoon. In the lee of the island, a raft of similar pontoons was anchored and moored. When completed, with timbers across their gunwales and planks spiked on top of the timbers, each pair of pontoons would make a segment of a floating bridge which would keep pace with the army and would link the two shores of the Hudson. Over Schank's bridge, the army could march across the Mohawk River, the last natural obstacle before they reached Albany. Beyond Fort Edward, the road to Lake George was maintained and guarded by the troops of Riedesel's division. This was the critical stretch of Burgoyne's supply road. Since the western and Canadian Indians had gone home, the people who lived on farms along the poor road that followed the west bank of the Hudson had grown bold. Impromptu bands of "cow- boys" under self-appointed ensigns and captains attacked any scout or foraging party from Burgoyne's army when they ventured across the river. Every British wagon-train that passed between Fort Edward and Lake George was in danger of being waylaid by a determined force of these Charlotte County rangers. To protect the convoys, Brigadier General Johan Friederich von Specht kept his headquarters at the Jones farm. There, where the road began its climb out of the Hudson Valley and entered a mountain defile, the wagonmasters would be joined by a strong escort of German infantry which would conduct them through the vulnerable pass, to the landing place at the head of Lake George. The boat trip down the Lake George leg of 154 MARCH TO SARATOGA Burgoyne's supply route gave Lieutenant Hannemann and the other wounded men from the Battle of Bennington a last awed look at the terrible deep woods of North America. High, steep mountains squeezed in on the narrow blue ribbon of water. The boat convoys stayed in the middle of the lake, shunning the inhospitable and seemingly deserted shores of stark, gray rock and thick underbrush that clogged the forests blanketing the mountain slopes. Not until Ticonderoga did the road to Canada emerge from the woods. At that point European civilization began again for those who, since early in July, had been in the wild lands between the old fort and the crude way-stations on the road to Albany. To the weary men from the fighting point of the army the big vessels of the Royal Navy, anchored in the basin below the forts, gave promise of a swift passage to the city streets of Montreal. During the last two weeks of August 1777 and in the first days of September the British post at Ticonderoga underwent a change in its character and purpose. After the battle fought on the Hubbardton road, a steady trickle of sick and wounded had found the way back to Ticonderoga, to its hospitals and the boats that would take them to Canada. The western Indians had paddled their big canoes silently under the high cliff at the tip of the Ticonderoga peninsula. Warily, the garrison had watched as the Canadian tribes paused at the landing place on their journey north. After the battle at Bennington, men of the Prinz Friederich regiment had tenderly lifted the Q AND A 155 stretcher cases who had survived the trip and had laid them on the decks of the Canada-bound vessels. Then, in late August, came Indian refugees women and children from the Mohawk villages west of Albany, driven from their ancient homeland by the rebels after their tribal brothers, under Joseph Brandt, had fought with St. Leger's forces at the Battle of Oriskany. Burgoyne employed the refugee men as much-needed scouts; the others he sent on the long, weary trial to a new home in Canada. About 1 September the last of the reinforcements for General Burgoyne's army left Fort Ticonderoga on their way south. These were culls from the regimental rear parties which had been left at Montreal. Men who in June had been thought too old or too feeble to march with the proud battalions now, in September, appeared able and fit to the man-hungry colonels of wan and slim battalions, anxious to keep their place in Burgoyne's line of battle. Not many days after the final draft of reinforcements went through to the army on the upper Hudson, the last shipment of supplies from Canada was unloaded at the wharves at Ticonderoga. With the expediting of this final cargo, Fort Ticonderoga and its garrison reverted to a purely military role. Stevedores went back to being soldiers, cargo checkers again became drill sergeants, and officers moved out from the cool shade of the quarters to reappraise defense positions and to lay out new fields of fire. On down the supply line, the last cart was packed, the 156 MARCH TO SARATOGA last bateau loaded, and one by one the transhipping points were closed down. When a sweating carter at Fort Edward rolled the last barrel of flour to the tail- gate of his wagon, and remarked to the two privates who reached to ease the barrel down that this was "the one we've been looking for" Burgoyne's army was completely and finally cut off from its Canadian base. General Burgoyne had cast himself adrift. He now floated in a hostile sea, with no friendly relieving feature on a nearby horizon toward which to steer. Between his army and Canada there remained only the sprawling complex of forts at Ticonderoga and a small post on Diamond Island, stepping-stones along the long way he had come. On their tight island, the two companies of the 47th invited a neutralizing raid by "cowboys" from the west bank of the Hudson. Even the great fortifications at Ticonderoga were vulnerable to Yankee attack. There, Brigadier General Henry Watson Powell, humorless but confidently tenacious, had been left with two weak regiments. With his main strength across Lake Champlain on Mount Independence, Powell kept watch on the slopes to the eastward, where Warner's Continentals and Stark's New Hampshire men threatened to scythe around Burgoyne. Burgoyne knew that, between himself and Albany, the American army, now under a defensive General Horatio Gates, was digging in across his way. Of what was taking place beyond and behind the rebel lines he knew nothing at all. The long-expected word Q AND A 157 that Sir Henry Clinton was marching up the Hudson to the aid of the northern army failed to come. Couriers, sent out to meet the general coming from New York, turned back, unable to find a way through or around Gates's army. No spies came to the camp above the Batten Kill with rumor or gossip on which to base either hope or despair. Burgoyne drifted in a silent sea, with no echoing answer to his cries for help. One messenger did get through to the Duer House at Fort Miller. He was an Indian from St. Leger's force, besieging Fort Stanwix, but the dateline of the letter that he handed to the general read "Oswego, 27th August," and Johnny Burgoyne needed to read no further to know that Barry St. Leger had fallen back. Neither bluff nor threats had been able to bring about the capitulation of Fort Stanwix. St. Leger had run regular siege approaches to within a hundred and fifty yards of the fort. With a mine ready to be laid under the northwest bastion, St. Leger's Iroquois, surly and dissatisfied since the Battle of Oriskany, had mutinied. Two hundred Indians had deserted in a body, but those that remained had demanded that the siege be raised, while rumors spread that the invincible Benedict Arnold was coming with an army that could be numbered only with the leaves in the trees. As St. Leger deliberated with his British and Tory officers, the Indians ran amok. They pillaged the tents of the officers and menaced the soldiers. The council of war broke up with the officers hurrying 158 MARCH TO SARATOGA to rejoin their units, which already were running away, as much to escape their own Indian "allies" as from fear of the supposed approach of Arnold. From Oswego, on Lake Ontario, St. Leger wrote that he was hastening with his troops, to put them under Burgoyne's command. But the general on the upper Hudson knew that it was four hundred weary miles to Oswego, and that long before Barry St. Leger and his seven hundred regulars and Tories could come up to him he must either be in Albany or climbing back up his severed supply line into safe and secure winter quarters. John Burgoyne never seriously considered a retreat. As a soldier, his orders were as clear to him, and as enduring, as a fife tune: he was to force his way to Albany, where he was to put himself under command of General Howe. After the failure to capture stores and horse-transport at Bennington, Burgoyne was four weeks in building up the twenty-five days' supplies which he deemed necessary to carry the army to Albany. At last, on 11 September, all was in readiness. Wagons were packed, boats were loaded, and Schank's floating bridge was anchored across the Hudson. Von Specht's brigade had rolled its blankets and moved to Fort Edward. Baroness Riedesel still had the last of the children's clothes hanging on the line; when the order came to move out, her maid would quickly gather them up, and the children would have clean clothes all the way to Albany. The commissary's wife, in her gray traveling dress, sat by the fire in the Q AND A 159 deserted Duer House headquarters. Gentleman Johnny had gone to his field headquarters on the Batten Kill, leaving her with her baggage wagons and his own. She would dine alone, unless a staff officer should come back on some errand and join her. 13 Reconnaissance During the afternoon of 11 September, the rain, which had been threatening, began to fall. The preparatory order to move out was cancelled. The six thousand men of General Burgoyne's army went into bivouac along the ten miles of road that lay on the east bank of the Hudson from the Batten Kill to Fort Edward. The following day, the army woke to a steady drizzle. Stiff and cold, the men (and the women) cursed the land in which they found themselves, cursed their lot as soldiers, and cursed the enemy that stood in their way to the comfortable billets awaiting them in Albany. John Schank spent the day pacing the planks of his floating bridge as though it were a quarterdeck. While his crew of sailors bailed out the pontoons, the land-locked naval officer kept a close watch on the taut anchor cables that held his odd-looking command firmly in place across the current. He had lost one makeshift bridge to the torrential summer rains of August. Now every drop of rain splashing on the 160 RECONNAISSANCE l6l flat waters of the Hudson River seemed to threaten, for a second time, the engineering feat that Schank had accomplished. The present structure was so contrived that, should the flood rise on the river above, Schank could quickly disconnect the segments and float them out of harm's way until the spate of water had passed. But the rains of September differed from the August deluge. They were cold and silent, penetrating and harsh, and they lay on the land like the snows which they presaged. The rain stopped during the night, and before the guard corporal woke the drummers whose din began the army's day of march, the sentries had seen the stars come out all over the sky. The road dried quickly in the warm sun, and before noon the first contingent moved out onto the bridge. Most of the men in the army saw their general that day. Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne stood on the high bank on the west side of the Hudson, his constant aide, Sir Francis Carr Clarke, beside him, taking the salute of the colonels as they came up, all grinning, onto the new and hopeful side of the river. As the companies streamed by, they cheered Burgoyne, who waved the plumed and crested cap which, like them, he was wearing, and called back the watchword of the day: "Britons never retreat!'' General Phillips rode up and dismounted to watch Captain Thomas Jones bring his brigade guns off the bridge. Each gun and limber-team in turn trotted out on to the planking. As they reached the far shore the drivers lifted their teams into a rattling gallop l62 MARCH TO SARATOGA and, with whips flaying, brought their limbers and guns up the steep cut to the top of the bank, mud flying, harness chains ajingle. On the road, the wild- eyed horses were reined into a steady trot to close up with the red-coated infantry, and to clear the bridgehead for the next gun to cross over the Hudson. Baron Riedesel kept his German contingent on the east shore for two more days. Two miles down the west shore, the British had come to Saratoga, and to a rich bounty which they paused to gather. At Philip Schuyler's country seat the harvest was full. Fields of ripened wheat quilted the wide folds of the highlands around the house, and eight-foot stalks of maize, like rustic soldiery, ranked row upon row along the side of the road to Albany. In the deserted farm sheds, the racked scythes, flails, sickles, and husking knives awaited the harvesters. At the mill on Fish Creek the stones were in place, lacking only the miller's hand on the gear-lever, and that of his assistant to open the hopper-gate. On 14 September, soldier-farmers worked throughout the long day to reap Philip Schuyler's harvest. Threshers and winnowers toiled on the threshing- floor. While the sergeant-miller filled sacks with bread flour, huskers shucked ears of maize for the poor hungry horses of the army's train. The newly commissioned officer of the 24th Foot found the picquet guard that night a vantage point for reflection. In the course of a single day Lieutenant Anburey had witnessed the pillaging of a rich and prosperous estate. From his place in the first surge RECONNAISSANCE 163 of a victorious advancing army he could view philosophically the devastation "attendant on war." But Anburey, the young gentleman from London, during that day of harvest had ignored, or had not seen, that quarter of the plantation where the wheat lay scorched by fire. The night now hid the blackened acre where, with the torch of resistance in her own hand, Kitty Schuyler had tried to burn her home and the yield of her husband's land. On the morning of 15 September, the close ranks of the German contingent crossed to the west bank of the Hudson. After them came the gun park in reserve, guarded by the 47th Foot. Baron Riedesel did not see his baroness that day, though he was told that her big calash had come safely across the river with the baggage wagons before the floating bridge was broken into its component parts. It would be floated downstream with the store bateaux and would keep pace with the army. At Saratoga the German general took his division's station along the river road, on the left of the British. Smartly, he deployed a regiment to his right, to make contact with the left of Hamilton's British division. On the rising land further to the right, Fraser's corps had the responsibility of the army's open flank, resting in the woods. While he made secure his own position in the battle line, Riedesel learned that Burgoyne himself, with General Phillips and General Fraser, had taken forward two thousand men and four cannon on a reconnaissance of the roads and clearings that lay ahead toward the enemy. 164 MARCH TO SARATOGA Johnny Burgoyne was out all day, and evening found him two miles in front of the main position. The woods were quiet, the cabins deserted. Almost gaily, Burgoyne called up Captain Thomas Jones and ordered him to fire the evening gun for the army then and there, to give the illusion of its being well forward of where, in fact, it was. Captain Jones stood quietly behind the unlimbered piece. He was a veteran of Benedict Arnold's night attack on Quebec. When the gun was reported ready, Jones nodded his consent to fire. The report was still echoing through the woods, and the gunners were still stamping out the little fires, started among the dry autumn leaves by the muzzle blast, when Jones gave the order to limber up and follow back to camp. Another officer who had been at Quebec in the swirling snow of New Year's, 1776, heard Burgoyne's evening gun. He was Daniel Morgan, the rifleman leader, whom George Washington had sent north with his corps in August to bolster the northern army of the Americans. On the evening of 15 September Morgan was commanding an escort of his riflemen back to the American lines. They had been out all day with Horatio Gates, who like Burgoyne was making a personal reconnaissance toward the enemy. In taking over from Philip Schuyler the command of the northern department, General Gates took onto his own sloping shoulders the full responsibility for stopping Burgoyne's march to Albany. In his head, RECONNAISSANCE 165 behind the wizened, bespectacled face of an old grandfather, must be found the plan to halt the British invasion from Canada before it made a junction with Sir Henry Clinton's forces. To this enormous challenge to the new nation and to his own reputation, Gates brought a supreme self-confidence in his own ability. He was sure of his method: the painstaking staff system he had learned and mastered as an ambitious British officer. He had proved the efficacy of this method in 1776, when on this same northern frontier in the short space of a summer he had halted an American retreat at Ticonderoga, rebuilt a beaten army into a proud force, created an American fleet on Lake Champlain, and had erected a strong defensive position out of the old French fort at Ticonderoga, while extending the fortress system across the lake to Mount Independence. Gates's strategic plan for the campaign of 1776 had proved out. By forcing a naval race on the British, he had left no time for General Carleton and General Burgoyne to try the defenses at Ticonderoga. But for Horatio Gates himself this successful campaign had been a disappointment. He had been forced to share credit for the victory with Philip Schuyler, nominal commander of the northern department of the army. Even the accolade of fame had eluded General Gates, snatched from him by his erratic brigadier Benedict Arnold. In directing disobedience of Gates's orders, Arnold had fought a dazzling naval battle to climax the summer campaign. In this battle the American fleet had been defeated and for the purpose of any l66 MARCH TO SARATOGA subsequent campaign had been destroyed, but it was Arnold's strange genius that he emerged as the hero of the battle and the undoubted victor on Lake Champlain. In 1777 General Gates had to repeat the campaign of the previous year, but with a difference which to some degree compensated for the short space of time remaining to him in which to accomplish his ends. By 19 August 1777, when Gates took up his position of command behind the headquarters desk, the American army already had been rebuilt. No one was more aware of this than Gates's adjutant general, James Wilkinson. In two years of war Wilkinson had ingratiated himself into the favor of three successive generals Brigadier General Arnold, Major General St Glair, and the army commander, General Gates with such success that he now stood before Horatio Gates's desk, at twenty years of age, an adjutant general and a lieutenant colonel. It was as aide-de-camp to Arthur St. Clair that the young officer had endured the night escape under Burgoyne's guns on Sugar Loaf. From his position close to the general, Wilkinson knew that, of the two thousand Continentals at Fort Ticonderoga on 5 July, many had been casualties at the Battle of Hubbardton. He himself had been a casualty of the attrition that accompanies a retreat, but had turned up again on the strength of the newly reconstituted northern department, in a position to ride with an ascending star. The muster rolls which, Wilkinson, as adjutant general, showed to Horatio Gates at the end of the third week of RECONNAISSANCE l67 August put the strength of the American northern army at six thousand men Continentals and effective militia. Only four thousand, however, faced Burgoyne along Schuyler's last defensive line at the mouth of the Mohawk River. Benedict Arnold, now a major general, was with Learned's brigade, successfully turning back St. Leger's threat on Albany from the west. He would not return with his men until the first week in September. Benjamin Lincoln was to the east, where, since the Battle of Bennington, he had been organizing a strike at Burgoyne's rear, and trying to persuade John Stark to join Gates's army or, failing that, to move in closer onto Burgoyne's flank. Stark would do neither, preferring, as was his right, to sit out the expiring short-term enlistment of his brigade on its victorious battleground. Later, if the spirit moved him, Stark would take his own opportunity to strike a blow at Burgoyne. On the way, but not yet arrived on the Mohawk River, was Colonel Daniel Morgan's hardy regiment of Continental riflemen. Gates knew Morgan from Washington's winter camp in New Jersey, and from the early days of the Revolution when, as Washington's adjutant general, he had assigned the riflemen to Benedict Arnold's force against Quebec. Gates now had to fumble in his memory for a picture of a nineteen-year-old wagoner named Morgan, who had shared with him the disaster of Braddock's defeat. In the mess gossip of the old war there had been the incredible story of the provincial who, quite l68 MARCH TO SARATOGA justly, received five hundred lashes for daring to strike back at a British officer who was chastising him. The provincial had been the same Daniel Morgan whom Gates now eagerly awaited to round out his northern army. Morgan was a broad-shouldered, deep-chested man, who carried the welts and stripes of his flogging under the hunting shirt he habitually wore as uniform. His face was scarred by an Indian arrow which had penetrated into his mouth, to leave its mark on Morgan's naturally slurred, soft Virginia speech. To carry his orders to his scattered regiment, Morgan used a wild turkey call which became the pride and spirit of his regiment of rifle-armed marksmen. Morgan's arrival on the Mohawk with but three hundred and thirty-one of his men was a disappointment to Gates. The remaining one hundred and sixty- nine of the expected five hundred were sick. To bolster the riflemen, whom Gates proposed to keep under his own direct command as an advance corps, Major Henry Dearborn, with two hundred picked light infantrymen, went under Colonel Morgan's command. Like Morgan, Dearborn had made the overland march to Quebec, so when Arnold returned from Stanwix he found in Horatio Gates's army two aggressive troop commanders waiting to greet him. With six thousand reliable troops, Gates was an even match for Burgoyne's regulars. But in the valley of the upper Hudson there was no fort such as Ticonderoga on which Gates could build his defense and thus gain the advantage. From his scouts and civilian RECONNAISSANCE l69 spies he knew that Burgoyne's supplies were limited, and that the cold mornings of a northern September would force his British opponent to move on to his objective of Albany, if only for use of that city as winter quarters. Gates, who was a patient, calculating officer, saw his advantage and success in field works, at which the Americans were adept, and against which the British must wear themselves away. With Schuylers northern department General Gates had inherited a serious-minded Polish military engineer of proven competence, Thaddeus Kosciusko. Before the American army had fallen back to the Mohawk River, Kosciusko had run his lines and driven the stakes for a defense at Stillwater. On 8 September, Gates's army set itself to the eleven-mile march to Stillwater. With their muskets, the men carried shovels and picks. Their step was light and gay as at long last they advanced against the brutal "macaroni," Burgoyne of the bloody hatchet. They cheered the elderly General Gates as he rode along the line of march, and shouted their approval to the bearded rifleman of Dan Morgan's corps, standing under a pine tree and exhibiting to all who passed the scalp of an Indian that he had taken only the day before. At Stillwater the Americans grounded their arms and stood about with their tools in their hands, waitting to be told where to begin their digging. But Gates had gone on ahead with his Polish engineer, his staff, and his escort, in search of another place to build his fortifications. At Stillwater the river bank 170 MARCH TO SARATOGA was so wide and gently sloping, and the cleared fields so extensive, as to favor Burgoyne's strong complement of well-served cannon, and to invite the terrible omnipotence of a disciplined bayonet charge by trained European troops. On 12 September, the American army moved three miles closer to the enemy, onto the ground which they would fortify, and where they would make their stand. On a narrow strip of flat land between the river and the hills rolling up to the western forest, a man named Bemis had built a tavern at the juncture of two roads. The main road followed closely along the west bank of the river, pressed there by a parallel series of high, moundlike hills, cut through by a maze of deep gullies. A road on the left climbed steeply from the river to John Neilson's farm on Bemis Heights. Half a mile before coming to the Neilson house, the road forked again, the western track ambling off through the woods, the north road passing the farmer's house and barn and skirting the high land between the gorges, to Freeman's farm. A complex of cart tracks cut through the gullies and ran over the hills from Freeman's farm to the Hudson River. North of the farm there was a wide depression, known as the Great Ravine. A road, coming up from the river bank, lay along the north edge of the Great Ravine and joined the Neilson-Freeman road half a mile beyond the latter farm. Horatio Gates had come to his battlefield. Planning carefully, Gates projected the course of the defensive battle he expected to force on General Burgoyne. RECONNAISSANCE 171 Field works of earth, faced with logs, would be thrown up in depth across the narrow river plain where it defiled at Bemis's tavern. Other field works would rise on the eastern slopes of Bemis Heights, enfilading the river road which, being the only good road from the north, must inevitably be the center line of Burgoyne's advance with his baggage train and gun park. American cannon placed in the works could deny the river to the British boats. Standing on the heights with his engineer, Gates traced out additional fortifications, following the contour of the land away from the river to Neilson's big barn. This barn he fortified, before turning the lines once again to form a three-sided box facing north, with its strength dominating the river plain. From the high ground at Fort Neilson, Gates looked down across open ground to the ravine-cut woods and hills cruel country through which to advance. Again, Gates's British-trained eye wandered off toward the river road, where he had set Nixon's, Glover's, and Paterson's brigades to digging. Here, behind their field works, Gates felt confident that his Continentals could hold the main advance of European regulars. On either side of Fort Neilson (as the barn was now referred to), Brigadier Generals Learned and Poor, whose men formed the division under Arnold, dug in to guard against the approach of a flanking column coming in from the scattered clearings around the Freeman farm. As General Gates had anchored his right on the Hudson, so his left was firmly tied to the barrier of 172 MARCH TO SARATOGA the impenetrable woods, fit only to be a playground for wolves and bears and catamounts, and for Gates's own wild riflemen. Into this dark region Gates found himself led on 15 September. There was much work yet to be done on the lines, and at headquarters his desk was piled high with letters and papers requiring his attention. As he rode along the trail beyond Freeman's farm, with Morgan padding on moccasined feet beside his stirrup, the crafty American general had many things to think about and many decisions to make. All along the line of field works the engineers needed his prodding; a mass of reports and orders awaited his signature. The militia, goaded by Lincoln and stirred by the murder of Jane McCrea, were beginning to come in, eager to fight but without supplies or any plan of action. Then, there was the correspondence with the haughty Sir John Burgoyne, and this Gates relished. Burgoyne had written to him, under a flag of truce, complaining of the treatment of Tory prisoners after the Battle of Bennington. Gates had replied to "The Famous Lieutenant General, the Fine Gentleman . . . the Soldier and the Scholar," with a taunt for every scalp taken by an Indian in the pay of the British, and a sneer for the murderer of Jane McCrea. Perhaps, while he was in the woods with Dan Morgan, another letter would have arrived from Burgoyne. As the afternoon wore on, Gates, too long away from his headquarters, gave the order to turn back. Morgan spluttered into his turkey call, and the scouts came in and silently fell into line behind their colonel. RECONNAISSANCE 173 Then, over the tree-tops to the north, came the hollow boom of Burgoyne's evening gun. The two officers, who had been together in the woods at Braddock's defeat, stopped to listen. In the stillness that followed, they quickly made their way back to the fortified American camp Gates to his tent, Morgan to detail the night's offensive patrols. MAP 1st BATTLE of FREEMANS'S FARM (SARATOGA) 19 September 1777 14 To the Sound of the Guns For six days Burgoyne's army crawled southward down the west bank of the Hudson. Moving, as it did, in a tight little enclave, it was confident. The main body of the troops did not feel the presence of the enemy. The army lived and moved as much unto itself as did the porcupine it met along the road, which, when prodded with a musket, lashed out and then, with quills raised and head down, moved on in the direction it had been going. The army was indignant and affronted, therefore, rather than apprehensive when an unarmed party digging potatoes from an abandoned patch was ambushed by Yankees, who killed or wounded thirteen men. The whole army knew by morning, and talked all day, of the fire that destroyed the Aclands' tent, on the campground of the advance corps. Everyone sympathized with the gentle Lady Harriet over her loss, and the officers expressed their admiration for the gallant major, who, not knowing that his pregnant wife had managed to escape, rushed back into 175 176 MARCH TO SARATOGA the burning marquee to rescue her. The soldiers congratulated the Aclands' servant for having pulled the major out by the ankles, offered him a pipe of tobacco, and joked with him about his not having been sure whose ankle he had grasped! Though clothing of any kind was scarce, and the officers had brought no warm clothes with them below Skenesborough, somehow the Aclands were outfitted, and the major, his head and hands swathed in wet bandages to soothe his burns, marched out with the grenadiers on 17 September. Headquarters was made that night at Sword's house, two miles north of Bemis's tavern, and remained there all the following day, while the supply train came down by road and river, bringing the hospital with it. Burgoyne found it necessary to keep with the army the sick and wounded and the convalescent. To leave them in the comfortable houses and barns at Saratoga was to give them over to pillage and reprisal at the hands of the irregular Yankee "cowboys," whom Captain Fraser and the fifty Iroquois Indians now with the expedition reported as prowling and scavenging close behind the army. To leave a hospital behind meant leaving behind surgeons and mates to tend the patients, and Burgoyne could not spare this skilled personnel. Heavy casualties could be expected when the British army butted through the American defense line which, Burgoyne's intelligence informed him, was building at Stillwater, three miles beyond the defile at Bemis's tavern. The Yankees, harassing the British front and flank in the woods, already had been TO THE SOUND OF THE GUNS 177 identified as Morgan's men, and there were those in Burgoyne's army who regretted that prisoner-of-war Morgan had scorned the colonelcy offered to him in Quebec by General Carleton. Others of Burgoyne's officers corps had known Gates before he turned his coat from red to blue. Burgoyne himself had seen Arnold through his spyglasses from the deck of His Majesty's schooner, the Lady Maria. On 13 October 1776, the Yankee general-commodore had appeared as a wild, whooping figure under a red-and-white gridiron flag, laying the long stern-gun of his galley, the Congress, on any British ship that drew too near. Burgoyne expected to meet Benedict Arnold again in the autumn of 1777. At dawn on 19 September, Burgoyne's artillery prepared to move out with the army on its day's march toward an enemy still indistinct. A thick, pale thin mist of autumn hung over the river bank, making strange shapes of the gun teams. Drivers were poking about in the boxes of the troop carts and in ammunition boxes, in search of hidden ears of corn with which to coax a little more snatch and haul out of their tired animals during the day's work that lay ahead. Men and horses, both blanketed against the cold of the night that persisted into the new day, moved slowly in the heavy mist. Not until the sun rose high enough to burn away the mist, and, like a bold picquet, drive off the scouting cold of the approaching winter, would the army march off toward Albany. At his tent in the army headquarters area, Major 178 MARCH TO SARATOGA Griffith Williams, commander of Artillery, awaited the arrival of his breakfast and of his gunner captains. One by one, the latter emerged from the mist, slouching or moving briskly according to each individual's mood of the morning: Pausch, the German, in his big cloak, all military; Thomas Jones, glancing impatiently at Pausch, whom he could not understand and of whom, as befitted a Welshman, he was suspicious; Ellis Walker, who had taken the 12-pounder up Mount Defiance; and finally, John Carter, who had commanded the gunboats on the dash up to Skenesborough, and who was now in command of the gun park which followed the regiments. Of these captains, each of the first three commanded the guns attached to a column of Burgoyne's advance. Pausch was going with Riedesel's German wing of the army, following the river road. Walker had under command six Royal Artillery guns and two of the Hesse-Hanau gunners. He marched with Eraser's corps, to which had been attached Breymann's grenadiers. His would be the longest march, following the road westward along the north side of the Great Ravine to Freeman's farm, to protect the right flank. Captain Jones was in support of Brigadier Hamilton's British brigade, which would follow after Fraser but would turn off by a track which led more directly through the Great Ravine to Freeman's farm, and the road to Neilson s barn on Bemis Heights. Before the artillery orders group broke up, General Phillips, a gunner all Ms life, joined these kindred souls. Since August, as second in command TO THE SOUND OF THE GUNS 179 of the expedition, he had taken direct command of all supplies, and in that capacity he would follow Riedesel along the river road on the march of 19 September. From that position, he could best judge the moment to call up Captain Carter's reserve of guns when, as was expected, the German wing met the main line of rebel resistance and their strongest fortifications on the flat river plain. General Burgoyne himself would command the center, with which he intended to turn the Yankee left. The sun showed as an orange disc through the mist before the captains returned to their batteries of guns, and Major Williams's servant dared to announce the morning meal. It was ten o'clock before the three columns of the British army moved out. Pausch, riding with his lead section of guns, had a fair view across the Hudson and the flat plain beyond. Riedesel's column had halted while the leading regiment of infantry patched a section of the road that led through the swamp to a bridge, also in need of repair. As the Hessian captain looked across the river, a flash of sunlight showed on the crest of a tree-covered mountain humped up into the sky. The flash showed again. It was the glint of sunlight on polished metal a basin, perhaps, or even a mirror as though a Yankee militiaman were shaving. When once more the German column was halted, to repair another bridge destroyed by the retreating Americans, again the flash of light could be seen on the distant mountain. Pausch and Riedesel knew it now for what it was: heliograph signals from American l80 MARCH TO SARATOGA scouts to the American commander somewhere up ahead. From the urgency of the flashing, the rebels could not be far away. The bridges having been repaired, the German division had come to a long stretch of straight road and was stepping out smartly to the music of the bands. Shortly after one o'clock the German column halted again, and the jangle of harness and the rumble of wheels on the bridge planking was stilled. Pausch could hear the sound of distant musket fire, inland away from the river, where he judged that Fraser's column, with Colonel Breymann, would be turning into the road parallel to the one he himself was following. Almost at once, one of the baron's aides appeared, requesting that two cannon be sent forward. Pausch himself took the two leading guns, each with its ammunition tumbrils and carts of tools, and pressed forward. The infantry fell away to the sides of the road to let him pass. Near the head of the column, Riedesel's aide led Pausch into a narrow side road and up a small hill onto a flat table-land, where he found Riedesel looking toward the west. The sound of firing was crisp. An aide quickly appraised Captain Pausch as to the disposition General Riedesel had made of his division. Two German battalions were deployed along the original line of march, with two companies of Rhetz's regiment pushed a little forward, to occupy a small hill dominating the river road. In moving up onto the plateau and calling for two guns, not only TO THE SOUND OF THE GUNS l8l had the baron rounded out the German position but had placed himself in readiness, if called upon, to go to the aid of the British. As Pausch could see, Riedesel's relief force was made up of the general's own regiment, together with the two remaining companies of Rhetz. The men were sitting on the grass, not at ease in the companionable relaxation of a halt on the march, but very calmly, their muskets in their hands, waiting. These men had been in North America for two campaigns without coming face to face with the enemy. Now the firing in the west seemed to be drawing nearer. The tableau of officers, gathered around their general yet apart from him, heard the volley fire that marked the change of position of the British line to its rear, while the Yankee fire, loose and indiscriminate surged up into a frenzy. The cannon, too, fell silent as the German officers looked to each other for confirmation as to the implication of a British retreat. General Riedesel turned quickly to his commanders, gave them the order to advance, and without further delay, set out along the track across the plateau toward the sound of musketry. The infantry scrambled to their feet. Pausch found his artillery train restless and eager, the horses sidling and tossing their heads before the drivers could get them to lunge into their collars. Across the plateau, where the road dipped down into a ravine, Riedesel halted his column. While the infantry deployed into a defensive position, Pausch sighted his guns, ordering his gunners out to throw 182 MARCH TO SARATOGA down a rail fence which offered cover for the "Yankee" riflemen. Patrols of three and four men each were sent out to locate the enemy, and when Pausch rode up to report his guns in position, he found Riedesel instructing his aide, Captain Geismar, to ride to Burgoyne with word that he, Riedesel, was in position and ready to assist. Quietly, Pausch ordered his wagonmaster, who was well mounted, to follow Geismar and to find the best possible traverse of the gully for the guns and carts of the train. So General Riedesel's relief force waited out the afternoon, while the noise of battle thundered less than a mile in the distance. Beyond the spot where Captain Pausch marked the course of battle by the sound of Captain Jones's 6-pounders, and on the other side of the gunsmoke that trailed lazily above the tree-tops, Captain Walker's brigade of guns was silent. There was no field of fire in the thick woods, where General Eraser had put his corps into a defensive position on a height of land half a mile to the west and north of the embattled British center. Fraser had taken up his position soon after hearing the first fire. The height appeared to him as the key to the right wing of the whole advance; from it he could also counter- attack into the flank of the Americans attempting to turn the British center. Already, at the very first fire, Fraser had sent a reinforcement of two companies of the 24th to assist the center. Lieutenant Thomas Anburey found himself at the TO THE SOUND OF THE GUNS 183 rear of Ms company, jogging down the forest road toward the sound of musket fire. With his left hand he held his sword scabbard free of the ground. In front of him were the backs of his men, their muskets held high at the port; the empty bayonet scabbards, bullet pouches, and barrel-like water bottles bobbed in unison at their hips. Close behind him, the lead team of Lieutenant Dunbar's gun pressed closer. Anburey half turned as he ran, shouting at the driver to keep his distance. The driver's arm was raised, as was Dunbar's, in a signal to halt. As the lieutenant ran into his own rear rank, he heard rifle fire to the front, answered by a volley from the leading company of the 24th. The commander of Anburey's own company already had given the order to form on the right. Now the company was advancing in a scythe- like sweep to the right. A brown figure seemed to flit, sparrow-like, between two bushes. Anburey thought it one of the Mohawks, then realized that what he had seen was a Yankee rifleman. Some of the men were firing their muskets at the brown people they saw moving away. Officers and sergeants were cursing the nervousness of their men. Anburey saw his first man killed in action, and with all the incomprehension of a soldier at his first battle, he thought it odd that his friend, Lieutenant John Don, should leap so high in the air, then fall in a heap to the ground. Bursting through a screen of red-gold leaves, Lieutenant Anburey came upon a strange sight. On the ground sat a Yankee rifleman, calmly paying out paper money from a black leather wallet to a soldier 184 MARCH TO SARATOGA Anburey recognized as General Eraser's batman. Both, men were smiling. On seeing the lieutenant the Yankee stopped for a moment to explain that the batman not only had saved him from capture by the Indians but had managed to retrieve his wallet, containing (among other things) his commission. Politely, the American introduced himself as Captain Van Swearingham of Morgan's Riflemen and a prisoner, of course, of the lieutenant of the 24th. Quiet had come over that part of the battleground on which Anburey and his prisoner stood. Dunbar came sauntering up and joined them. When Anburey 's servant found them he had the lieutenant's flask, from which, as they talked, each of the three officers drank in turn. While Van Swearingham was promising the two Englishmen much more "business" before the day was over, heavy firing again broke out in front of the picquet of the advance corps. Dunbar ran off to rejoin his gun, and Anburey, too, hurried to where his men waited in rank. The Yankee captain watched them go; then, with his escort, he set out for the rear. If he was recaptured, as he might well be, for the woods were saturated with Morgan's men, he would get back his long brown rifle with its carved patch-box cover that he loved so well. The British soldier carried it in his left hand, behind the point of balance, and Van Swearingham feared that he would ram the lips of the muzzle into the rough forest floor. It was Major Gordon Forbes of the 9th Foot, who, with the picquet of Burgoyne's center column of the TO THE SOUND OF THE GUNS 185 British army, early that afternoon made the first contact with Colonel Morgan's Riflemen. The four regiments of British regulars, with Jones's brigade of guns, had entered the gully during the morning, crossed the millstream on a bridge which they found to be intact, then climbed up to high ground. There, with advance sentries out, the regiment had waited for an hour, to give Fraser time to march the wide circle around, and to come on to the right flank of the army. About one o'clock, Burgoyne ordered the three- minute guns fired as a signal to Riedesel and Fraser, and so began the advance. Coming out of the woods, Major Forbes deployed his hundred men for the advance on the Freeman farmhouse. Immediately he came under aimed rifle fire from his objective. He ignored this, as his men were behaving well and advancing steadily and without undue haste. They cleared the farmhouse in a rush. Then, as they were being fired upon from a railfence over to the west, they changed direction and continued their charge, which carried the fence line. Forbes followed the fleeing riflemen into the woods, where, among the pines, the American resistance stiffened. Rifles seemed to crack from every direction, and the major felt himself stung by a ball. The men began looking around to see how their friends were faring, and Major Forbes knew that soon they would begin to huddle. He saw one man standing free, aiming his musket toward the tree-tops. He opened his mouth to shout at the man, to bring him to his senses, but saw just in time a puff of smoke high in a maple tree. l86 MARCH TO SARATOGA Though he could not see the enemy he realized there were riflemen in the trees as well as on the ground. Reluctantly, the major gave the order to retire. He was hit again before he regained, the open pasture land, where a regiment (probably the 20th) was forming into line. To his horror, he saw the men of the front rank leveling to fire. He ran toward therm shouting, but too late to stop the first ragged volley, which added yet more wounded to the casualty list of his already sorely tried picquet. Mounted on his horse directing the deployment Colonel Robert Kingston saw the nervous regiment fire into the returning picquet. He ordered a gun to be fired. Its booming roar shook the men into control, and the sergeants and two young officers steadied down to their work of getting the lines dressed, preparatory to advancing across the wide home pasture of Freeman's farm. 15 Action Front! Gone were the farmer's bullocks, which had plowed the upper fields. Gone was the team of horses, which had cropped short the summer grass along the rail fence. The log barns behind Freeman's farmhouse were empty of stock. Where the ground fell away to the east at the far side of the farmyard, the edge of a cornfield spreading up out of the gully marked the brow of the hilltop clearing. The row of tall stacks seemed to be watching the lines of red-coated infantry, spreading, weed-like, over the northern end of the home meadow. Quickly, the long line of Englishmen formed up, as more and more files of companies marched out of the woods. There was a moment when a little band of Jägers in their green coats ran out between the companies to dash for the protection of a ditch, where their short-rifled pieces could answer the desultory fire of Yankee riflemen. But for the odd rifle shot, all was quiet at Freeman's farm until the drums began to beat. Fifty gaily coated drummers stood behind their 187 l88 MARCH TO SARATOGA regiments; at the ready, slim backs arched stiffly, young eyes wide. At an order, a hundred drumsticks fell to rattling out the insistent beat of the long roll, then fell silent. All up and down the three regimental fronts, colonels and captains shouted the traditional orders and ran to take their places in the line of British infantry before the drums began to beat again. With the one first step of fate, the whole long line advanced to the slow, measured tap to which the tramping men could set down their feet with decision. Close behind the infantry, forty-eight gunners took up the slack on drag-ropes, and as the heavy trails cleared the ground, the gun sergeants, leaning on the muzzles as counter-weights, gave the order to march. Four guns moved out after the infantry, two in the gap between the 9th and the 21st, and two more to the left, where the 20th and Anstruther's 62nd continued the line. Further back, four ammunition tumbrils followed, their drivers leading the plodding dray horses. General John Burgoyne sat easily in his saddle, Colonel Kingston at his elbow. A horse, stirred by the drumbeats, danced out of the group of staff officers and division couriers standing near the general. The rider, a French-speaking Brunswick officer from the German wing, pulled his beast around and slipped back into the group. Gentleman Johnny edged his mount into a walk as the long red line of infantry passed the little farmhouse. The line crossed the ditch where the Jägers lay. The gun crews of each ACTION FRONT! 189 two-gun battery combined efforts to worry their pieces across the ditch, then hurried to catch up with the drums, bobbing on the thighs of the drummers as they strode behind the companies. The Yankees were firing from the woods, and here and there a red-coated figure fell heavily to the grass. Lieutenant Hadden ran ahead and dragged a wounded private from the path of an oncoming gun. At the two log barns, the British line halted. In the face of the rebel fire, they could not go on without support. Volley fire by platoon skipped up and down from the British ranks. It drove the Americans back from the edge of the wood, while the guns were being wheeled into place. With the help of Lieutenant Reid, Captain Jones set up his piece in the space between the 9th and the 21st, with his field of fire to the left, in front of the latter regiment. Lieutenant Hadden stationed his two pieces to cover the wood and to shoot into the cornfield. To his right six companies of the 62nd faced the wood; to his left two companies angled back, facing the gully. For two long hours Hadden fired his guns. Some- times his canister shot tore through the tall stand of corn, cutting the stalks through which the enemy tried to infiltrate around the 62nd. Sometimes Lieutenant Hadden fired round shot and canister into the woods, and the balls ricocheted off the tree trunks into the branches above. The canister was meant for the Yankee regiments forming up under the trees, preparing for a charge. From the point where he commanded the battle 190 MARCH TO SARATOGA Burgoyne saw four rebel attacks form up, start off, then turn back before the volleys of his line of regulars. Unlike the Yankees who had begun the battle, these were uniformed Continentals. Most of the rifle fire was to Burgoyne's right, where Fraser, too, was holding his ground. Now the familiar crack of the long American rifle came seldom from in front of the 62nd and the 21st. When it was heard, it usually meant that a British officer was hit, or that another gunner had fallen away from his gun. As the smoke drifted off enough to afford a clear view, the Yankee marksmen tried for General Burgoyne. When, at extreme range, they toppled a big officer from his handsome mount in front of the staff group, the Yankees cheered the supposed fall of the scalp-buying British general. But the young dandy who stopped Burgoyne's bullet was Captain Charles Green, aide to General Phillips. On hearing the sound of the firing, Phillips, who had been riding with Baron Riedesel's wing, had ridden hard to the sound of the guns. With the eye and mind of a veteran gunner, he had paused on his way to Burgoyne to order the 20th (which he found waiting in the gully) to protect the flank of the 62nd by occupying the woods and the cornfield. He also took time to send a man galloping on horseback to Major Williams with the request that four guns from the park be dispatched at once. Captain Green had been sent on ahead, to appraise General Burgoyne of what he had done and to tell his general he was coming. As the gunner general put his foaming ACTION FRONT! 191 charger to the hill out of the gully, he met his handsome aide, borne on a litter by four officers' servants. The captain was but one of a long line of wounded, drifting down off the higher land like autumn leaves shaken from a tree-top by a gust of wind. All sought shelter in the gully, where the doctors worked by the bank of a little stream, and chaplains moved among the men. There a host of wagoners, smiths, armorers, wheelwrights, servants, and busy noncombatants looked anxiously to where Squire Freeman once had farmed. The gale of battle beat most furiously on the corner where Hadden's guns stood with the ranks of the desperately fighting 62nd. The gunner lieutenant was now working as a gun number. With but four men to load the guns, he himself was laying and firing each of his two guns in succession. Eighteen of his artillery men were dead or gone back wounded; one of his three men had been hit, and even as Huddon looked at him to appraise his strength, the man slipped down beside a gunwheel, tried again to rise, then sunk back, exhausted, His guns unmanned and helpless, Hadden ran back to where Brigadier Hamilton stood encouraging Colonel Anstruther, to beg for some infantry- men to pass ammunition and keep the guns firing. Ho reached politely for his cap; as he prepared to doff it to the general, a rifleman's bullet snatched it from his hand. He left it unheeded on the ground, as he pleaded with the senior officer for men for the guns, his guns! But Anstruther and Hamilton were 192 MARCH TO SARATOGA organizing a charge, and they needed every bayonet. Blinded with the rage of frustration, Hadden turned and ran stumbling to the barn where Burgoyne, dismounted now, had moved up to take even closer control of his battle. General Phillips was there, and Captain Jones, too, and to them he repeated his plea for gunners. With the consent of Phillips, Jones promised men from the two other guns of the brigade, and immediately ran off to fetch them. Content for the moment, Hadden stopped to look around him. The 9th Foot, who had not been heavily engaged, were flying back across the ditch to take up a reserve position at the farmhouse. The 21st was standing firm. One of Hadden's gunners was sprawled on the ground in the lee of the log barn; he was one of the men Hadden had left wounded; now he lay dead. Exposed in the open space between the two barns, seemingly unconcerned by the danger, Gentleman Johnny was in earnest consultation with Captain Willoe of Riedesel's staff, whom the general held tightly by the arm, as if holding back the younger man. When the German ran quickly to his horse, mounted, and gave the beast spur into a bounding gallop, Hadden returned to his guns. He arrived as the 62nd, shouting hoarsely in the throat-stinging smoke of battle, launched their charge. Alone with his guns, Lieutenant Hadden watched them go. The men and officers were hurrying toward the woods, where smoke puffs blossomed at the roots of the tall trees. Behind the line of soldiers stumbled the little drummer-boys in their buff ACTION FRONT! 193 coats, the big drains flapping as the boys tried to hurry. Hadden laughed at the ragged beat the running boys were fumbling out of their jouncing drums. It seemed funny that the regiment marched steadily on, oblivious to the step the drums were striving so manfully to give them. At the forest edge, the attack of the 62nd wavered. Like shy suitors at a lady's door, the regiment hesitated to enter. From further back in the hollowness of the woods American musket fire, controlled and telling, rumbled out an invitation to the infantry to come on. Instead, the 62nd fell back, firing volleys as they went. Red-coated dead now dotted the field in front of Hadden's two 6-pounders. Captain Jones shouted in his ear, and Hadden, the spell of awe broken, turned to his guns with new determination. He had seen infantry, cloaked only in tradition, discipline, and honor, walk up to naked death. While Anstruther and his officers strove to reform the battle line, the guns fired and loaded and fired again. The rebel fire along the whole front turned on the two guns, still unsupported by the disorganized 62nd. One by one, the new gunners dropped. Captain Jones was down, clutching at his abdomen, his face tight with pain. Lieutenant Reid's right arm dangled helplessly from a stained blue sleeve. Hadden sent him to the rear, carrying as best he could the linstock from the now silent number-two gun. It was time to bring off the guns, but, before this could be effected, the 62nd gave way. Alone, bleeding from a slight wound, Hadden could stand no 194 MARCH TO SARATOGA longer. Carrying his captain, somehow he reached the nearer of the two barns. The building was crowded with the badly wounded, lying on the wet straw. The barn smelled of cattle. As Hadden gently laid Captain Jones down with the others, his eyes were brought to the level of one of the chinks between the loosely laid-up logs. In the bright sunlight of the pasture, a hundred yards away an American infantry regiment was lining up. All the men seemed to be big in size, moving with assurance under competent officers. This, then, was the Continental line, and Thomas Hadden, of the Royal Artillery, was caught in a stinking cow barn between that line and the British regulars! With the arrival of General Poor's brigade in the woods in front of Burgoyne's British infantry, Morgan shifted his riflemen to the American left, to engage Fraser's advance corps in their strong hill position. They found good shooting into the 24th Foot, and Colonel Morgan was content to pin his enemy down until Benedict Arnold could bring up Ebenezer Learned's brigade. No one had attacked General Riedesel. The stocky German general paced the road, awaiting the call that surely must come from Burgoyne. Willoe was with the general, and Riedesel had also sent Geismar; neither had yet returned with the expected summons. He heard the firing as the 62nd made their charge. Standing still to listen, he heard the regiment come back and the guns, so long silent, come alive, and ACTION FRONT! 195 then he recognized the subtle change as British cannon fire slowed down, while the rebel fire increased. When the guns fell silent again, Riedesel, for the second time that afternoon, flung out the order to follow, and without waiting mounted and rode down into the gully. At the bottom, where the road skirted a marshy part of the mill stream, Riedesel met the returning Geismar and Willoe. While the three were talking, two of Rhetz's companies came singing down the road. Riedesel waved them on, pointing with his gold-headed stick to the slope ahead. His own regiment followed, as loud of voice as the Rhetz, and even louder of drum. Ernst Ludwig von Spaeth was commanding, and the general needed only a word in passing to convey to von Spaeth his intent to bolster up the British left. Sure of his gunner, Riedesel left Captain Pausch to deploy his own guns. Ziglamm, the wagonmaster, had found a way up to the height of land for Pausch's battery. It would be a hard haul around the edge of the swamp and up through an edge of the cornfield. But Ziglamm had gathered together some extra men to join the gunners at the drag-ropes. The officers, too, heaved on the spokes of the wheels, as the two cannon rolled on through the corn stalks, and the big yellow pumpkins were crushed under the iron-shod wheels. Behind the guns, an odd assortment of men came out of the gully, loaded down with shells and ball and powder. Pausch had scrambled on ahead to where he had a clear view. Out in the field stood the two deserted 196 MARCH TO SARATOGA guns of Hadden's battery, their brass muzzles stained black with much firing. Pausch saw the Continentals formed up at the edge of the wood, and ran back to urge his own guns on. With a rush, they burst out through the last row of corn, and under their gun captains' orders wheeled and dropped their trail. While the gun crews loaded, the blue-coated Brunswick infantry began to arrive on the field, to left and to right. Perhaps it was stunned surprise, or perhaps it was the blue coats of the Germans, but the Yankee regiment seemed to hesitate for a moment. It was the crucial instant when mattrosses rammed home the charge, gun captains applied the linstock, and the guns let loose their swarms of stinging grapeshot out of a roar and rush of smoke. The Continental line was only a pistol shot away. As the Hesse-Hanau gunners reloaded, Riedesel's regiment opened with volley fire. Far across the meadow Pausch saw a house under a big shade tree; drums were beating and a British regiment was advancing to the attack. General Phillips was leading the charge. The field was obscured in the smoke. With the going down of the sun, unnoticed, the light wind had dropped into stillness. Without a field of fire, Captain Pausch silenced the guns. The musket fire was slowing down. A single volley burst out on the left, after which came silence. The smoke of battle was dispersing. All over the meadow, the men in British red and German blue stood calmly in their ranks, facing an empty wood. Slowly and painfully, the gunners of the Hesse- ACTION FRONT! 197 Hanau Artillery dragged their cannon forward, out of the German line. All eyes turned dully, incuriously, on the struggling group of men. Sixty yards in front of the whole army, the guns came to a halt. The gun crews took up their stations as though they were on parade. Pausch's orders were crisp and clear, as the gunners executed the drill of loading. At the captain's command, the two guns roared in unison. No one counted the parting shots fired into the woods after the retreating rebels. They were a salute to a brave day, an evening gun of rememberance. In fifteen minutes it was dark. 16 Muffled Drums Harness chains rattled and limber wheels jounced bumpily over the ditch. Lieutenant Hadden, still hatless, heard the familiar sound as he stood alone in the darkness, beside his silent guns. When he reached a caressing hand to the nearest piece, the metal was cold to his touch. It was as though he had touched the faces of the dead gunners beside the wheels, at the trail, or out by the muzzle where the grass was black with scorch. The limbers came out of the night to Hadden's low call, and in silence dragged away the two brass cannon, leaving the crumpled dead alone without the symbols of their life and of their death. Lanterns were blinking all over Freeman's fields as Lieutenant Hadden marched off his guns. The dim yellow lights dotted out the lines of infantry, where sergeants called the roll of companies and detailed the first watches of the night. A surviving officer was hard put to find a friend to share a nip from his flask, so accurate had been the Yankee rifle fire. Colonel Anstruther of the hard-fought 62nd was 198 MUFFLED DRUMS 199 the last senior officer to join the others at the farm- house headquarters. He brought with him an appalling list of one hundred and forty-six casualties, and an additional twenty-nine who were prisoners of the rebels; some of his companies had been reduced to ten tired men. General Fraser, though not heavily engaged, glumly reported fifty casualties in his own 24th alone. His grenadiers and light infantry were sorely tired after their day exposed to the unseen rifles of Morgan's men. At General Burgoyne's conference that night, no officer was present to report the brigade artillery casualties. Lieutenant Hadden, the last gunner officer or man had gone down the line to have his own wound dressed. While the unit commanders talked over the day, it grew quiet on the heights above the Hudson, where the British army lay on its arms, on the fields that it had held. Tired men slept in their ranks. Sentries and picquets, more nervous than alert, felt the cold beneath the belt straps crossing their backs. Those near the gully heard the creak of wagons taking the wounded back to hospital, and listened for other carts coming up, carts that might bring them food. In the woods, dry-mouthed sentries, crouching down among tall trees, heard in the darkness the coughs and moans of yet undiscovered wounded, grew drowsy, and again became alert when the corporal, bringing up the relief, cautiously called out the password. Neither those who watched nor those who slept knew that, at the council of war that night, they had 200 MARCH TO SARATOGA been given one more whole day to live. Burgoyne had been persuaded to postpone until 21 September the continuation of his advance on the rebels. The battle at Freeman's farm was over. Down on the river flats, where the rear echelon of General Burgoyne's army was gathered, the long afternoon had not yet ended. There, where the women waited and the surgeons worked, the battle did not end until the last patient had been cared for and the fate of the last man was known. At the first sound of distant gunfire, the five ladies of Burgoyne's armies drew together. Quite naturally, they gathered in the big downstairs room of the Smith house, the quarters to which little Baroness Riedesel had laid claim by bringing in her children's trunks and setting down her own open dressing case on the deep cedar doorsill. Rockel, the butler, had brought tea to the ladies, after which he had gone to be near the major, leaving his mistress in the care of the two frightened maids. Of the four ladies who waited courageously, Lady Harriet Acland had the least chance of escaping the dreaded news. Out there amid the terrifying noise was not only her husband but her brother as well. It took a long time for the news to trickle back with the wounded. Mrs. Harnage was the first of the ladies to learn her fate. They carried the major in and laid him down beside his wife, who covered with her lace handkerchief the angry bluish hole in her husband's abdomen before she managed a smile for him. Soon MUFFLED DRUMS 201 the house had become a hospital, and all the ladies went to work. Friederika Riedesel was rummaging in her trunk in search of her own linen for an ensign with a shattered leg, when she saw a man standing in the doorway, looking full at her. But before she had time either to fall into despair or to let loose her relief, the man's eyes carried hers across the room to where Mrs. Lieutenant Reynell sat, silently weeping. The man nodded his head. When the lieutenant was brought in, Baroness Riedesel was holding the girl tightly in her arms. There was no hope for Thomas Reynell; his arm was off before they brought him into the hospital. It was morning before he died, leaving his young wife and three little children on the banks of the Hudson River, in the North American wilderness. Not until dawn of 20 September did the soldiers on the high ground receive their rations. At the same time the men of the line regiments, British and German, went down into the gully to fill their empty water bottles. The food refreshed spirits as well as bodies, and the fresh water washed away the tiredness in their bones. Now they were fit for the work to be done that day. With the carts bringing the food there also came shovels. Groups of men were told off to dig wide, oblong trenches for graves. Other groups spread out over the fields and into the woods, to gather in the dead for burial, while ashen-faced chaplains waited, book in hand. Thomas Anburey prided himself that the two graves 202 MARCH TO SARATOGA dug by his detachment were deep, their sides square, the soil well piled. Into the larger of the pits he saw the bodies of the men laid neatly side by side, in ranks, as they had lived and as they died. Into the smaller grave, Anburey placed the three ensigns he had found lying all together where the British line ran closest to the woods. None of the three was older than the drummer boy now beating out the dead march on a muffled drum. Though he was short of camp gear, Lieutenant Anburey avoided the sale that evening, at which the effects of the dead officers were sold. It was late when the courier from New York got through the lines and found his way, unnoticed, to General Burgoyne's headquarters at the Freeman house. The message he brought was written small. It was pulled from its hiding place crumpled and stained, but under a glass, by the light of a single candle, the letters were clear, the words bold, and Burgoyne read them with soaring hope. Sir Henry Clinton would soon be out, his destination the highlands of the Hudson! Clinton had given Gentleman Johnny, always a heavy gambler, a high trump card for his tight little game with that more cautious player, Horatio Gates. With the Guards General in New York holding cards, Burgoyne could now lean back in his chair to review his hand and, possibly, revise his play. In the first exchange of tricks, on 19 September, the British had won the field by keeping possession of it. But at MUFFLED DRUMS 203 Freeman's farm, Burgoyne had suffered irreplaceable losses In officers, gunners, and soldiers, without either sweeping the rebels out of the road to Albany or winning any distance toward that city. The renewal of the attack on the American left, scheduled to go in on the morning of 21 September, was calculated to break through the American defenses. But a battle is always a chancy thing, and, like cards, soldiers once played are dead. With Clinton coming up the Hudson at Gates's back, Burgoyne could afford to wait for a better moment to lead his strength at the American general's field works. It was not until shortly before daybreak that Burgoyne cancelled the attack and ordered his troops to dig in. By mid-morning of 21 September, Gentleman Johnny, the gambler, had reverted to General Burgoyne, the writer, penning a letter to Sir Henry in which he urged all haste, as supplies could last only until 12 October at the latest. By that date the northern army must either be in Albany or, admitting defeat, at Ticonderoga. For Horatio Gates, 19 September had not been a happy day. Things had not gone according to his plan; the direction of the battle had been snatched out of his hands; and by nightfall he was in danger of losing the glory of the day to Benedict Arnold, the hero of Valcour Island In the morning., when the sun-signals had been flashed to him from the east shore of the Hudson, General Gates had ordered his army to man the field 204 MARCH TO SARATOGA works. Three brigades of Continentals faced the river road, with their general peering over their shoulders, looking for the British main attack to fall Benedict Arnold's two brigades, Continentals with militia, manned the still uncompleted salient of breastworks on the heights, near the Neilson house and barn. About noon, the reluctant Gates had been persuaded to order out Morgan's corps. They were to make contact with the British right wing in the woods and along the road to Freeman's farm. Advancing in small groups on a wide front, Morgan met and beat in the picquet of Burgoyne's center column. It was at this point that Horatio Gates lost control of his battle. Joyous at seeing the redcoats run, the riflemen forgot their long-range tactical advantage and pursued too closely. They ran onto the oncoming British bayonets and were scattered in confusion. Benedict Arnold, ever volatile, never patient, had moved forward of his division's position to follow the progress of Dan Morgan's reconnaissance from one of the small works, built as a listening post well forward of Gates's main line of defense. Even the rough barricade of logs and earth cramped the aggressive spirit of the stocky major general, to whom a fort was the starting point for an attack, not a place in which to cower. Arnold, awkward from an old leg wound, had climbed up to the top of the parapet when the first fire of the riflemen broke out. There he was standing when he heard the frenzied gobble of Dan Morgan's turkey call, urging his scattered men to rally. It was a cry for help, too, like that of a good hound dog MUFFLED DRUMS 205 who has brought the red stag to bay. Arnold barkened, and, with the weird sound of the wild turkey beating in his ears, exploded into action. Racing back to his division, he grabbed the first two regiments he came upon and sent them running down the road to Freeman's farm. They were the New Hampshire Continentals, men of Joseph Cilley's and Alexander Scammel's regiments. Hale's men followed, then the New Yorkers. Most of Poor's brigade, too, was in the firing line in the woods at the south end of Freeman's home pasture. Morgan had disengaged, to slide over to the American left and face the British right, "treed" on its high ground. Galloping up, Arnold saw his troops engaging the British line across the open fields. Seeing the gap between the British center and Fraser's corps in the woods, he dashed away in search of General Learned's brigade, to exploit the situation. It was then that Arnold ran afoul of Gates. Every action that Arnold had taken that afternoon had been without the American commander in chiefs orders, and contrary to his intention. Arnold had abandoned the American army's main line of defense at a time when Gates had expected the main British attack down the slot he had prepared for it. To exploit an opportunity which had not been carefully considered, the swarthy division commander had opened a general engagement with Burgoyne, at great risk to his command. It had been difficult for Gates to restore order among the excited officers and men of Arnold's division, who were yelping at the British stag in Freeman's fields. Wilkinson had restrained 206 MARCH TO SARATOGA Arnold from returning yet again to the fight, with the result that the regimental commanders lost the cohesive leadership they needed, and fell back. So ended the battle and the day for Gates and for Arnold. In his quarters, the latter was composing a letter requesting that he be sent at once to serve under General Washington, Gates, his army again under control, was in his tent working over plans and forms and lists, while his adjutant general saw to it that the battle of 19 September 1777 was accounted a victory for General Gates, with no credit whatever accruing to the disobedient major general. Benedict Arnold did not leave the northern department for three weeks. The senior officers of the army persuaded him to stay on. With neither duty nor command, since Gates had taken his division from him, Arnold remained in his quarters, taking an occasional drink with the two aides he had inherited from Philip Schuyler, mocking "Granny" Gates from afar, and for the moment keeping within the limits of sarcasm the fury mounting within him. On the fine days of the northern autumn, he moved his chair to the doorstep. He was sitting there, idly watching the soldiers at their digging, when the first great flock of Canada geese flew by. It is the sound of their honking which first lifts one's eye to their flight. It is an insistent, urgently plaintive cry, quite unlike the clipped, quick, assured call of the wild turkey gobbler ordering his hens to follow him. Yet it is the call of the strong-willed leader, carrying the wide-spreading wedge of his followers behind him down the broad lanes of the upper air. MUFFLED DRUMS 207 Horatio Gates busied himself in Ms headquarters tent. Field works must be perfected and extended to make strong the left flank which the enemy had attempted to turn. Then, too, the militiamen, fully aroused at last, were coming in by the hundreds, each newly arrived unit requiring much staff work before it was assimilated into the northern army. But Gates as well came to stand at the flap of his tent, to watch for a time the flight of the wild geese. As the approaching cold of winter drove the big birds south, so the coming pangs of hunger would send Burgoyne's regiments marching up to the American lines. On 3 October, in a routine order that reflected the state of his commissary, General Burgoyne put his whole army on half ration. The men took the order well. The troops had worked hard since the day after the battle, when they had buried their dead. The field of corn at the Freeman farm had been harvested as fodder for the horse lines. Lieutenant Schank had moved his pontoon bridge downstream. Again in position, it reached from the base camp to the east shore of the Hudson, where a bridgehead redoubt was thrown up. But the bridge reached only to a blind shore, for beyond the redoubt the American militia roamed the woods in menacing strength. The main work of Burgoyne's army, however, was in erecting a strong, safe, fortified line in which to await the coming of Clinton. The works extended in a long, jagged line across the high ground where Riedesel had waited with his reinforcements. This 208 MARCH TO SARATOGA part of the British works dominated the river road and, from positions on the forward slope, watched the crossings of Mill Creek, To the west of the long redoubt, behind which Burgoyne established his headquarters, a dotted line of small positions extended the fortified line through the gully to the high ground where stood the Freeman farm. On the old battlefield, the British engineers had traced out a great redoubt in the shape of a broken sling swivel. Within its earth and log walls stood the Freeman house, serving as headquarters. This, the pivotal position of the whole line, was named Balcarres redoubt, in honor of the twenty-four-year-old Scottish earl, whose reckless bravery in leading the light infantry was exceeded only by his daring at the nightly card games with his general. Twelve hundred yards to the north, the Germans, under General Breymann, built their redoubt on the edge of the Great Ravine, which was an impenetrable tangle of scrub-brush. It faced north over newly cleared fields, across which a road wound its way to yet more distant clearings. Between the Balcarres redoubt and the open rear of Breymann's redoubt stood two log cabins in which the last remnant of Burgoyne's Canadians camped and cooked their thick soups. Here lived the eleven- year-old Monin, whose father, "le capitaine," had fallen to a Yankee rifleman out where the woods were thickest, and where only the strongest British patrols dared go. The boy, with his dog Bellona, hunted rabbits in the fields and waited to be taken home to Canada by the friends of his dead father. MUFFLED DRUMS 209 Baroness Riedesel, too, was to have a house in which to live with her children as soon as Major Williams's men could complete it. There, she would be near enough to her husband's headquarters to watch over the preparation of his meals and to give dinner parties at which she and her husband could entertain the other generals. Her house was close to the rear echelon of the army, where the gun park stood beside the river, near the hospital. The boats of the supply fleet lined the banks of the river, the stores they had carried stacked under oilcloth coverings, and all the followers of the army and the soldiers passing on details could see the dwindling piles. It was on the river bank, where the women and the idlers gathered, that hopeful rumors on which to feed the army were bred. Like clean white linen spread on the grass to dry, the news was plain for all to see. Clinton was coming, of course. General Burgoyne had received a secret messenger who brought the welcome news. Three officer-couriers, heavily disguised, had gone out to tell Sir Henry that the army from Canada was ready to attack when he did, but that he must hurry. Twice they had gone out, on the nights of 22 and 23 September, while the British guns thundered to draw in the Yankee patrols, enabling the messengers to slip through. The army knew that Captain Scott had gone to Clinton on 27 September, followed the next night by Captain Alexander Campbell. A wild, romantic tale was circulating that one of the officers carried his message in the hollow shell of a bullet made of silver. 210 MARCH TO SARATOGA For several days the men standing to in the early morning asked each other for the true news from the north. Some said that Skenesborough was in American hands, others that Ticonderoga had fallen to the Americans. It was not until the evening alert on 2 October that the men in the lines and at the redoubts, listening for the evening guns in the rebel lines echoing their own, learned what had really happened at Ticonderoga. General Burgoyne received word from Brigadier Powell that he had been attacked by a force sent out from Vermont by General Lincoln. For four days he had been molested by fifteen hundred rebels but, recognizing the action as a raid in force, he had fended them off by remaining inside his forts at Ticonderoga and on Mount Independence. At last they had gone away, but not before taking the fortifications on Sugar Loaf, from which, fortunately, the big guns had already been removed. The Yankees had also taken the posts all along the portage road and all the boats they found at the foot of Lake George. Colonel John Brown, the boldest of the American officers, had gone up Lake George in the captured gunboats, tarrying only long enough to menace the forewarned garrison on Diamond Island before taking off eastward through the woods. Twenty Canadian Indians brought this news from Ticonderoga. But their coming was of little interest or encouragement to the British enclave on the Hudson. All trust in their savage allies had gone out of Burgoyne's army, who had been betrayed by wanton murder and disgraced by caviling cowardice. In the MUFFLED DRUMS 211 great fortified camp, twenty Indians were but twenty additional mouths to feed. There was no work for them to do. The woods around the army were American woods, into which even Captain Eraser's marksmen scarcely dared to venture. By day and by night the Yankees patrolled the fringes of the British camp, while wolves howled in the distance. In the center of the ring Burgoyne's army waited, isolated and alone, yet confident that when the right time came their general would lead them out to smash through the encircling rebels and clasp hands with Sir Henry Clinton's men. The army knew that Clinton could not be far away, else Gentleman Johnny would not wait. At midnight, when 5 October passed over into the next day, a rocket was fired from the lines near army headquarters. It soared high into the dark sky, launching a final rumor: the old soldiers knew, and quickly told the young ones, that a night rocket was fired only when a friendly force was near. Though no answering rocket lit the sky beyond the rebel lines, at headquarters they must be expecting the approach of Sir Henry Clinton. As the rocket arched upward, those nearby saw Gentleman Johnny, standing at the open door of his quarters. Several officers were with him, and the light from the room beyond caught the gleam of satin as the commissary's wife turned to go back to the warm fire burning on the hearth. 17 General Fraser Eats Breakfast General Fraser rode his handsome gray down into the gully behind the Balcarres redoubt. Since first he had passed that way, the leaves of the swamp maple growing by the bridge had turned scarlet, as scarlet as the general's coat. Sumac at the edge of the swamp was the crimson of his sash, while on the skyline toward which he rode the drooping branches of an old oak tree were the color of the tarnished gold epaulets at his shoulders. Breasting the hill at a snorting, plunging gallop, the general of the advance guard reined his horse back into the dignity of a controlled walk and soothed it with an approving pat. He was in behind the long, wavy line of field works and among the rows of tents, where, in passing, soldiers acknowledged his rank and showed their esteem for him. At the edge of the headquarters compound an orderly ran out to take the bridle reins. The Brunswick dragoon sentries took their pose of rocklike attention. In the bright, warm sunlight of the fine October Sunday, General Fraser paused for a barely perceptible instant before crossing over the threshold 212 GENERAL FRASER EATS BREAKFAST 213 into the room where Time demanded a grave decision. It was the second time that week-end that Lieutenant General John Burgoyne had called in to headquarters his three division commanders: Major General Phillips of the British line, Major General Riedesel, and Acting Brigadier General Fraser of the elite advance corps. On Saturday, 4 October, the four men had met in a council of war to consider Burgoyne's bold plan to cut loose from his heavy guns, his full hospital, his dwindling supply column, and the women of his army, in a wide arching dive into the forest that would bring the fighting troops out behind Gates's army and make them the vanguard of Sir Henry Clinton's expected advance. At Sunday's meeting Burgoyne's generals rejected the rash plan, as too risky for those left behind and too problematical as to the anticipated merger with Clinton's forces. The fallow silence that followed the veto was broken by Riedesel, the disenchanted German whose nationality had excluded him from Burgoyne's proud boast, at the crossing of the Hudson, that "Britons never retreat!" The baron, whose initiative had saved the day at Freeman's farm, proposed that the whole army retire to the old position on the Batten Kill, there to nurture itself at the dangling end of the Ticonderoga supply line until Clinton's arrival was more imminent. Simon Fraser, the Highland Scot, concurred in the opinion of the comrade-in-arms who had turned the Yankee right flank for him on the Hubbardton, road. With a motion of his hand, Phillips 214 MARCH TO SARATOGA abstained. As a major in the Royal Artillery, Phillips had witnessed the total casualties at Jones's guns on 19 September, when forty-eight irreplaceable gun numbers were lost to Burgoyne's army. And as a major general in the British Army, the old gunner knew the solitary responsibility of high command, where one's guideposts through the fog of war are months old instructions issued by people in a remote place, informed of circumstances no longer existent. Phillips could only sympathize and obey. The instructions to Lieutenant General John Burgoyne were clear: he was to take his army to Albany and there place himself under command of General Sir William Howe. In the light of these orders, Burgoyne would only accept as a responsible opinion, put forward by two brave and reliable officers, the advice of Riedesel and Eraser to retreat. His duty and inclination lay in the opposite direction. At the council of war Burgoyne was forced to effect a compromise between his own natural instinct and the unacceptable (to him) caution of his subordinates. Ultimately a solution to the problem was found. It was agreed that on Tuesday, 7 October, all four generals would make a reconnaissance in force of the American left. If it was then deemed feasible, a general attack would be ordered for the following day. If the American position was found to be unassailable, after waiting out the week, Burgoyne would retire on the Saturday to the old Batten Kill position. The command decision came hard to General John Burgoyne. He even sought to avoid it by asking for GENERAL FRASER EATS BREAKFAST 215 orders from Sir Henry Clinton. But he received no reply and, with his fate hanging on the disembodied instructions from London, he prepared to make his reconnaissance. He ordered mm for the whole army: one barrel for the auxiliaries, three for the British line, four for the Germans, and four for the advance guard who would be going out in the morning. On Monday morning the carts dropped the rum off at the various positions. There were many willing hands to ease the barrels to the ground and roll them up onto the racks, where spigots were driven into the bung-holes. Popularity was natural to Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne. Duty calls to the common soldier very early in the morning. A sentry, eager for companionship, wakens the drummers and the cooks as early as he dares. At the first sound of drums, the corporals poke and pull their squads into wakefulness before the sergeants can find them remiss in their first duty of the day. Two subalterns, sharing a tent, lie awake on their cots as they listen to the noises of the rousing camp, and luxuriate until the servant whom they share brings water for their ablutions, and what fare can be managed from an army starving on half-rations. Majors and colonels of many years' service find that the chill of a northern New York knows where old wounds and old injuries twinge and ache the most. The morning mist from the Hudson River gets into the back of their throats and sends them, snuffling and coughing, into their field trunks, where they keep their private stock of bone-warming liquor. Majors 216 MARCH TO SARATOGA and colonels are meticulous as to their dress, and take a long time at their morning toilet extra time for the leisurely ablutions of the captains of companies. Generals are exalted persons. Lieutenant General John Burgoyne was the most exalted of all the army that camped on the banks of the Hudson, six miles below Stillwater, In all the northern frontier of the war, the only man equal to General Burgoyne in importance was Major General Horatio Gates of the Continental Army, whose picquets faced the British at musket-shot distance, and whose main defense works were only a mile from the Balcarres redoubt. Gates's headquarters tent was pitched at a road juncture, half a mile behind his front lines. The general was early at his desk on the morning of 7 October, with a full day's work before him. Since the British sortie on 19 September and the nearly mutinous brushfire fight that had contained it, Gates's army had almost doubled in number. The militia had turned out, its ire thoroughly aroused by the murder and pillage by Burgoyne's Indians, and reassured in its patriotism by Stark's victory at Bennington, Herkimer's and Arnold's turning back of St. Leger, and General Lincoln's exhortation to the Continentals to stand at the pass above Stillwater. To Gates, the militia presented a delicate problem in staff work. Theoretically, the men came supplied often ludicrously so in their own interpretation of what constituted a uniform and other martial equipment. Soon after its arrival, a company, hungry after its inarch from a hamlet in a distant valley, would be demanding food. GENERAL FRASER EATS BREAKFAST 217 All the militia seemed to be prodigious eaters, and their powder horns were as empty as their stomachs and the flabby shot pouches hanging at their belts. With the influx of ardent militiamen, the Americans' resources, already low in ordnance supplies, were sorely taxed. But the nicest staff problem for the former British brigade major was the brigading and deploying of this mass of citizen-soldiers. Gates put the Massachusetts units, some thirteen hundred men under command of the militia general, John Fellows, with an assignment to proceed up the Hudson by the east shore, cross over again, and Me on Burgoyne's rear at Saratoga. Two Connecticut State Regiments were veterans of Poor's brigade. Even the problem of Stark and his New Hampshire men had been solved. The old rock-visaged ranger, with his eight hundred men, had been persuaded to leave the fair fringe of New England for the deserted fort and buildings at Fort Edward, through which Barry St. Leger must come with reinforcements for Burgoyne if, indeed, he came at all Searching the empty place, Stark found, decently interred in the fort cemetery, the boats with which St. Leger was to have crossed the Hudson. These were destroyed before the New Hampshire army, still shy, still suspicious, edged a little closer to the place and hour of destiny. John Stark did not know it, as he prowled the upper Hudson in the bright October sun, but the general's commission which he so truculently regarded as his due, lay already signed on a Congressional desk in distant Philadelphia. Less bright on his shoulders were Benedict Arnold's 218 MARCH TO SARATOGA stars of rank. Gates tad neutralized Arnold, who, for the three weeks following his disobedience of 19 September, was virtually under house arrest. But General Gates could never quite forget him. Arnold represented the old Schuyler faction. He was the fiery comet of the battlefield that all soldiers look to in their own fear of death or cowardice. Schuyler himself had been dealt with, and Gates no longer feared him. The former general was a not-infrequent visitor to the American camp. He had even given the army lumber for the bridge Fellows's brigade had used to cross to the east bank of the Hudson. But Gates had not felt sufficiently secure to dismiss Arnold, or even to grant his request for transfer out of the northern department. So he was left to wither and fall in inactivity, until a gale could be stirred up finally to blow him away. Meanwhile, Brigadier General Abram Ten Broeck's New York State militia was kept away from him. These Yorkers were Schuyler men and were inherently suspicious of the New England faction, in the army or the government. They were men whose homes had been pillaged by Burgoyne's army, or were imminently threatened by that army's advance and the Tory rule it would bring. It was they who were impatient for revenge, and who sought a bold leader such as Benedict Arnold, now disgraced but famed in many battles. While his defensive plans matured, Gates kept the New York militia in the rear or scattered in the woods, where they could stalk the unwary British patrols and foraging parties, far GENERAL FRASER EATS BREAKFAST 219 removed from the orderly procedure of the American staff tents. Horatio Gates knew that Sir Henry Clinton was moving on the highlands of the Hudson. The Yankee general was in close correspondence with Israel Putnam, the American commander there. Each report that Clinton was still below the highlands meant another day that Gates could count on for Burgoyne to eat himself toward the decision being forced upon him. So, Horatio Gates worked on through the morning of 7 October, toward the time that he would be called to dine. General Burgoyne ate a leisurely breakfast on the morning of 7 October. He was still at table when the contingent of two hundred soldiers, selected from the several German regiments, marched past his dining- room window, on their way to the forming-up point for the reconnaissance in force. With them, and raising a cloud of dust from the dry road, Captain Pausch clattered by with two 6-pounders. The four ammunition wagons following the guns made quite a cavalcade. Later, Burgoyne was disposing of some staff details at his writing-table when Major Griffith Williams rode up, turned out of the road, and, still in his saddle, watched while his battery of guns went by. For the reconnaissance Williams had selected his two best i2-pounders the same guns with which he had defied the great wilderness fortress at Ticonderoga. Major Williams had decided to accompany 220 MARCH TO SARATOGA his beloved 12's, not only to watch them but because he hoped to place them on a hill nearby and from there to pour a few shots in the rebel field fort. For his anticipated shoot, Williams had ordered out his two 8-inch howitzers, which were to drop shells in among the rebels as they cowered behind their works. He watched as the gun teams dragged the howitzers past: squat brass tubes, their big mouths thrust up as though drinking from the sky. They were very different from the long shining barrels of the 12-pounders, crouching in their carriages like vicious panthers readying to spring. Before the last tumbril passed, Major Williams dismounted and joined the head- quarters group of officers waiting to ride out with their general. There was a festive atmosphere as the men waited in the yard, a little removed from where the grooms held the horses, which were fully caparisoned for battle with the bulky pistol-holders at the pommels and cloaks rolled behind the cantles. Many of the headquarters staff were riding out that day, among them the two bright luminaries of General Burgoyne's intimate family of aides: Sir Francis Carr Clarke, whose lieutenancy in the 3rd Foot Guards was equivalent to a captaincy in any other regiment, and Lord Petersham, his slim boots drawn over cavalry- man's shanks. Captain John Money, the quartermaster general, stood talking with Captain Thomas Blomfield. The latter specialized in water-borne artillery, and, since Charles Green had been shot, was acting as aide-de-camp to General Phillips. GENERAL FRASER EATS BREAKFAST 221 Standing by the headquarters door and sliding the focusing piece in and out of his battered old brass telescope, General Phillips waited for Burgoyne to come out and begin the reconnaissance. Riedesel walked back and forth, stopping occasionally to talk with Phillips as though the council of war still continued. The commander of all the Brunswick and Hessian troops of Burgoyne's army had breakfasted with his wife, as usual. The meal had been a hasty one, as he had been summoned when the parade of German troops was formed up. The Baroness had hurried him, too, for she had a menu to contrive and a table to set in her new house. She was giving a dinner-party that afternoon after the men returned. The work of finding suitable food in the near-starvation camp, the decoration of the room and table, and the supervision of the cooking would keep her busy and occupy her mind while the men were out. Simon Fraser, who was to be one of Friederika Riedesel's guests of the evening, was not among the group waiting on Burgoyne at headquarters. He was at the Balcarres redoubt, supervising the assembly of the troops for the reconnaissance. He had eaten a substantial English breakfast in preparation for the busy day that lay ahead of him. Lieutenant Anburey, who was commanding the quarter guard of the day, had gone out toward the American lines and had returned to report them all quiet. He brought back to Fraser the extraordinary report that, in a thicket, he had discovered the bodies of three Yankees, one of them being that of a young 222 MARCH TO SARATOGA woman apparently killed while she was bringing an apron full of paper cartridges out to the men. General Fraser was returning from a last word with his nephew, who was taking out the marksmen, the Tories, and a few painted Indians for a wide scout to westward, when the German contingent from the main camp came marching up. Lieutenant Colonel von Spaeth halted his troops on the low ground between the two redoubts. Drums sounded in the curve of the Breymann redoubt, and soon the three hundred grenadiers designated for von Spaeth's command marched down to fall into the column, now five hundred strong. Lieutenant du Fais of the Hesse- Hanau Artillery followed them to talk with Captain Pausch. Then du Fais climbed up the hill again to where his two guns were, and would remain, with Colonel Breymann and the two hundred grenadiers left to hold the redoubt. Major Acland had his grenadiers out in good time, in the cleared space in front of the Balcarres redoubt. The Earl of Balcarres marched his quick- stepping light infantry across their front to gain their starting line on the extreme right of the British advance, with the grenadiers to their left. Close behind the light infantry followed the 24th Foot. John Acland waved to his brother-in-law, Stephen Strangways, as he marched past at the head of his company. General Fraser was up on his fine gray when General Burgoyne rode out of the gully, the other generals and the large staff group behind him. Burgoyne waited at the Balcarres redoubt only long GENERAL FRASER EATS BREAKFAST 223 enough for the orders to move out to be sent to the three columns. It was almost one o'clock by Lieutenant Digby's watch when the grenadiers began their advance. MAP 2nd BATTLE of FREEMANS'S FARM (SARATOGA) 7 October 1777 18 No Dinner for the General Marching beside Captain Wight, Lieutenant William Digby of the 53rd crossed the cleared ground in good order with his company. On reaching the edge of the woods, parade order was broken and the captain, the lieutenant, and the sergeant each led a single file of grenadiers in a twisting trail through the trees and the undergrowth of brush. Soon they came to the road between Neilson's and Freeman's farms, across which a large fenced-in field of wheat sloped from high ground into a ravine across its southern border. Major Acland was waiting in the road when the com- pany of grenadiers of the 53rd Regiment came out. He showed Captain Wight where he wished the com- pany to form a line, extending the grenadier front from its left, in the woods, into the standing wheat. To the west, the Germans were coming onto the field and spreading out thinly to join up with the 24th Foot and light infantry, making a line of men a thou- sand yards in length. From where Digby was he could not see the guns, but he could hear the shouts of the drivers as they turned the teams off the road to 226 MARCH TO SARATOGA the selected positions, the 12-pounders unlimbering behind the grenadiers. Orders came from the rear for the men to sit down and, though they had marched only half a mile from the redoubt, the soldiers quickly took advantage of the opportunity and sprawled themselves out in the yellow wheat. Captain Wight walked over to where Digby sat, cross-legged, behind his company, and invited the lieutenant to stroll about with him. Wight led him a short way down the line where they could see a small abandoned log cabin set at the edge of the woods beside a rail fence that defined the wheatfield. On the roof of the cabin, like a bunch of brightly dyed feathers on a dilapi- dated old brown beaver hat, perched three British generals and a stiff-backed German colleague a delight to all common soldiers and junior officers to behold. General Phillips was on his stomach, steady- ing his long glass on the ridge-pole; a mounted staff officer (Petersham, by the look of him) was standing in his stirrups beside the cabin, stretching to pass a spyglass up to Gentleman Johnny himself. While the generals studied the terrain to the south, a long line of foragers, leading their pack animals, filed up the road. They spread quickly out through the field to harvest the good grain, which would put energy back into the worn horses. From the roof, the generals could see a small portion of Gates's lines across the rough, broken country, cut by ravines and gullies, thick with woods, and checkered only spar- ingly with rough clearings. One of the latter reached over the top of a small wooded hill that rose out of a NO DINNER FOR THE GENERAL 227 ravine beyond the brook at the southern extremity of the wheatfield. The generals were still on their roof- top when a gun team came up over the crest of the hill and into the clearing. It was followed by another, to its left, then two more. As one, the generals im- mediately swung their telescopes to take into focus this new development on their front. Phillips's cen- tered on a young officer in blue and red standing with his back to the British, an arm raised as a marker to the gun crew, dragging a gun with dif- ficulty around the stumps and through the brush of the rough clearing. Phillips was straining for a good look at the gun itself in an attempt to judge its exact size it was small when musket fire broke out at the southern end of the wheatfield. The foragers were now running back to the safety of the infantry line, which along its whole length was rising to its feet. They were calling to him from below when General Phillips snapped his telescope shut, slipped down the back of the cedar-shingled roof, and dropped to the ground. The gunner officer the British generals had watched as he expertly positioned his piece was Lieutenant Ebenezer Mattoon of the Continental Artillery. The range was long for real effect with his small caliber guns, but the target was clear as he opened fire on the long line of enemy infantry. He saw that his shells were falling short of their target, and he was at the breech of his number-one gun, attempting to coax a little more elevation out of it, when the heavy British 228 MARCH TO SARATOGA round shot struck down the hill in front of him and went screaming over his head in a wild, terrifying ricochet. The ball from Major Williams's second 12-pounder rumbled through the air, high over the hill where Mattoon had placed his battery on the forward slope, and his limbers and ammunition wagons out of sight behind the crest. Lieutenant Mattoon had already spotted the other British guns, set up in batteries of pairs behind Burgoyne's line. Now he saw that they were coming into action against him in counter-battery fire. The Continental gunner called up his limbers and abandoned his position before the full force of the enemy cannonade could fall on it. Safely in the shelter of the woods, the American battery came into the forming-up area of General Learned's brigade, where Mattoon found Lieutenant McLane and the rest of the guns of Captain Furnival's company. He joined them in a march that skirted to the west of his hilltop clearing and was aimed for the edge of the woods at the bottom of the ravine, facing the blue-coated Germans in the center of the British line. Learned's brigade had been the last to march out from the American position on Bemis Heights. When the Yankee picquets reported that the British were preparing to come out, General Lincoln had gone forward to estimate the situation. Benedict Arnold rode with him to the lookout point. Together, they had then ridden to Gates's headquarters tent, and Gates had interrupted his work to come out and receive Lincoln's report; Arnold he snubbed. On NO DINNER FOR THE GENERAL 229 General Lincoln's recommendation, Horatio Gates ordered Morgan's corps out at once, to make a wide march to the west, then to the north, to fall on the British right and "begin the game" Drums were beating the call to arms for Poor's Continentals to attack Burgoyne's left. As he led out his guns up the road to the Freeman farm, Mattoon caught a glimpse of the last of Morgan's riflemen disappearing into the woods. He was to support the skirmish line, sent to hold the enemy's center until Learned's brigade could be assembled for the main attack. He saw Arnold, looking like the cocked hammer of a dueling pistol. He was riding aimlessly about on his big chestnut horse with the flowing black mane. Mattoon did not see Gates go back into his tent to resume his interrupted work. Although it had been intended that Dan Morgan was to "begin the game," he had a long route around, over rough country, and Poor's brigade made the first contact with Acland's grenadiers, on Burgoyne's extreme left. Probing about through the woods on the east side of the road, Poor's men encountered the extension of the grenadiers' line. A fire-fight began, with the Yankees aiming at individual men in red, while the solid ranks of grenadiers, broken by the gray tree trunks, poured volleys among the figures they dimly saw, down the hill from them, among the thicker undergrowth near the water course. Another regiment of Poor's brigade, Joseph Cilley's 1st New Hampshire Continentals, entered the action, and the fight with the grenadiers was carried out into the 230 MARCH TO SARATOGA road and into the wheatfield beyond. Now the whole line of grenadiers was firing by company volley and was accepting heavy casualties. But Acland, standing between two of the companies, noted a hesitance in the advance of Cilley's men. He took this as an opportunity to charge, and gave the order to fix bayonets. Bayonet sockets clicked home over the hot muzzles of the muskets, and as the officers, with drawn swords, took their places out in front, the ranks of British grenadiers straightened and seemed to grow taller as they readied for the charge. Cilley's men halted where they stood. But it was less in awe of the threatened bayonet attack by Europe's most famous infantry, than in wonder that men would stand so, in the open, such easy targets to the muzzles of the Continental line. Quickly, the New Hampshire men brought their weapons to their shoulders, their eyes running down the long gun barrels to the front sights, comfortably fitting the V-sights near the breech. Beyond, at flat range, they could see ruddy faces under bearskin caps, white over-belts crossing over stained and worn lapels. Some saw the crimson sashes slashing across the white coats of officers as they pressed on the triggers of their muskets. All Time was compressed into the interminable minute of sighting. Then the muskets began to fire, and the slowest marksman noted that the man on either side of him was reloading, and hurried his shot before the smoke drifted in front of him so that he could not see if he had made a hit. Colonel Cilley was shouting as his men fired, and other firing was coming from the woods on his right. NO DINNER FOR THE GENERAL 231 Major Acland went down during the long fusilade of the New Hampshiremen. Although fat Captain Simpson was a good target, he had not been hit. A man of great strength, he was able to pick up his major and carry him on his back, out of the trodden wheat. The whole line of British grenadiers was giving way before the Continentals, who, as they fired, moved forward out of their own smoke to fire again. At the edge of the woods the remaining British officers checked the men, but no amount of effort could get them to move out to renew the fight, nor were there enough of Burgoyne's elite grenadiers left to mount a bayonet charge. Acland's command had ceased to exist, and the survivors could but watch as Cilley's men veered slightly to the west to overrun Major Williams and his two 12-pounders. They saw the big rebel colonel climb up onto one of the pieces, and but for the noise of the battle over the spur of ground where the Germans were fighting they could have heard the Yankee officer yelling and whooping and cheering, as more and more of Poor's brigade emerged from the woods. The battle had gone no better for the British on their right. Morgan's riflemen had quickly driven in Captain Alexander Fraser's marksmen. With the same wild abandon they had shown on 19 September, Morgan's rangers hurled themselves at Balcarres's light infantry. Showing perfect discipline under firm, clear orders, the British light infantry shifted their front to meet the attack from the west. Balcarres marked the extent of Morgan's attack by the now- familiar call of the wild turkey. Somewhere behind 232 MARCH TO SARATOGA his own shifting line, a bugler mocked the call with a "Tally Ho!" on his curled French horn. The attack of Dearborn's light infantry fell unexpectedly on Balcarres's new left flank. Henry Dearborn's men came in hard and strong. Caught, the earl withdrew his whole command to the rail fence, and, from its protection, reorganized his firing line, which held Morgan and Dearborn at the edge of the woods. General Burgoyne's messenger at last found Balcarres and gave him the general's orders to disengage and return to the redoubt. By ones and twos, the light infantrymen fired; then they retired in good order, trailing their muskets as they stepped lightly down the forest track. The messenger, sent to the left flank with the same message, and then to the Germans in the center, was Sir Francis Carr Clarke. Setting off at a fast canter, he rode through the wheat, passing behind the gun line, as both Pausch's battery and the howitzers were in action. Smoke obscured the gentle rise over which Major Acland had formed up his grenadiers, and where the afternoon's action had begun. One of Major Williams's 12-pounders that had been silent for a time now fired. With the sound of the gun as a reference point, Sir Francis gave Ms horse its head, and at a pounding gallop, plunged into the smoke with his vital message. Too late, he realized that he had ridden onto the ground taken from Acland by Poor's brigade. The Guards officer had no time to cry out "Surrender!" before a musket shot at close range took him in the body, jerked him NO DINNER FOR THE GENERAL 233 out of the saddle, and slammed him on the ground. Rough hands pulled him, still dazed and wondering, to his feet, and with a strange soldier helping him on either side, he dimly sensed that he was running and stumbling down a hill. Somewhere in the confusion of his mind, Sir Francis Carr Clarke knew that he had been wounded, and that he was running in the wrong direction. Unaware that Acland's left wing had been driven in and that Williams's guns had been turned on the beaten grenadiers, in ignorance of Burgoyne's new order to retire, which the light infantry and the 24th Foot on the right flank were already following, the five hundred men of the German contingent stood where they had been placed. Some protection from the fire of the rebel skirmishers was afforded them by the rail fence behind which they stood, and through which their own Jägers were returning the enemy fire. At the left of their line, Captain Pausch was keeping up a steady fire along the edge of the woods. He was taking casualties among his gun crews, so when Lieutenant William Smith, bloody and excited, rushed up to him, demanding ten gunners to return the 12-pounders to action, Pausch refused. He was brusque with the wounded young officer, who seemed to have forgotten that the three to one rate of fire of a 6-pounder made it that much more valuable in the type of open fight that was developing. The Americans had now brought up their own guns. The big puffs of white smoke rolling out from 234 MARCH TO SARATOGA under the trees betrayed their position. They were Mattoon's and McKay's light batteries, firing canister at a telling range. Under the close support of their guns and disregarding Pausch's fire, Learned's regiments of Massachusetts Continentals were forming up for a charge. Slowly, they advanced across the bed of the dry brook and on up the gentle slope toward the waiting Germans. Gunsmoke rolled over the field between the advancing and the stationary lines of soldiers. When the smoke lifted, the rebels had halted and in places were giving ground. Instantly, Colonel von Spaeth was up over the fence, shouting for a counter-attack. Driven by their officers, the men came out. But, though the officers kicked and shouted and beat the men with swords, the German line would not take ranks. Instead, it wadded itself into a milling mass of stubborn and frightened me n terrified to go on toward the enemy, and frightened to go back, where their own snarling officers menaced them with brutal authority. In the quick moment of indecision, German discipline faltered and the invincible hand of confidence fell upon the shoulders of Learned's Continentals. It sent the Americans running for the rail fence, and before the onslaught of the hoarsely shouting Massachusetts men the Brunswickers and Hessians stampeded. Of all General Burgoyne's reconnaissance force, only Pausch's two guns remained in action on the field. With his gun numbers still working with precision under the old veteran's tight hand, the Hesse- Hanau artillery was preparing for a fight to the NO DINNER FOR THE GENERAL 235 muzzle. Discipline kept the gunners at their station; tradition kept the old captain from abandoning his sacred guns while they could still fire a shot. And it was tradition and discipline and loyalty that ultimately saved them. Out from the trees at the northern end of the wheatfield the limbers came at a gallop, the quirts of the drivers flaying their teams. Down the hill they came, swinging wide through the field in a curve cut to bring each limber close to the trail of its gun. The gun crews fired, to clear their guns with a parting shot, hooked up quickly, and as the drivers slashed down at their off-horses, they grabbed a stirrup leather and ran free and wild, in great bounds, beside the running horses. At the log cabin, which less than an hour before had borne upon its roof four British generals, Captain Pausch unlimbered for another stand. Learned's brigade was reforming at the rail fence, which they were pulling to pieces to make a way through for Mattoon's guns. Coming up from out of the woods behind them was a fresh regiment, still marching in column of route, led by a senior officer in full uniform, riding a big chestnut horse. Some men of Poor's brigade, to the east, had drifted over and were poking about among the Hesse-Hanau dead at Pausch's old gun position down the hill, where the wheel tracks through the wheat came to an end. In the woods behind the cabin, Pausch could find no line of resistance forming up. There were still plenty of German soldiers, but they were individuals, some of them without weapons, who, recognizing him 236 MARCH TO SARATOGA as an officer, skulked away into the bush as he approached them or called out to them. Without an infantry line to support, it was foolhardy to stand with the guns and waste such good men as remained to him. Pausch ordered up the limbers, hooked up again, and continued his retreat with honor, down the narrow track through the woods. He followed it eastward toward the Freeman's farm road and the redoubt, but he did not get far down the crooked, narrow trail. Saplings snarled the wheels, stumps seemed to rise up from the ground to foul the axle- trees, and when the gunners rushed forward to clear them, the standing horses grew fractious under the taut reins held by uneasy drivers. Rifle fire was drawing nearer, as Morgan's men infiltrated the woods. The end of Pausch's guns came when a hidden rifleman shot a wheel horse in the leading gun's team. Its driver leaped free, but the lead team took fright and bolted, dragging the squealing beast with it for a few feet, until all ended in a hopeless tangle of horses, harness, limber, and gun. More rifle fire broke out, now aimed at the horses, and Pausch and his gunners ran. The old captain rested for a time behind a rail fence, trying to catch his breath. It was then that he saw one of his ammunition wagons, abandoned, its team quietly nibbling among the leaves on the ground. Almost gratefully, Pausch climbed up onto the driver's seat, and with one of his gunners beside him, drove off. At least he had saved something of his pride. At the eastern corner of the wheatfield, where the NO DINNER FOR THE GENERAL 237 road from Neilson's farm entered the wood on the north side of the field, Simon Fraser was making his last stand. He had found his own regiment (the 24th) intact, its morale still high, retiring under orders with Balcarre's light infantry. He had led the men out onto the corner of the field, and, sitting high and proud on his gray horse, had watched while the rest of the reconnaissance force passed around behind him, bound for the redoubts. The Yankees, too, were keeping their distance, though rifle fire was chipping into the solid wall of the company fronts. Suddenly, the American rifle fire concentrated on the conspicuous General Fraser. A ball creased the cruppers of the gray horse. For a moment the animal danced in surprised pain, then Fraser quieted him. The riflemen held their fire. Once more, horse and rider were motionless. A second ball passed through the horse's mane, then a third took the general in the stomach, doubling him over as though he were executing an awkward bow from the saddle. Soldiers rushed to steady the stricken officer before he fell. An aide leaped to the bridle, and before the general could protest, led horse and rider away. With two men to hold him in the saddle, and the aide leading his horse, Fraser began the long, agonizing ride to the hospital, far away on the banks of the Hudson. For a short distance, Gentleman Johnny rode beside his wounded friend. Behind them followed the 24th Foot. The reconnaissance in force was at an end. Burgoyne turned off at the Balcarres redoubt, to organize its defenses for the rebels were following 238 MARCH TO SARATOGA closely behind the rear guard. General Fraser rode on, one of a long line o wounded men finding their way through the late afternoon shadows to the camp beside the river. Heavy firing could be heard inland at the redoubts, as the two soldiers eased the wounded general from the blood-flecked gray horse. They carried Simon Fraser into the cool, quiet darkness of Baroness Riedesel's new house, and there, on the table at which he had been invited to dine, they gently laid Mm down. 19 Prisoners of Hope The sorely wounded Sir Francis Carr Clarke found himself in the most unusual situation for a prisoner of war, of all the distinguished British officers captured on 7 October. Major Acland, who had been overrun while helpless in the angle of the rail fence, was cared for with proper consideration. Captain Money and Major Williams, being less seriously wounded, were held politely but firmly by the American provost guard. But Burgoyne's knighted aide came to rest in Horatio Gates's own camp bed, with the rebel general giving him as much attention as did the headquarters physician. While Gates was occupied with his august prisoner, Benedict Arnold escaped the restraint of his virtual arrest. He had gone forth to fight with the men of his old division, Arnold had ridden forward with the last regiment of Learned's brigade, and by going up to the firing-line had put himself beyond reach of the exquisite aide sent by Gates to fetch him back. Arnold, whose enemies referred to him as a "horse jockey," rode extremely well. He had need of his skill, 240 MARCH TO SARATOGA as he brought his big red horse pounding after Learned's leading regiments, up the hill and through the wheat. The bodies of the dead first those of the Americans and then of the Germans and the wounded of both sides caused the big animal to start, leap, and swerve. But Arnold's strong hands and self- possession quieted the nervous horse into a useful charger. The charge over the rail fence had hardly ended and the last of Burgoyne's men had just retired under the rear-guard action of Fraser's 24th Foot when Arnold rode over the field. He was cheered by the regiment, and he was seen reining in for an instant to shout a gay word to a company officer, or to commend a flush-faced colonel. At a time when the elation of victory might well have dampened to the flaccid content of physical exhaustion, Benedict Arnold spread his own unquenched lust for battle over all the well-won field. Soldiers stopped their aimless looting of the enemy dead and ran back to their officers. Drummers beat the call, and colonels shouted the rallying cry of their commands. The haphazard fire of Morgan's riflemen and the marksmen of regiments concentrated and held on the old British general mounted on his handsome gray horse. The Americans saw him sag in his saddle, and they saw him led away. Many a Yankee claimed that shot! The noisy Irishman, Tim Murphy, vowed it was his own. So did an old man in a full-bottomed wig and a greasy big hat, with a long-barrelled musket which, according to his claim, had never been known to miss. PRISONERS OF HOPE 241 Arnold was not there to see the shooting of General Eraser. He was off to the captured 12-pounders, where Morgan and Poor and Learned had gathered at his summons. The three leaders, whose measured blows one, two, three had beaten out the shape of the British defeat, now turned expectantly to the former division commander for the plan to complete the afternoon's success. Benedict Arnold's order was simple: "Follow me!" General Gates's aide, Major John Armstrong, also followed Arnold, but he trailed along at a distance, contentedly busy as he snuffled at the cold track through the wheatfield, at the cabin door, and in the angles of the rail fence, while Poor's and Learned's men streamed down the road in the direction of the British redoubts, and Morgan's corps re-entered the enveloping forest. The hesitant major was prowling through the shambles of the abandoned gun batteries as the New York militia of Abram Ten Broeck's brigade hurried past. For the most part they were Albany County Dutchmen, who marched loosely in village groups or together with their neighbors of the valley. They were untried troops, though there were some who had fought with Herkimer, and others who had been with Arnold on the road to Fort Stanwix. The latter, as they marched across the clearing and down the road the Continentals had traveled before them, looked with interest at the British dead. The green men looked away as they came past where Acland's big grenadiers lay huddled all around. From the walking wounded, Ten Broeck's men knew that 242 MARCH TO SARATOGA Arnold had gone ahead; from the sound of firing further on, they knew where they would find him. Lieutenant General Burgoyne himself commanded in the Balcarres redoubt, where the outflanked, out- numbered, overwhelmed remnant of the reconnaissance in force had now reformed. Gentleman Johnny had been lucky. A horse had been shot from under him, his waistcoat had been ripped by a rifle ball, and at one point during the battle at the wheatfield he had been obliged to remove his hat and rearrange the plume cut by an aimed shot. Everyone had been under fire in the clearing. Behind the walls of the redoubt the soldiers would have shelter, and beyond the loopholes and the gun embrasures lay a clear field of fire over open ground. The woods were a long rifle- shot away. In front of the redoubt, two small earth- and-log barricades were positioned to cover some dead ground beyond an outcropping of gray rock. Into the southern and larger of these barricades, the Earl of Balcarres had gone with his light infantry and a complement of cannon. The men were composed as they leaned against the log walls of their barricade, occasionally interrupting their talk to peer through the loopholes in which their muskets lay. A gunner sergeant blew softly on his slow match and watched the glow as it brightened. The sun was dropping quickly toward the undulating line of the tree-tops. Black shadows, gathering in the deep spaces between the marginal trunks of the trees, spilled out onto the clearing. The British PRISONERS OF HOPE 243 watched the approaching dusk and awaited the coming of the enemy. Suddenly the enemy was there, dark figures running out from the sheltering shadows into the revealing light of the cleared field. As if startled, the British guns roared and pranced back on their wheeled carriages. The guns fired again. A light infantryman saw his chosen target drop his musket and fall into the low scrub. Balcarres's man selected another Yankee, waited for him to come within range, and fired. Once triggered, the fire from the British field works became measured and purposeful. The artillerymen, loading, aiming, firing to a long-rehearsed rhythm, beat out their bass note in a recurring sequence of emphasis; the musket fire quickened or slackened according to the near or distant approach of the attacking rebel infantry. The first rush had carried the American charge up and into the British abatis. For a moment, the attack had hung there while the Yankee soldiers furiously wrenched and clawed and pulled at the mesh of branches that kept them from the raw-faced walls of earth and logs beyond. Then the British fire had driven the Continentals away, into fire positions in the scrub, among the stumps, or wherever a slight fold of the ground offered shelter in concealment. All up and down the long, twisting line of the Balcarres redoubt, small American attacks were now developing. Out of the Yankee firing line, a group of shouting men would rise up and charge forward in a new attempt to come to grips with the enemy beyond the 244 MARCH TO SARATOGA abatis. Each time a group came on the British or the Germans at the threatened part of the redoubt would drive them back. As the battle developed into a long fire-fight, a pattern in the local attacks became apparent. First, the British at the loopholes would see an American officer gallop up on a big, chestnut horse; the Yankees would rise slowly out of their hiding places surrounding the figure astride the prancing horse; then they would charge. By the time the attack had been beaten back, the big horse was far down the line, and wherever he was, another charge could be expected. But even the fury of Benedict Arnold (who was the mounted figure) could not lift up the whole Continental line and hurl it forward en masse. The sun was down, the day was dying, and the passing minutes were sliding the balance of victory over to the side of the defense. Then Arnold, changeable, unpredictable, never constant, totally unreliable but instinctive in battle, abandoned the frontal attack on the Balcarres redoubt. He left his own troops in their fire positions and he left the British at their loopholes, their guns agape at the embrasures. He was off and away on the impulse of a new idea. In his urgency, the fact that the direct way to his new objective the Breymann redoubt was across the front of the two firing-lines, was of no consequence. He gave spur to his chestnut horse. American marksmen withheld their fire as the swarthy major general galloped by in front of their levelled pieces. British and German infantrymen PRISONERS OF HOPE 245 forgot to shoot, as they watched the horse with the flowing black mane and tail dash past them. It was almost a mile to the American left, where fresh regiments were coming onto the field. Unscathed, Arnold reined in at the head of the Massachusetts regiment, where Lieutenant Colonel John Brooks was waiting for orders. Arnold did not tarry long. He made a sweeping motion of his arm in the direction of the two log houses in the gap between the two redoubts, Brooks and his men understood their orders. A touch of the spurs and again Benedict Arnold was away, to meet the militiamen of Ten Broeck's brigade, who were running toward him from the west. Here, too, there was no need for words. Arnold had but to wheel his mount to draw the whole brigade after him in a march, the direction of which would turn the open end of Breymann's log redoubt. The big horse was walking now, to allow the foot soldiers to catch up with him. Many of them reached out to touch Arnold's stirrup as they hurried by, and, looking down at them, he saw that some of Dearborn's and Morgan's men had joined him for the final assault. From all over the field they came to him: men in buckskin and in civilian clothes, boys with their fathers' hunting guns, old men with muskets as old as their fathers before them. Even a dog joined the parade. He came out of the cabins from which Burgoyne's Canadian troops were now fleeing. Although the boy, Monin, tried to call him back, he was irresistibly drawn by the shouting Yankees. Within the redoubt, Colonel Heinrich Breymann 246 MARCH TO SARATOGA was in a frenzy. His men had grown sullen as the acid of their fear ate into the core of their discipline. There was little firing over the log wall at the oncoming mass of rebels; the grenadiers were watching over their shoulders for a chance to cut and run. One man did run, but Breymann, snarling like a Hartz Mountain cat, slashed viciously at him with his sword. The rebels had passed the open southern end of the redoubt and were slanting in on the German flank and rear when Breymann's grenadiers broke. The raging colonel stood, his legs apart, cutting and jabbing at his own men. In the rush for safety, he struck three of them; a fourth, a big man with waxed mustaches and a mad look of panic in his wide blue eyes, shot Breymann dead, then calmly turned to meet the enemy now entering the works. For a wild moment it was hand to hand, clubbed gun against bayonet, sword against musket. In the center of the melee, the big chestnut war horse stamped and slashed with his hooves, as the rider on his back shouted and whooped. A wounded German on the ground saw the great beast bearing down on where he lay. The man's gun was still unfired. He raised it, aimed at the wide red chest and let loose the charge. It pierced the animal's great heart. Arnold felt the horse go slack between his knees. He kicked free of one stirrup, but the leg wounded and then broken at Quebec was awkward. On it fell the dead weight of the horse. Once more, Benedict Arnold had broken his leg. It was all over in the Breymann redoubt. Amerleans PRISONERS OF HOPE 247 guarding them, a long line of Hessian prisoners sat, their backs to the wall that they had built. The Yankees had rolled the dead horse from their general's leg, and, having given his orders, Arnold was resting. It was almost dark. The salmon-colored sunset glow was fading quickly. Breymann's redoubt was firmly in American hands. Burgoyne's whole defense line had been turned. It was then, and in such circumstances, that Gates's aide, Major John Armstrong, at last caught up with Benedict Arnold. He had been too late to prevent Arnold from acting "rashly." Only the last part of Gates's orders to him remained to be carried out. Standing before the wounded and prostrate hero general, the bright boy aide requested Arnold to put himself under the major's escort, to be returned to his quarters at once. Arnold complied and so left the field of his battle, borne on a litter high on the shoulders of four of his veterans. With the coming of darkness all musket and cannon fire ceased. In front of the Balcarres redoubt, Private Soldier Ephraim Squier sat up, put his back against the white birch stump which, for the duration of the fire fight, had been his fortress, and waited for the sergeant to come and tell him what to do next. Ephraim was tired. As he figured it, the Continental Army owed him a full night's sleep. The night before Monday night he had been one of a patrol whose leader got lost and did not bring the men in until ten o'clock in the morning. Sunday night, 248 MARCH TO SARATOGA Ephraim had stood the middle guard. On Sunday he had heard the parson preach from the text, "Return to the stronghold, ye prisoners of hope." On Tuesday the British and their hirelings certainly had returned to their stronghold! The sergeant, calling the company in a low-pitched voice, roused Ephraim from his reverie. Stiffly he levered himself up from his stump and shuffled off toward the voice he hoped would lead him back to Fort Neilson and his blankets. There was no sleep that night for William Digby. At first dark, carrying a lantern, he had searched the Balcarres redoubt for the scattered remnants of the company of grenadiers, which, since the death of Captain Wight in the wheatfield, Digby had commanded. Of the twenty men who had marched out that afternoon, he could find only four. He knew that there were others: some wounded who might recover, some sick who would return, and a few who had been left out of the battle for valid reasons of administration, were still on the rolls of the company. But for duty that night of 7 October, Lieutenant Digby had but four men out of the fifty who had sailed so gaily up Lake Champlain only three months before. Digby's succession through survival scarcely seemed a promotion. The duties of seniority, however, kept him up late. He had organized his command, set guards (like a sergeant), sought food and water for his men, searched without success for a commander of grenadiers in Major Acland's stead, and finally had reported to Balcarres, the new commander of the PRISONERS OF HOPE 249 advance corps. If Digby had hoped for a few hours' sleep, he was quickly disabused of the notion. Balcarres had just returned from General Burgoyne, with serious news and urgent orders. When John Burgoyne had received no report from Colonel Breymann as to the light firing heard from his key redoubt, a contact patrol had been sent out at dusk. It returned with the news that, not only had the Brunswick colonel been killed and his grenadiers captured, but that the Yankees, who now held the redoubt in force, were bringing up their own cannon to add to the three pieces taken in the works from the Hessian gunners there. The loss of two hundred additional men was a blow to Burgoyne, but the loss of the vital corner of the defense line was catastrophic. In the morning, a bombardment followed by an attack such as had been seen on the 7th would roll up the Balcarres redoubt like a map. Dishevelled, gaunt, and in the lantern light looking all of his fifty- five years, Lieutenant General Burgoyne gave the order to evacuate the Balcarres redoubt. It was one o'clock in the morning of 8 October before the retreat to the new position on the heights above the hospital could begin. Horses had to be sent up from the camp beside the river to draw off guns and their ammunition and the wagons with the tents. Tending a watch fire, kept to deceive the Yankees in Breymann's old redoubt, Digby heard his own men, and the other Britishers, mutter as the German infantry marched out first. Silent and chastened, the blue-coated soldiers quick-marched past their red- 250 MARCH TO SARATOGA coated comrades. His head held high, Captain Pausch, who had fought the good fight, stamped off at the head of his proud gunners. It was the dark before the dawn when the Earl of Balcarres entered the gully behind his redoubt, and the last of General Burgoyne's army quit Freeman's farm. 20 The Highland Lament Only three hours of the night remained when the surgeon who was attending General Fraser crossed the room to speak to Baroness Riedesel. She was sitting bolt upright on a bench with her small daughters sleeping beside her. The surgeon told her that, despite all efforts to save him, the general was dying. The baroness roused her children and was attempting to slip quietly out of the room when Fraser himself spoke to her. He apologized for the inconvenience he was causing, Friederika Riedesel spent the rest of the night sitting on the floor of the corridor, while her children slept peacefully nearby. The old Highlander had prided himself on his mastery of the difficult military maneuver of withdrawal and retreat. The British army during the hours and days following his funeral was in sore need of General Fraser. Burgoyne had given the order for a general retreat to Saratoga to Fort Edward down Lake George to Ticonderoga: a sixty-mile climb back down the ladder of his success, without pause on the rungs of his delays. 252 MARCH TO SARATOGA John Burgoyne was the dashing cavalryman of the "hell-for-leather" charge, the gambler who always expected his high cards to win, the politician in debate who was always impatient to make his rebuttal. He saw no glory or merit in retreat, however bold or reckless, from an unbreached wall. To discard a court card was dishonorable, even though such a move might develop a whole line of lesser trumps, and, in debate, to concede was to admit defeat. Now, Burgoyne had no plan for retreat. He had only the hope that his luck would turn and that he could yet reach Albany. A few necessary preparations were made, however, during the daylight hours of 8 October. At the British camp, carts and boats lay, as on any other day, under the watchful scrutiny of rebel scouts on the east side of the Hudson River. The increased activity around the hospital, where the surgeons worked to prepare the sick and wounded for the Yankees to whose care they must be left, could well be attributed to the previous day's battle. The guns could not yet be removed from the redoubts, as a renewed American attack was expected, even hoped for, by the British troops imbued with their general's infectious determination. Only the men of the fighting regiments, by resting quietly behind their strong redoubts, could prepare for the secret night retirement. During the morning there was a general alarm, when the tired, underfed troops stood to and watched the Americans deploy in front of their lines on the flat river plain. But the guns and howitzers of the THE HIGHLAND LAMENT 253 Royal Artillery kept the Yankees at their distance, while the foot soldiers, wrapped in the blanket of near exhaustion, resumed their interrupted sleep. In a hiding place that he had made beyond the picquet post, a Jäger private, alert because of the danger in which he found himself, caught a glimpse of blue and buff among the trees, a long rifle-shot away. As a huntsman on the ducal estate, the Jäger had often watched the wild boars drifting, ghost-like, through the forest. Now he raised his rifle, waiting for his quarry again to expose himself. In the instant before pulling the trigger, he saw the biggest and fattest man to come before his eyes since last he had seen His Grace's baker, at home in Wolfenbüttel. In the German's aimed shot General Fraser was avenged. Major General Benjamin Lincoln took the Jäger bullet in his leg. Though not fatal, the wound seriously affected the future course of the American campaign. In immobilizing the great bulk of the man, it removed the weighty influence of the general. Benjamin Lincoln's value as a soldier had been proven on the northern frontier under both Schuyler and Gates. He it was who had roused the militia, who had placated John Stark sufficiently to prevent his returning home; he had organized the telling raid on Fort Ticonderoga, leaving it be carried out by men more agile than himself. During the action of 19 September Lincoln had been in Vermont, but he soon returned to keep his level head, and his command of the right wing of the Continental Army and of the militia, 254 MARCH TO SARATOGA while the Gates-Arnold controversy raged. He had taken Benedict Arnold with him when he went forward to estimate the situation created by Burgoyne's reconnaissance in force. General Gates had listened to his report, and at Lincoln's urgent instigation had sent out Morgan and the brigades of Arnold's former command. Although he was the only available major general on duty at the time, Lincoln had made no attempt to take over the disgraced Arnold's men for the battle of 7 October. He had returned to his right wing command, where he readied Glover's and Patterson's brigades to exploit any breakthrough that might be achieved on the left. With Lincoln down, as well as Arnold, Major General Horatio Gates stood alone in the high place of his rank and his command. He demonstrated no need for a deputy; he had never sought one. None of his seven brigadier generals was permitted to approach him. Content with the working out of his own schemes, he remained in every way aloof. From Gates's headquarters, all contact forward was made through that "bright lad," James Wilkinson. General Gates saw his troops and their battles only through the eyes of the young lieutenant colonel and adjutant general, who rode here and there as he felt inclined, a platoon of couriers trailing him. Now, on 8 October, undisturbed by the bold interruptions of Arnold or by the necessity for showing courtesy to the able and amenable Lincoln, Gates could continue with his plan for holding the diminishing British army within its contracting lines. If THE HIGHLAND LAMENT 255 Burgoyne retreated, as now appeared likely, Gates would follow, as inevitably as the cart follows the horse, into the marketplace of victory and reward. But as the day after the battle wore on, Gates was reminded again and again of one administrative detail which had been overlooked 7 October had been the beginning of a new four-day ration period. Because of the battle no individual issue of food had been made. The Americans had been sustained by the excitement of victory and by the anticipation of a second day's harrying of the British. But inaction had kindled fires of hunger in the soldiers deployed on the river plain and in the captured redoubts. Gates ordered the issue of rations on 9 October, and called the troops back into their fieldworks so that in the day- long ceremony of weighing, apportioning, and recording of the rations, each man might draw the issue to which he was entitled. At sunset, when the Americans had not yet returned to their lines, a group of British soldiers was spotted on a hilltop, only a cannon shot away. Before it limbered up, a rebel battery fired on this target of opportunity, its round shot falling short by only a few yards. It was close enough to throw a shower of dirt and sand over the black coat of Chaplain Edward Brudenel. But the interruption failed to halt the flow of his words, nor did General Burgoyne, or Phillips, or Riedesel, or young Captain Alexander Fraser, raise his bowed head until the remains of General Simon Fraser had been committed, with all ceremony, to the grave. 256 MARCH TO SARATOGA At nine o'clock on the evening of 8 October, with Captain Eraser's marksmen leading, the retreat of Burgoyne's army began. General Riedesel followed with his Germans. Then came the British contingent, with the guns and wheeled transport sandwiched in among the regiments. Before the rear guard, under Balcarres, had begun to march, Riedesel, at the head of the column already four miles forward on the road to Saratoga, received the order to halt. A light rain was falling when General Riedesel climbed into his family's calash to await the order expected momentarily to resume the march. Three hours later, he awoke with a start of bewilderment which quickly changed to anger at his wife, who had pillowed him in his heavy sleep. Rain beat on the canvas cover of the wagon, and gusts of the northeast wind flapped the sodden cloth against the taut bows holding it away from the passengers and baggage that it protected. Still in a rage, the general left its shelter and strode off through the mud to get to the bottom of the cause for the delay. The cause was all too apparent. It was visible in the drawn white faces of the men who sat by the roadside, wet and cold and seemingly heedless of their misery. Like the baroness herself, the German women were with their men, instead of at the wagons. They looked at him boldly, and the general's anger softened into indignant compassion. It was the transport which had caused the delay. Whereas the will of the men could be revived by encouragement, the dumb beasts pulling the guns and the wagons THE HIGHLAND LAMENT 257 through the mud could only be driven until they died. Yet they struggled on. In one of the carts, Riedesel saw Major Harnage, wrapped in blankets; he had refused to be left behind. With one hand on the tail- gate, Mrs. Harnage walked beside the cart, smiling at Major General Riedesel as she passed. From across the Hudson River, a single shot was fired. It was directed at a provision bateau which, in its struggle upstream, had worked its way too close to the enemy, dogging the east bank of the river. At a point where grooms were holding a large herd of saddle horses, Riedesel found General Burgoyne, who was rejecting the plea of Colonel Sutherland to release his regiment (the 47th) for an attack. On the previous day, 8 October, Sutherland had been sent ahead to see if the way was clear. He had reported that the road was unobstructed through Saratoga. Beyond that place, Brigadier General Fellows of the Massachusetts militia lay in such a loose, carelessly organized camp that Sutherland felt sure he could attack with the two hundred and fifty men left in his regiment and have every expectation of success. Burgoyne, however, refused to detach any part of his force. He remained throughout the day in the rainy bivouac at Dovegate, and at four o'clock in the afternoon the march to Saratoga the first leg of the retreat to Ticonderoga was resumed. Earlier in the day a group of German soldiers had eluded their officers long enough to desert into the woods. There, without their own Indian allies to hunt them down like rabbits, the "hirelings" found mercy 258 MARCH TO SARATOGA from the Yankees. That evening Lady Acland, too, quit the army. With her she took her maid, her husband's wounded valet, and, for consolation and to row the boat, the Reverend Edward Brudenel. The little party went downriver to a safe landing behind the American lines. Her pass from General Burgoyne was respected, and soon she was reunited with her wounded husband, whom she nursed back to health. The evening was still young as the head of the British army crossed Fish Creek and spread out into the old positions, made in mid-September. Scouting north of the old camp, Eraser's marksmen saw the last of Fellows's brigade splashing across the ford to the east bank of the Hudson. A few shots in the dark hurried them along. Burgoyne himself did not cross Fish Creek that night. Always reluctant to give in, he ordered three British regiments, under Brigadier Hamilton, to keep a bridgehead on the south side of the stream. Wearily, he then permitted himself to turn in at the gate of Schuyler's house. The wife of his commissary had preceded him, and already lamps had been lighted in the downstairs rooms. As Burgoyne crossed the threshold, a champagne cork popped with a noise like a pocket pistol. Gentleman Johnny headed instinctively toward the familiar sound. In the morning, rested and refreshed, General Burgoyne moved all his troops north of the Fish Kill. Regretfully, he gave the order to burn down the graciously hospitable Schuyler house. It had to go, overlooking as it did the stream crossing and the British defensive positions on the other side. THE HIGHLAND LAMENT 259 On 10 October General Gates finally moved out of his fortified camp and with his whole army went in pursuit of Burgoyne. During that day, Fellows's brigade held the British to the west side of the river by harassing fire, preventing Burgoyne's pioneers from building a bridge over the Hudson at the old crossing place. In the dense river fog of the autumn morning of 11 October, Daniel Morgan and his grizzled riflemen crossed Fish Creek on improvised rafts, disembarking on the bluffs three-quarters of a mile west of the Hudson. To men at home among the close, solid, friendly trunks of great trees, the vast emptiness of the thick blue mist hanging over the open fields was a disconcerting thing. As if drawn by a magnet, their northward advance inclined to the west, where the deep woods began again. Thus they missed the strong redoubt where Balcarres's advance guard stood at arms, marking the rangers' passage by their eerie, though all too familiar, call of the wild turkey gobbler. Nearer to the river bank, Brigadier General John Nixon had crossed the creek with his brigade of Continentals. Though a town man from near to Boston, Nixon, like Morgan's woodsmen, also moved warily through the fog. Uncertain of his true position and mistrusting the report that the British had gone on to Fort Edward, he called a halt. It was well that he did so, for with the rising sun the mist burned away to show his whole brigade under the muzzles of a British battery. Promptly and without hesitation, Nixon, in whom the keen edge of vainglory had been dulled on many battle grounds, brought off his 260 MARCH TO SARATOGA brigade at a run, not stopping until he had recrossed Fish Creek to its south shore. There he fell into line of battle beside John Glover, a Marblehead man. Only Ebenezer Learned sprang forward on discovering that the fog had hidden all of Burgoyne's army in a position of defense. As on 7 October when Benedict Arnold led, he sought out Morgan and prepared to mount a charge. He was stopped only by the arrival of the ubiquitous Wilkinson, who, in the name of General Gates, ordered him back. Reluctantly, and muttering strange biblical quotations, Learned withdrew. Gates's artillery came up in the afternoon, and from positions along the line of Fish Creek began the bombardment of the British entrenchments. Using captured British bateaux as ferries, Yankee artillerymen moved guns and ammunition over to the east shore of the Hudson, where men from Fellows's command pointed out gun sites to enfilade Burgoyne's camp. On 12 October, the first gun of the east-shore batteries fired on a house that was known to belong to Peter Lansing, which, from the activity surrounding it, the American gunners believed to be British army headquarters. It was on that day, too, that Gates completed the encirclement of Burgoyne's army. Morgan shifted his line northward until it overlapped the British positions on the west. Again crossing Fish Creek, Learned lined up to the right of the riflemen. That night, Massachusetts men of Fellows's brigade crossed on rafts to the west shore of the Hudson. Pushing boldly THE HIGHLAND LAMENT 261 westward through the darkness and rain they cut the forest road up the west bank of the river to Fort Edward, Burgoyne's only clear way to the north. Patrols continued westward through the sodden underbrush until they were challenged by the picquet of riflemen holding Morgan's suspended left flank. By dawn of 13 October, twelve thousand American guns, rifles, and muskets ringed around Burgoyne's scant four thousand men and bayonets. Since the fog had lifted on the morning of 11 October, the British troops on the high ground had learned every angle and nook of their redoubt. They knew every spot where a Yankee rifleman perched high in a tree could reach in with his murderous small shot. They knew where they could crouch and where they could lie in reasonable safety from the American cannon. Men quickly grew wise in judging the sound of an oncoming shell, and learned by a glance at a distant puff of smoke whether to duck for safety or to continue their wretched waiting in the rain. Baroness Riedesel had seen the first shot fired from the east shore of the river. With the shrewd judgment of a veteran, she had guessed that it was intended for the Lansing house, in the cellar of which she and her children, with the other women, were taking refuge. For the remainder of the siege, the house was under constant and accurate bombardment, but there, in the vaulted arches of the cellar, she ruled as she had ruled in her stately Brunswick home. After thoroughly fumigating the smelly quarters by burning 262 MARCH TO SARATOGA vinegar there., she apportioned the available space. In the deepest vault she placed the wounded; the women she assigned to the middle room; and in the room from which the stairs climbed to the outer door, she curtained off her own corner of luxurious privacy. In the outer room, which she shared with Mrs. Harnage and Mrs. Reynell, Baroness Riedesel received her callers and turned away all those whom she deemed "skulkers." She saw but little of her husband, though he sent his aides from time to time to reassure her. On one such errand, Captain Willoe silently handed his wallet to her for safe-keeping. She was already holding Captain Geismar's wallet, with his watch and ring. One day, after a particularly heavy bombardment, during which those in the cellar could hear the cannon balls rolling across the plank flooring above them. Captain Green came to have his old wound dressed by the surgeon. Before leaving, he told the baroness that he had made arrangements with three officers, each of whom would take one of her children on his saddle-bow, and that, when the time came, a horse would be brought for her to ride. At headquarters the generals were talking flight. In the lines the men talked of food, of a bayonet charge, of old campaigns: Ticonderoga, Hubbardton, Fort Anne, Fort Edward, even of Bennington. All these were now only places in the distant past. 21 The World Turned Upside Down At all the councils of war, Major General the Baron Friederich von Riedesel though himself a "hireling" and his men but chattels of their respective dukes spoke out in favor of any plan which was in any way of benefit to his troops. In doing so, he risked incurring the disapproval of those same Dukes of Brunswick and of Hesse-Cassel, who stood to gain if their soldiers were killed, wounded, or taken prisoner. Of the former, three wounded subjects equaled, in cash to the duke, one dead subject. Perhaps the baron's concern for the common soldier was the result of his own long years in the army, and his consequent knowledge of, and respect for, those men he deemed true soldiers. General Riedesel recognized the investment in training, experience, and loyalty represented by the men, both British and German, who had fought from Ticonderoga to Freeman's farm, and considered them to have a greater value than the guns and stores. At the council of war held on 12 October 1777, in the all but encircled camp at Saratoga, General 263 264 MARCH TO SARATOGA Riedesel's views finally prevailed. His proposals were accepted and the necessary orders issued by General Burgoyne. At ten o'clock that night, guns, wagons, stores, boats everything but small arms were to be abandoned, and the men and women of the expedition, carrying their food on pack-horses, were to march by the west road to Fort Edward. They were to fight for the crossing there, and proceed to Fort Ticonderoga. But at Saratoga the plan, which might have succeeded four days earlier, no longer served its purpose. The drag of the wheeled vehicles in the rain and mud, and the northeast wind which had delayed the provision boats forcing their way up against the current of the river, killed all hope of the troops being able to save themselves. Had the delay not rendered the plan unfeasible, in all probability General Burgoyne's hesitancy would have done so. He still saw his duty and loyalty in faithful adherence to "The Plan," and he was honor-bound while he yet had guns and battalions, to hammer the enemy pending the arrival of Sir Henry Clinton and his army, still confidently expected by Burgoyne, Even in this desperate situation John Burgoyne could not quit. Before the appointed hour on the night of 12 October he cancelled the order to retreat. By accepting the decision of a council of war, a commander in chief gains friendly witnesses at the inevitable court of inquiry. By overriding the decision and going against the advice of his senior officers Phillips, Riedesel, Hamilton, and von Gall THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN 265 General Burgoyne accepted full responsibility for the consequences. By the morning of 13 October any attempt to get away by the west road was futile. The road was dominated by Fellows's Massachusetts men, from a strong hill position with marshy ground in front. In the afternoon, Burgoyne called a general council, to which came the generals, the colonels, and the majors. The captains, too, were summoned, some of them coming from exposed company positions, darting across open spaces, under the watchful eyes of Morgan's riflemen, and crawling through underbrush so as not to be seen by the Yankee gunners. After brushing their uniforms with grimy hands and straightening their rumpled stocks, with some embarrassment they entered the presence of their general. Burgoyne rose to speak. He accepted all blame for the situation in which they found themselves. He reported frankly that there remained but five days' rations in all the camp. Eloquently, he cited comparable examples in history of armies that had capitulated. The officers listened in silence as their general made his case for surrender. Then Burgoyne posed two questions: Would a surrender on advantageous terms be disgraceful? The solemn answer was an unhesitating "No" Under existing circumstances was such a capitulation necessary? Speaking, first, as is the custom, the most junior captain shyly and unemotionally offered his life and pledged the loyalty of his men in a "do or die" attack. Others followed 266 MARCH TO SARATOGA "his lead, and on up through the grades of ascending rank, General Burgoyne heard out his tribute. In the reaction of his officers John Burgoyne regained reason and found wisdom. He entered into negotiation with Horatio Gates. Early in the morning of 14 October a drummer in a yellow coat marched boldly to Fish Creek, where the bridge stringers still reached over to the south bank. He was busy for a moment as he tightened the soggy head of his drum. Then, posing with the tips of the drumsticks just touching the down on his upper lip, he sensed that unseen Yankees were watching him. He beat out the parlay. At ten o'clock, James Wilkinson rode past the burned-out ruins of the Schuyler mansion, dismounted, and strode to the south end of the broken bridge. At the north end, a few yards away, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Kingston, Deputy Adjutant General and secretary to General Burgoyne, waited in the rain for Wilkinson's invitation to cross, which came with a polite gesture. Gingerly, the Englishman crossed on the single stringer linking the two banks of Fish Creek. On the Yankee side, Kingston accepted the blindfold, and with Wilkinson leading him set out to open the negotiations with Gates. All that day and far into the night proposals and counter-proposals were written, exchanged, discussed, amended, and returned. While the two staffs worked hard and long and late, the men of both armies moved about in their positions, secure under the terms of an armistice. THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN 267 Compromise by compromise, the negotiations moved toward a still-distant conclusion. Then, with a suddenness that startled Burgoyne into suspicion, Gates agreed to all of Burgoyne's requests, stipulating only that the capitulation be signed by two o'clock that afternoon, Wednesday, 15 October, and that the British and German troops lay down their arms at five o'clock. Such a bullish rush was not in in character for the feline Gates. To Burgoyne, a shrewd player at cards, Gates appeared to be pushed from behind, like a house cat shoved out into the rain. Quite correctly, Burgoyne reasoned that some action on the part of Sir Henry Clinton was the cause of Gates's haste to bring the easy game of negotiation to a close. By every means in his considerable knowledge of the art of procrastination, Burgoyne sought to prolong the discussion of terms. Ever a prisoner of hope, with each passing hour he saw the phoenix of his "Thoughts for Conducting the War" rise from the ashes of his predicament, in the tardily kindled flame of Clinton's advance from Albany. Burgoyne's spirits soared that night when he was roused from sleep to interview a Tory from the lower Hudson. The man brought word of the capture by Clinton, on 8 October, of the American forts on the highlands. He also reported that English forces, which he had heard were at Esopus, only sixty miles below Albany, probably were now marching into that city. With this good news, General Burgoyne entered the council of officers that he had called for 16 268 MARCH TO SARATOGA October. But the temper of the army had now changed, and the vote held Burgoyne in honor bound to continue the negotiations with Gates. Even so, Gentleman Johnny found one more grain of hope in his larder of desperation. Had Gates broken the armistice by sending troops from the army encircling the British to meet the threat of Clinton's northward march? If so, then Gates himself had broken off the negotiations. The council of officers recessed while representations on this point were sent to Gates. Truthfully the American general could answer in the negative. In fact, Gates had sent Colonel Peter Gansevoort, from the Mohawk Valley, to contain the British at Esopus. It was these rebel soldiers that the Tory talebearer had seen on the march below Albany. When the council reconvened that afternoon the British officers again saw no legal or moral reason for failure to sign the surrender. While the officers waited, Burgoyne sought privately to sway his generals. Phillips, eternally proud, refused comment, as he had done at the council before the second battle at Freeman's farm. Riedesel, who had been sustaining himself in his exhaustion with white wine, could only bemoan the lost opportunity to save such fine soldiers. Completely alone in all his hopes, opinions, and determination, Lieutenant General John Burgoyne surrendered his army. With studied carelessness, he threw his last card out onto the table: it was a deuce. Nowhere in the Articles of Agreement should the word "capitulation" appear; the word, "convention" was to be used in its place. THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN 269 The British general chose the nicest of words to entitle the script; unexpectedly, the staging of the final scene was a masterpiece of tact, courtesy, and understanding on the part of the American general. The ceremonies were set for Friday, 17 October 1777. For the first time since the retreat had begun nine days earlier, the sun came out. It rose above the high mountains lining the Vermont horizon. It shone on the wide trace of the Hudson River, where red and gold autumn leaves, riding southward on the smooth, swift flowing current, caught the light. On the western slopes, the trunks and branches of trees that had been hidden by summer foliage now showed a silvery gray. The day was bright and washed and polished as were the British and German soldiers, forming their ranks in the old redoubts and behind the barricades. Orders were carried out with a crispness matching the clear October air. Closed ranks opened; the dressing was picked up with a shuffling of feet that rustled the dry leaves. Rows and rows and rows of straight, proud figures stood rigidly at attention while the officers made their slow inspection. Not much was left of the uniforms that four months earlier had looked so fine on the banks of the distant Richelieu River, as the royal standard had flapped lazily in the warm June breeze. Now, many miles away on the shores of the Hudson, patches were the soldiers' distinction, and wispy plumes that once had been full and luxuriant marked the fortitude of men on 270 MARCH TO SARATOGA long marches down forest roads. Old muskets, their battered, dented stocks rubbed gleaming with oil, and the burnished steel of bayonets, marked the veterans of General Burgoyne's army as battle-tested troops. It was their last parade as soldiers. Soon for the drums had begun to beat the men would be called upon to lay down the tools of their profession and to march away as prisoners of war. One by one, the regiments came down to the river, the red-coated British and the tall, blue-uniformed Germans. One by one, their colonels gave the order to ground arms, and one by one, the regiments marched off, hands swinging high to the music of the bands. There were no Yankees to witness the shucking of their arms and their pride. Only a few curious civilians watched from the other side of the river. It was for their benefit that the bands played "The World Turned Upside Down/ 7 while the tension that had been building up in the waiting troops eased to the sound of the appropriate and familiar tune. James Wilkinson could hear the sound of the music as, with General Burgoyne riding beside him, he approached the Fish Creek bridge. The stamping hooves of their horses, and of the horses of Burgoyne's four generals who followed behind them, drowned out the saucy music as the party rode across the bridge, On the new side of the world, the young American officer and the old British general he was escorting caught the sound of another air. It was made by the harsh field music of the American Continentals, THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN 271 marching up to line the road to the tune of "Yankee Doodle Dandy," squealed out by the insolent fifes. Once, as Wilkinson led him on, Burgoyne jerked his head up quickly; a wild turkey had called from a copse not far away. Half a mile from the creek, the cavalcade turned off the Albany road into a field where a large tent had been set up. In front of the tent stood a group of American officers. As the British approached, one of the Americans left the group and mounted his horse. Moving with slow deliberation, the British generals drew nearer. A few yards from the solitary mounted figure dressed in a simple blue uniform-coat, Burgoyne reined in. Wilkinson politely made the introduction. John Burgoyne removed his plumed hat, and in a firm, clear voice spoke the sentence that made him a prisoner of war. Horatio Gates made the appropriate reply, addressing Lieutenant General Burgoyne as "Your Excellency." The final ceremonies of the "convention" took place beside the straight road to Albany. There, in a cleared space near the road, General Burgoyne tendered his sword to General Gates. Along the road the weaponless soldiers of Britain's northern army marched as prisoners between two silent ranks of solemn-faced Continentals. To Lieutenant Digby, striding by with all that remained of Acland's grenadiers, the music of their band, though it played their own "Grenadiers' March," sounded dull and lifeless. His face was wet with tears as he stepped out smartly, to pass in style 272 MARCH TO SARATOGA the place where Gentleman Johnny was taking the review beside the pudgy little man who was the conqueror. Company by company they came: light infantry, artillery, regiments of the British line, Jägers in green, and stolid German infantry. The remnants of the 62nd passed the motionless ranks of the men they had met in the bitter fighting at the angle of the fence at Freeman's farm, a month gone by. The young Fraser and his moccasined rangers padded past the riflemen of Morgan's corps, on whom they had so successfully patterned themselves. The 9th of Foot, remembering the defile at Fort Anne, marched along behind its band. In the lead was Colonel Hill, very conscious of the sudden corpulence showing under his waistcoat, where his regiment's Color was safely (he hoped) hidden. The October sun caught the polished gold and silver of the mitered grenadiers, as they trudged woodenly along behind their new commander. The sun caught, too, the flourish of a sword blade as it cut the elaborate arc of a final salute to the well-loved general it had served with unswerving devotion. A short distance down the road, the company commander whose sword it was turned abruptly and tossed the weapon, now useless in his hands, to a small American boy who stood, wide-eyed, in the space between two Continental soldiers. Epilogue Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes, was foreign minister to Louis XVI, the young Bourbon king of France. Many people, however, considered him to be little more than a clerk, and it was as such that he was treated by the British ambassador to the court at Versailles when, on 2 September 1777, he brought word to the French court of Lieutenant General Burgoyne's capture of Fort Ticonderoga, the French- built "Fort Carillon." Accompanying this news was a demand by England that the American rebels be treated as outlaws, and that French ports be closed to the Yankee pirates and their prizes. The British ambassador, Viscount Stormont, intimated that failure to comply with this demand might well bring on a formal declaration of war. For two months after the receipt of the news of Burgoyne's significant victory in the Lake Champlain Pass, Vergennes played the part of procrastinating clerk, while proving himself to be, in fact, an accomplished diplomat, a crafty politician, and a master in the art of devious intrigue. In France, public 274 MARCH TO SARATOGA opinion favored the cause of the Americans in their dispute with England. Since the revolt in Boston had spread so quickly to the other colonies in North America, France had sent supplies to the rebels and had encouraged them in every way short of declaring war on Britain. But in spite of increasing pressures, Vergennes held back from making the ultimate commitment. Actually, he was strengthening his own resources in military preparations and in diplomatic alliances, while watching for a sure sign that the Americans could and would hold fast to their declared independence against the armed might of Britain, All during September, October, and November, Vergennes was successful in fending off the demands made by the arrogant Lord Stormont, while restraining his own ardent countrymen and following his monarch to Fontainebleau for hunting with the court. On 4 December 1777, the American commissioners brought to Vergennes's busy private bureau the sure sign for which he waited. General Burgoyne had been defeated in battle, and his whole army had been taken prisoner at a place called Saratoga. Two days later, in a note written in the king's presence and in the king's own apartment, Vergennes gave France's recognition of the new United States as a sovereign nation, and became that nation's ally in war. Scarcely waiting for the ink to dry, Louis XVI approved and dated the simple document which was to assure the victory and independence of the United States of America. EPILOGUE 275 In the office of King George the Third's Secretary of State for the American Colonies there was another document, as important to the emergent United States as was Vergennes's note of alliance and active participation in the war. But, unlike its French counterpart, the document in London was unsigned, undelivered, and in fact, forgotten. This was the promised letter from Lord George Germaine to General Howe, ordering the latter up the Hudson to complete the grand design of Burgoyne's plan to sever in two the American colonies along the Hudson- Champlain Pass. It was bitterly cold on the March evening in 1777 when Germaine stopped in at the Colonial Office to sign some letters before continuing his drive into the country, where he was to spend the week-end. The important letter he had drafted to Lord Howe was not yet ready in the form insisted upon by the meticulous Germaine. It was warm beside the fire in the Secretary's office, but it was not warm outside in the street where milord's coach was waiting. Always a considerate horseman, Germaine preferred not to keep his horses waiting in the cold. Besides, his blast of furious rage over the poorly copied letter would lose its effect, if he were to wait patiently while the clerk rewrote the slovenly work. So Lord George Germaine swept out of his office, his dignity and his scruples intact, and rode away in his fine coach. When he returned a few days later, he quite forgot to ask for the letter to Howe, and no one cared perhaps no one remembered to bring it to his attention. 276 MARCH TO SARATOGA The letter was never sent, and without any specific orders to co-operate with General Burgoyne, Howe sailed for the Chesapeake to carry out his plan for the capture of Philadelphia. In the upper Hudson River and in Lake George and Lake Champlain, ice forms in December in quiet bays and backwaters, and between Fort Ticonderoga and Skenesborough, where the water is shallow. On the mountain summits the gathering snows are white along the invasion road from the St. Lawrence to the Hudson. The long silence of winter settles over the land. By December 1777 all the armies of the long, hot, frenzied days of summer were gone from the northern frontier. Soon after the surrender at Saratoga, Clinton had fallen back on New York. Powell had destroyed and abandoned the British forts at Ticonderoga, and had sailed to Canada. The remnant of Burgoyne's army was beginning its long years of captivity in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Even Gates's army had left the fields it had won. The militia had gone home. The tough Continentals had marched away to join General Washington at the grim camp at Valley Forge, there to watch Sir William Howe wintering comfortably in Philadelphia. No one was left at Freeman's farm, on the Walloomsac, at Fort Edward, Fort Anne, Skenesborough, Hubbardton, Ticonderoga, The softly falling snow covered the debris of Burgoyne's army along all the way of its proud march from British Canada to Saratoga, in New York State. Chronology of Lieutenant General John Burgoyne's Campaign of 1777 and of events relating to that campaign. 6 May General Burgoyne arrives in Canada. 13 June Invasion army sets out from St. Jean. 20 June Burgoyne's proclamation to the Americans. 21 June Burgoyne's conference with the Indians, 1 July Siege of the forts at Ticonderoga begins. 5 July British guns arrive on Sugar Loaf, and the Americans evacuate Fort Ticonderoga and Mount Independence. 6 July British army occupies the forts and Skenesborough. 7 July Battle on Hubbardton road. 8 July Battle near Fort Anne. 23 July General Howe with the main British army leaves New York by sea for Chesapeake Bay. 27 July Murder of Jane McCrea, 30 July Burgoyne's army established on the Hudson River at Fort Edward. 277 278 CHRONOLOGY 6 August Battle of Oriskany. 9 August British army advances to the Batten Kill. 16 August Baum's and Breymann's battles along the Walloomsac River on the road to Bennington. 2-3 August Colonel St. Leger raises his siege of Fort Stanwix. 11 September Howe wins the Battle of Brandywine, Pennsylvania. 13 September Burgoyne crosses to the west bank of the Hudson at Saratoga. 18 September General Lincoln's raid on the British-held forts at Ticonderoga. 19 September First battle at Freeman's farm. 26 September Howe occupies Philadelphia. 6 October General Sir Henry Clinton captures the American forts guarding the Hudson highlands. 7 October Second battle at Freeman's farm. 9 October Burgoyne's army arrives at Saratoga on its retreat. 17 October Burgoyne surrenders at Saratoga. 26 October Sir Henry Clinton returns to New York. 8 November British destroy and evacuate the forts at Ticonderoga. British and German Troops The tables of organization laid down for the three parts of the British army operating in and from Canada for the campaign of 1777 are given in a letter of instruction, dated at Whitehall on 26 March of that year, from Lord George Germaine, Secretary of State for the American Colonies, to General Guy Carleton, Governor General of Canada. The detailed instructions provided for 3770 soldiers to remain in Canada, 675 soldiers plus "a sufficiency of Canadians and Indians" to go with Colonel Barry St. Leger to Albany via the Mohawk River, and 7173 British and German troops to be put under the command of Lieutenant General Burgoyne. In addition, Burgoyne was to have as many Canadians and Indians as might be thought necessary. Both St. Leger and Burgoyne were to be given complete artillery trains. Burgoyne's force was also to include cadres of American Loyalist units to be recruited to full strength in the liberated province. St. Leger's force was to include Sir John Johnson's Loyalist regiment from the Mohawk Valley. There are several points that should be made about the different kinds of units and their components before proceeding with the table of organization. In the eighteenth century it was customary to put the best soldiers of a regiment into a single elite company. Originally 279 280 BRITISH AND GERMAN TROOPS this company was armed with grenades. Though the weapon itself became obsolete, the assault and shock troops of a regiment continued to bear the name of grenadier company. The overarm motion used to throw a grenade was awkward for a man wearing a wide-brimmed tricorne hat, so special headgear was adopted by the grenadiers. This, with certain other minor deviations from the regular uniform, was carried over as a kind of remnant, though it formerly had served a purpose. For a particular campaign, the grenadier company of each of the regiments of the force was often removed from the command of the regimental colonel and all the grenadiers assembled as a separate command. Thus, Major Acland's "Grenadiers of Regiments" was made up of the grenadier companies of the seven British regiments of General Burgoyne's army: the 9th, 20th, 21st, 24th, 47th, 53rd, and 62nd. To these were added the grenadier companies of three British regiments which remained in Canada under command of General Carleton: the 29th, 31st, and 34th. Ideally, the strength of a British company was fifty men, giving Acland a potential force of ten companies, or 500 soldiers. After removal of the grenadier company and, frequently, the light infantry company too, the line regiment was left with but eight companies, a total (in theory) of 400 men. In most instances, however, the actual number was somewhat less than full complement, though every effort was made to draft the most able men from the battalion companies into the grenadier and light infantry companies. When, in the mid-eighteenth century, a need for the employment of ranger-type troops became apparent, the light infantry company of regiments was raised by gathering the youngest and most active men into a second elite corps. Like the grenadiers, this corps also wore a distinctive uniform. Burgoyne's light infantry of regiments, commanded by the Earl of Balcarres, was of the same strength and drawn from the same regiments as Acland's corps of grenadiers. BRITISH AND GERMAN TROOPS 281 Burgoyne's forces, including the Indians who joined after the expedition set out from St. Jean, numbered about 8000 officers and men. They were organized, up to the time they quit Skenesborough at the end of July, as follows: I Lieutenant General John Burgoyne and Staff II Advance Corps Brigadier General Simon Fraser Grenadiers of Regiments Major John Acland Light Infantry of Regiments The Earl of Balcarres 24th Foot Major William Agnew; Major Robert Grant (killed at Hubbardton); Colonel Fraser, Acting Brigadier General Marksmen Captain Alexander Fraser Indians St. Luc de la Corne and others Canadians De la Naudiere and others III British or Right Division Major General William Phillips 1st Brigade Brigadier General James Hamilton 20th Foot Lieutenant Colonel John Lind 21st Foot Major Squire; Acting Brigadier General Hamilton 62nd Foot Lieutenant Colonel John Anstruther 2nd Brigade Brigadier General Henry W. Powell 9th Foot Lieutenant Colonel John Hill 282 BRITISH AND GERMAN TROOPS 47th Foot Lieutenant Colonel Nicholas Sutherland 53rd Foot Lieutenant Colonel Powell, Acting Brigadier General IV German or Left Division Major General Baron Friederich von Riedesel Brigade Specht Brigadier General Johann Friederich Specht Regiment von Rhetz Lieutenant Colonel Johann Gustav von Ehrenkroock (Brunswick) Regiment von Specht Major Carl Friederich von Ehrenkroock; (Brunswick) Acting Brigadier General von Specht Regiment von Riedesel Lieutenant Colonel Ernst Ludwig von Spaeth; (Brunswick) Major General von Riedesel Brigade von Gall Brigadier General W. R. von Gall Regiment Prinz Friederich Lieutenant Colonel Christian Julius Praetorius (Brunswick) Regiment Erb-Prinz Colonel W. R. von Gall, Acting Brigadier (Hesse-Hanau) "Reserve" * Colonel Heinrich Christoph Breymann * The German "Reserve" were, in effect, the storm troops of the German contingent, as was the advance corps of the British. The grenadiers of regiments were formed in the same way as Acland's grenadiers. However, as the German regiment was composed of five companies only, each with a hundred men, the five companies of Breymann's grenadiers were theoretically of the same numerical strength as their British counterpart. There were no light infantry companies of regiments in the German Establishment. BRITISH AND GERMAN TROOPS 283 Grenadiers Colonel Heinrich Christoph Breymann Light Infantry Battalion Bärner Major Ferdinand Albrecht Earner von Bärner Jäger Company Captain von Geyso (Brunswick) Prinz Ludwig Dragoons Lieutenant Colonel Friederich Baum (Brunswick) Artillery Major Griffith Williams Personnel: 4 companies Royal Artillery Detachment Royal Irish Artillery Reinforcement draft of 33rd Foot, destined for their regiment with General Howe's army, attached to Royal Artillery 1 company Hesse-Hanau Artillery Captain Georg Pausch Guns: Siege Train for siege of Fort Ticonderoga 128 guns - cannon, howitzers, and mortars Guns attached to brigades: Advance Corps 10 guns Hamilton's Brigade 4 guns Powell's Brigade 4 guns German Brigades 4 guns German Reserve 4 guns 284 BRITISH AND GERMAN TROOPS After the fall of Fort Ticonderoga, the siege train of artillery became redundant and was left behind. The army marched off to the Hudson with but 27 guns, which by eighteenth-century standards was a strong complement for the number of soldiers. With the constant problem of securing horses and forage for them, this large train of guns, ammunition tumbrils, tool carts, etc., was a severe strain on Burgoyne's transportation system. On leaving Ticonderoga, General Burgoyne was forced to detach two regiments: the 62nd (later replaced by the 53rd) and the Brunswick Regiment Prinz Friederich as guards for that important rear link and focus point for the collection of supplies. Two companies of the 47th were left on Diamond Island in Lake George, serving a like purpose when the army severed its supply line to Canada in the march down the Hudson to Albany. Faced with the necessity of manning and maintaining the posts in his rear, and after the losses suffered at Bennington and by attrition, Burgoyne crossed the Hudson with approximately 6000 men. The organization of the army was altered to fit the reduced size and the anticipated employment and deployment of the troops. At the time of the two battles of Freeman's farm, Burgoyne's army was brigaded as follows: Advance Corps: Marksmen, Canadians, Loyalists, Indians, Grenadiers, Light Infantry, 24th Foot, Breymann's Corps (Grenadiers and Bärner's Light Troops), Attached artillery (10 guns varying). Right Wing (Brigadier General Hamilton) : 9th Foot, 20th Foot, 21st Foot, 62nd Foot, Attached artillery (4 guns). Left Wing (Major General Riedesel) : Regiment Rhetz, Regiment Specht, Regiment Riedesel, Regiment Hesse-Hanau, Attached artillery (8 guns). Rear Echelon: Brunswick Dragoons (remnant as head- quarters guard), 47th Foot (6 companies), Gun Park. Major General Phillips was second in command to General Burgoyne, and in that capacity he took over the supervision BRITISH AND GERMAN TROOPS 285 of supplies and services while the army was gathering its resources at Fort Edward for the drive to Albany. The staff appointments at the army level were many and extraordinary: Adjutant General Lieutenant Colonel Robert Kingston Deputy Quartermaster General Captain John Money Royal Artillery Captain Thomas Bloomfield Chief Engineer Lieutenant William Twiss Commissary Mr. Rousseau Wagonmaster Mr. Robert Hoakesly Provost Lieutenant Atherton Department of Civil Affairs Colonel Philip Skene Naval Engineer Adviser Lieutenant John Schank, Royal Navy Captain of Bateaux Mr. Munro, Royal Navy Pioneers Captain Wilcox Paymaster Mr. David Geddes Surgeon of Hospitals ________ Almost all of these departments had assistants and deputies, and certain of them, such as quartermasters, commissaries, surgeons, and paymasters, had their counterpart at brigade and regimental levels. The chaplains were attached to regiments. Drummers were carried on the rolls of their regiments, distinct from the musicians of the regimental bands. The former were in effect the signal corps, as they beat the various calls and duties of the camp, as well as giving the pace on the march and in battle. Valets and bamen were also on the regimental lists, as were soldiers' wives, who served as washer-women and hospital attendants, and who had other specific duties for which they received rations. The final returns of General Burgoyne's brave army at the signing of the "Convention," 17 October 1777 showed a total of 4693 men who entered into the long captivity. The American Army General George Washington was the commander in chief of the American army. He was also field commander of the army fighting the British commander in chief, Sir William Howe. In the summer of 1775, in acknowledgment of the threat of the Hudson-Champlain Pass and the classic scheme of slicing in two the Atlantic Colonies along that geographic fault, Washington created the northern department of the army, command of which was given to Major General Philip Schuyler. It was Schuyler who met the first advance of Burgoyne's invasion in July and August 1777, and it was he who was responsible for the action of his subordinate, Major General Arthur Sinclair, who, with a force of two thousand Continentals, three hundred artillerymen, and about five hundred militia, abandoned the forts at Ticonderoga at the threat of siege by Burgoyne's eight thousand troops and heavy guns. The troops were saved. During Schuyler's rear- guard action, the American army was rebuilt in strength and numbers. However, the loss of the forts at Ticonderoga, symbol of rebel strength, resulted in such a scandal in the Congress that Major General Horatio Gates was appointed to replace General Schuyler and was given almost dictatorial power. Gates assumed command on 19 August 1777. The American army had two kinds of troops: first, the 286 THE AMERICAN ARMY 287 Continentals, who in effect were regular army troops, supplied by regiments from the individual colonies to the Continental Congress and to George Washington, its general, and, second, the militia, who were state or colony troops. The latter were held in their respective states for local defense, or were called out in a defensive role for a specific purpose and for a limited time. In the case of the New England militia at Saratoga, they were on an offensive- defensive mission outside their home states. Gates took over command of approximately three thousand Continentals and three to four hundred militia on active duty. Between 19 August and the Convention of Saratoga, 17 October 1777, Gates's army grew to almost six thousand Continentals and an undetermined number of militia, estimated variously at from twelve hundred to three thousand men. At the time of the surrender at Saratoga, the militia was still pouring in to join the army facing Burgoyne. The hard core of Gates's army was made up of the Continentals. At the first battle of Freeman's farm, they were organized into two wings, of which the right was commanded by Major General Benjamin Lincoln; the left was under the command of General Benedict Arnold. Gates had five brigadiers of Continentals.* They were, according to seniority: John Nixon, Enoch Poor, John Glover, John Paterson, and Ebenezer Learned. The Continental regiments of Gates's army at the time of Burgoyne's surrender at Saratoga were as follows: 11th Virginia Regiment (known as Morgan's Regiment of Riflemen) Dearborn's Light Infantry Battalion (under command of Morgan's Regiment) * Brigadier General John Stark held a New Hampshire commission at the time. His Continental commission, an award for his victory at Bennington in August 1777, was not promulgated until 4 October, so he was unaware of it at the time of the second battle of Freeman's farm. 288 THE AMERICAN ARMY 1st New Hampshire Regiment Colonel Joseph Cilley 2nd New Hampshire Regiment Colonel Nathan Hale 3rd New Hampshire Regiment Colonel Alexander Scammel 2nd New York Regiment Colonel Philip van Cortlandt 4th New York Regiment Colonel Henry Livingston Livingston's New York Colonel James Livingston Regiment (formerly 1st Canadians) 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th and 15th Massachusetts Regiments Warner's Vermont Regiment (The Green Mountain Boys) Ebenezer Stevens's Independent Battalion of Artillery Jeduthan Baldwin's Detachment of Engineers and Artificers Hyde's Continental Light Horse Seymour's Troop, 2nd Dragoons The militia was supplied for Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and New York, and for Vermont, a quasi- autonomous territory. The designation of a militia regiment was by the name of its colonel or the county in which it had been raised. The National Park Service has listed fifty- three militia units which either took part in the battles at Saratoga or were present at Burgoyne's surrender. Generally speaking, the militia regiments were brigaded together by states, which gave a great disparity in numbers between the various brigade strengths. Thus, Stark's New Hampshire brigade at the close of the campaign was eight hundred strong, while Ten Broeck commanded three thousand New Yorkers. THE AMERICAN ARMY 289 Three brigadier generals of the militia, with their troops, took an active part in the Burgoyne campaign: John Stark (New Hampshire), John Fellows (Massachusetts), Abram Ten Broeck (New York). Two Connecticut militia regiments, those of Colonel Jonathan Lattimer and Thaddeus Cook, were engaged with Poor's brigade of Benedict Arnold's division. Book List Anburey, Thomas: Travels through the Interior Parts of America, Boston and New York, 1923. Baldwin, Colonel Jeduthan: Revolutionary Journal, Bangor, Maine, 1906 (Limited Edition). Bascom, Robert: The Fort Edward Book, Fort Edward, New York, 1903. Baumeister, Adjutant General Major Carl Leopold: Revolution in America: Confidential Letters and Journals, 1776- 1784, translated and annotated by Bernhard A, Uhlendorf, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1957. Boardman, Oliver: Journal, Connecticut Historical Society, 1899- Brandow, John Henry: The Story of Old Saratoga and History of Schuylersville, Saratoga Springs, New York, 1906. British Army, Historical Records of Every Regiment in Her Majesty's Service: History of the 8th, 9th, 20th, 21st, 24th, 29th, 31st, 33rd, 34th, 47th, 53rd, and 62nd Regiments of Foot Horse Guards, 1836. Burgoyne, Lieutenant General John: The Dramatic and Poetical Works of Vol. I, London, 1808. Orderly Book, edited by E. B. O'Callaghan, Albany, New York, 1860, Cannon, Richard: Historical Record of the Ninth Regiment of Foot, London, 1838. BOOK LIST 291 Commager, Henry Steele and Richard B. Morris: The Spirit of Seventy-six, Indianapolis-New York, 1958. Clinton, Governor George: Public Papers of George Clinton, Introduction by Hugh Hastings, State Historian (two volumes), New York and Albany, 1899. Dearborn, Major General Henry: A Narrative of the Saratoga Campaign, Bulletin, Fort Ticonderoga Museum, Vol. I, No. 5, January 1929. Digby, Lieutenant William: The British Invasion of North America, with the Journal of Lieutenant William Digby of the 53rd or Shropshire Regiment of Foot, edited by James Phinney Baxter, Albany, 1887. Duncan, Major Francis: History of the Royal Regiment of Artillery, London, 1879. DuRoi, : Journal of DuRoi the Elder, Lieutenant and Adjutant in Service of the Duke of Brunswick, 1776- 1778, translated by Charlotte S. J. Epping, Philadelphia, 1911. Eelking, Captain Max von: The German Allied Troops in the War of Independence, 1776-1783, Albany, 1893. Flexner, James Thomas: The Benedict Arnold Case (abridged edition), New York, 1962. Flick, A. C., New York State Historian, and others: One Hundred Fiftieth Anniversary of the Battle of Saratoga and the Surrender of Burgoyne, Albany, 1927. Fuller, J. F. C.: A Military History of the Western World, New York, 1955. : Decisive Battles of the U.S.A., New York, 1942. Nickerson, Hoffman: The Turning Point of the Revolution, Boston and New York, 1928. Partridge, Bellamy: Sir Billy Howe, New York, 1932. Pausch, George: Journal of Captain Pausch, Captain of the Hanau Artillery During the Burgoyne Campaign, translated by William L. Stone, Albany, 1886. Pell, John H, G.: Burgoyne and Ticonderoga, Bulletin, Fort Ticonderoga Museum, Vol. I, No. 2, July 1929. 292 BOOK LIST Pell, Joshua, III: Diary of Joshua Pell, III, an Officer of the British Army in America, 1776-1777 (privately printed) , Fort Ticonderoga, New York, 1934. Montross, Lynn: Rag, Tag, and Bobtail: The Story of the Continental Army, 1775-1783, New York, 1952. Morris, Richard B. (see Commager, Henry Steele) Morton, Doris Begor: Philip Skene of Skenesborough, Granville, New York, 1959. Raddall, Thomas H.: Canada from the British Conquest to Home Rule: The Path of Destiny, Vol. Ill, Canadian History Series, edited by Thomas B. Costain, Garden City, New York, 1957. Riedesel, Major General Baron von: Memoirs, Including Letters and Journals Written during His Residence in America, edited by Max von Eelking, translated by William L. Stone (two volumes), Albany, 1868. Riedesel, Baroness von: Letters and Journal, translated by William L. Stone, Albany, 1867. Gilby, Thomas (Editor) : Britain at Arms, London, 1953. Graves, Robert: Sergeant Lamb's America, New York, 1940. Hadden, Lieutenant James M.: Journal and Orderly Book, Albany, 1884. Hiscock (Hitchcock?), Rev. Enos: Journal, Providence, 1901. How, David: Diary: An American Private, New York, 1865. Hudleston, F. J.: Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne, Indianapolis, 1927. Lefferts, Charles M.: Uniforms of the American, British, French, and German Armies in the War of the American Revolution, 1775-1783, New York, 1926. Lamb, Roger, Sergeant 9th Foot: Journal of Occurrences During the Late American War, Dublin, 1809, Lancaster, Bruce: Guns of Burgoyne, New York, 1939. Lawson, C. C. P.: The History of the Uniforms of the British Army (three volumes), London, 1961. Lossing, Benjamin: Pictorial Field Book of the Revolution, New York, 1859, BOOK LIST 293 Murray, Eleanor M.: The Burgoyne Campaign, Bulletin, Ticonderoga Museum, Vol. VIII, No. 1, January 1948. Neilson, Charles: Burgoyne's Campaign, and the Memorable Battles of Bemis's Heights, September 19 and October 7, 1777, Albany, 1844. Roberts, Kenneth: Rabble in Arms, Garden City, New York, 1936. Reid, Arthur: Reminiscences of the Revolution, or Le Loup's Bloody Trail (privately printed), Utica, New York, 1859. "Sexagenary": Reminiscences of the American Revolution, Albany, 1866. Snell, Charles W. and Francis F. Wilshin: Saratoga National Historical Park, Washington, D. C., 1958. Squier, Ephraim: Journal, Boston, 1878. Stanley, George F. G.: Canada's Soldiers, Toronto, 1960. Stanley, George F. G. (Editor) : For Want of a Horse, Sackville, N. B., 1961. Roby, Luther: The Life and Military Services of Major General John Stark, Concord, New Hampshire, 1831. Stimson, F. ].: My Story: Being the Memoirs of Benedict Arnold, New York, 1917. Steele, Matthew Forney: American Campaigns (two volumes), Washington, D. C., 1909. Stitt, Edward W., Jr.: Horatio Gates, Bulletin, Fort Ticonderoga Museum, Vol. IX, No. 2, Winter 1953. Stone, William L.: The Campaign of Lieut. Gen. John Burgoyne and the Expedition of Lieut. Col. Barry St. Leger, Albany, New York, 1877. Stone, William L. (Editor) : Washington County, New York: Its History to the Close of the Nineteenth Century, New York, 1901. Sylvester, Nathaniel Bartlett: History of Saratoga County, Philadelphia, 1878, Thacher, James: A Military Journal During the American Revolutionary War from 1775 to 1783, Boston, 1827. Trumbull, John: Autobiography, Reminiscences and Letters, New York & London, 1841. 294 BOOK LIST Walworth, Mrs. Ellen Hardin: Battles of Saratoga, 1777, Albany, New York, 1891. Ward, Christopher: The War of the Revolution, New York, 1952. Watson, J. Steven: The Reign of George III, 1760-1815 Vol. XII, Oxford History of England, edited by Sir George Clark, Oxford: 1960. Watson, Winslow C.: The Military and Civil History of the County of Essex, New York, Albany, New York, 1869. Weeks, William: Letters of an American Sergeant, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1901. Wilkinson, General J.: Memoirs of My Own Times, Philadelphia, 1816. Wilshin, Francis F. (see Snell, Charles W.) Index Acland, Lady Harriet, 7, 64, 175, 176, 200, 258 Acland, Maj. John, 7, 41, 42, 43, 64, 175, 176, 222, 225, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233, 239, 241, 248, 271 Allen, Ethan, 31 Allen, John, 75, 76, 77, 80, 81, 84 Amherst, Gen. Jeffrey, 16, 29 Anburey, Lieut. Thomas, 151, 162, 163, 182, 183, 184, 201, 202, 221 Anstruther, Col. John, 188, 191, 193, 198 Armstrong, Maj. John, 241, 247 Arnold, Gen. Benedict, 4, 5, 6, 48, 72, 77, 108, 110, 139, 140, 142, 143, 157, 158, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 171, 177, 194, 203, 204, 205, 206, 216, 217, 218, 228, 229, 239, 240, 241, 242, 244, 245, 246, 247, 254, 260 Aubrey, Capt. Thomas, 95 Baker, Albert, 82 Balcarres, Maj. the Earl of, 28, 42, 43, 208, 212, 216, 221, 231, 232, 237, 242, 243, 244, 247, 248, 249, 250, 256, 259 Baldwin, Ezekiel, 72 Bärner, Maj. Ferdinand von, 38, 100, 103, 106, 128, 129, 130, 133, 134, 151 Baum, Col. Frederick, 63, 99, 100, 101, 102, 104, 106, 107, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, Il6, Il8, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 128, 134, 144, 148, 149 Blomfield, Maj. Thomas, 221 Bock, Lieut., 100, 113 Braddock, Gen. Edward, 70, 167 295 296 INDEX Brandt, Joseph (Thay-en-da-ne-gea), 155 Breyman, Col. Heinrich, 101, 116, 117, 118, 127, 128, 129, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 144, 148, 149, 151, 178, l80, 208, 222, 244, 245, 246, 247, 249 Brooks, Lieut. Col. John, 245 Brown, Col. John, 210 Brudenel, Chaplain Edward, Campbell, Capt. Alexander, 209 Carleton, Gen, Sir Guy, 4, 5, 6, 9, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 22, 24, 73, 86, 91, 92, 108, 165, 177 Carter, Capt. John, 59, 178, 179 Cilley, Col. Joseph, 205, 229, 230, 231 Clarke, Lieut. Sir Francis Carr, 160, 220, 232, 233, 239 Clinton, Gen. Sir Henry, 10, 15, 92, 93, 145, 146, 147, 157, 165, 202, 203, 207, 209, 211, 213, 215, 219, 264, 267, 268, 276 Clive, Robert (Lord), 12, 72 Cromer, Jane, 52, 53, 5, 57, 64 Dearborn, Maj. Henry, 168, 232, 245 Digby, Lieut. William, 69, 223, 225, 226, 248, 249, 271 Don, Lieut. John, 183 Du Fais, Lieut., 222 Duer, Lady Kitty, 72 Duer, Capt. William, 72, 101 "Duluth," 79, 80, 81, 82 Dunbar, Lieut., 183, 184 Edgerton, Eleazer, 105, 106 Fellows, Gen. John, 217, 218, 257, 258, 259, 260, 265 Forbes, Maj. Gordon, 184, 185 Francis, Col. Ebenezer, 43 Fraser, Capt. Alexander, 33, 34, 69, 86, 87, 88, 100, 104, 113, 123, 176, 211, 231, 255, 256, 258, 272 Fraser, Gen. Simon, 19, 20, 22, 28, 33, 35, 36, 37, 38, 40, 42, 43, 59, 61, 68, 72, 77, 78, 81, 84, 85, 87, 102, 150, 163, 178, 180, 182, 184, 185, 190, 194, 199 212, 213, 214, 221, 222, 237, 238, 240, 241, 251, Freeman, Farmer, 170, 1.72, 191 Furnival, Capt., 228 INDEX 297 Gage, Gen. Thomas, 10 Gall, Gen. W. R. von, 264 Gansevoort, Col. Peter, 268 Gates, Gen. Horatio, 6, 31, 72, 108, 138, 140, 141, 142, 143, 156, 157, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 177, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 213, 2l6, 217, 2l8, 219, 226, 228, 229, 239, 241, 247, 253, 254, 255, 259, 260, 266, 267, 268, 271, 276 Geismar, Capt, 182, 194, 195, 262 George III, 22, 24, 26, 45, 50, 275 Germaine, Lord George, 16, 90, 91, 92, 144, 275 Geyso, Capt. von, 100, 151 Glover, Gen. John, 171, 254, 260 Grant, Maj. Robert, 39 Green, Capt. Charles, 190, 220, 262 Hadden, Lieut. James, 21, 22, 95, 189, 191, 192, 193, 194, 196, 198, 199 Hale, Col Nathan, 39, 40, 205 Hamilton, Gen. James, 94, 163, 178, 191, 258, 264 Hannemann, Lieut., 151, 152, 154 Harriage, Maj. Henry, 257 Harnage, Mrs. Henry, 64, 200, 257, 262 Herkimer, Nicholas, 139, 216, 241 Herrick, Col. Samuel, 119, 120, 121, 123, 124, 128 Hill, Lieut. Col. John, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 52, 53, 54, 56, 61, 272 Hoakesly, Robert, 62 Houston, Col., 67 Howe, Gen. Sir William, 10, 15, 16, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 109, 144, 145, 158, 214, 275, 276 Hubbard (Hobart), Col David, 119, 122 Hunter, Polly, 79, 80, 81, 82 Jessup, Lieut. Col. Ebenezer, 67 Jessup, Capt. Edward, 67 Jones, Lieut. David, 69, 72, 73, 78, 79 Jones, Capt. Thomas, 95, 161, 164, 178, 182, 185, 189, 192, 193, 194, Kilmore, George, 75, 76 Kingston, Lieut. Col. Robert, 93, 186, 188, 266 298 INDEX Kosciusko, Gen. Thaddeus, 169 Lamb, Sgt. Robert, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 64, 65, 66 Langlade, Charles de, 70, 74, 78, 85, 86 Lansing, Peter, 260, 261 Learned, Ebenezer, 139, 167, 172, 194, 205, 228, 229, 234> 235, 239, 240, 241, 260 "Le Loup," 74, 75, 77, 80, 81, 82, 84, 85 Ligonier, Gen. Edward, Viscount, 45 Lincoln, Gen. Benjamin, 77, 110, 111, 140, 167, 172, 210, 216, 228, 229, 253, 254 Lind, Lieut. Col. John, 47 Long, Col. Pierce, 50, 51, 53, 56, 66 Louis XVI, 273, 274 Lutwidge, Capt. Skeffington, 20, 37 McAlpin, Maj. Daniel, 67 McArthur, Duncan, 73, 74, 75,76 McCrea, Jane ("Jennie"), 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 116, 125, 139, 172 McKay, Lieut., 234 McKay, Samuel, 9, 10 McLane, Lieut., 228 McNeil, Mrs. Sarah Fraser, 72, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 84 Maibon, Maj. Christoph von, 100 Mattoon, Lieut. Ebenezer, 227, 228, 229, 234, 235 Melsheimer, Pastor, 103 Money, Capt. John, 93, 220, 239 Montgomery, Gen. Richard, 4 Montgomery, Capt. William, 54, 55 Morgan, Col. Daniel, 4, 5, 164, 167, 168, 169, 172, 173, 177, 184, 185, 194, 199, 204, 205, 229, 231, 232, 236, 240, 241, 245, 254, 259 260, 261, 265, 272 Munro, Capt. Hugh, 67 Murphy, "Tim," 240 Naudiere, Capt. de la, 8, 100, 101, 114, 148 Neilson, John, 170, 171 Nichols, Col. Moses, 119, 120, 121, 124 Nixon, Gen. John, 77, 139, 171, 259 Paterson, Gen. John, 171, Pausch, Capt. George, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 195, INDEX 299 , 219, 222, 232, 233, , 235, 236, 250 Peters, Lieut. Col. John, 67, 100, 101 Petersham, Capt. (Lord), 220, 226 Pfister, Col. Francis, 67, 100 Phillips, Cen. William, 9, 18, 22, 24, 33, 34, 56, 61, 101, 102, 137, 161, 163, 178, 190, 192, 196, 197, 213, 214, 220, 221, 226, 227, 255, 264, 268 Poor, Gen. Enoch, 171, 194, 205, 217, 229, 231, 232, 235, 241 Powell, Gen. Henry W., 45, 94, 95, 156, 210, 276 Praetorius, Col. Julius, 94 Putnam, Gen. Israel, 91, 219 Reid, Lieut., 189, 193 Reynell, Mrs. Anne (Reynolds), 64, 201, 262 Reynell, Lieut. Thomas, 201 Riedesel, Augusta von, 136 Riedesel, Caroline von, 136 Riedesel, Gen. Baron Friederich von, 5, 9, 19, 22, 23, 24, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 42, 59, 61, 62, 63, 64, 69, 96, 101, 102, 112, 116, 137, 153, 162, 163, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 190, 192, 194, 195, 196, 207, 213, 214, 221, 255, 256, 257, 263, 264, 268 Riedesel, Baroness Friederika von, 23, 136, 137, 158, 163, 200, 201, 209, 221, 238, 251, 256, 26l, 262 Riedesel, Friederika von, 136 Rogers, Maj. Robert, 107, 121 St. Glair, Gen. Arthur, 31, 32, 35, 40, 46, 65, 66, 77, 138, 143, 144, 166 St. Leger, Col. Barry, 8, 9, 15, 16, 17, 65, 88, 94, no, 139, 155, 157, 158, 167, 217 St. Luc de la Corne, Louis, 8, 26, 27, 70, 77, 84, 85, 86 Salans, Lieut. Baron Alexander, 88, 123 Scammel, Col. Alexander, 205 Schank, Lieut. John, 21, 150, 152, 153, 158, 160, 161, 207 Schiek, Capt, 113 Schuyler, Katherine Van Rensselaer, 163 Schuyler, Gen. Philip, 31, 56, 65, 66, 67, 69, 71, 77, 91, 108, 109, no, 111, 138, 139, 142, 143, 144, 162, 164, 165, 167, 169, 206, 218, 253, 258 300 INDEX Scott, Lieut. Thomas, 87, 88, 209 Sherwood, Capt., 103 Shrimpton, Capt. John, 43 Simpson, Capt., 231 Skene, Alexander, 88 Skene, Maj. (Col.) Philip, 48, 58, 59, 60, 61, 66, 70, 71, 96, 100, Il8, 1521, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 133 Smith, Lieut. William, 233 Smythe, Dr. James, 72 Spaeth, Col. Ernst Ludwig von, 195, 2,2,2,, 2,34 Spangenberg, Lieut., 117, 127, 130, 133, 135 Specht, Gen. Johan Friederich von, 153, 158 Squier, Ephraim, 247, 248 Stark, Elizabeth ("Molly"), 108, 109, 110, 111, 152-4 Stark, Gen. John, 107, 108, 109, 110, 115, 116, 118, 119, 1520, 1521, 15Z2, 1523, 1525, 126, 132, 134, 136, 140, 143, 156, 167, 5216, Stickney, Col. Thomas, 119 Stormont, Viscount, 273, 274 Strangways, Capt. Stephen, 222 Sutherland, Col. Nicholas, 149, 257 Swearingham, Capt., 184 Ten Broeck, Gen. Abram, 218, 241, 245 Tommo, "Captain," see "Le Loup" Twiss, Lieut. William, 34, 67 Van Rensselaer, Col. Henry, 50, 51, 54, 66 Van Vechten, Lieut., 80, 81, 83 Vergennes, Charles Gravier, Comte de, 273, 2274, 275 Walker, Capt. Ellis, 178, 182 Warner, Col. Seth, 42, 63, 102, 105, 109, 116, 120, 126, 132, 134, 135 Washington, Gen. George, 31, 91, 108, 109, 110, 141, 142, 145, 164, 167, 206, 276 Westroop, Lieut. Richard, 53 Wight, Capt., 222, 226, 248 Wilkinson, Col. James, 35, 143, 166, 205, 254, 260, 266, 270, 271 Williams, Maj. Griffith, 34, 178, 179, 190, 209, 219, 220, 228, 231, 232, 233, 239 Willoe, Capt, 1952, 194, 195, 52622 Wolfe, Gen. James, 32, 148 the decisive battles in world history, since it assured American independence by bringing wavering France in as the colonists' active ally. Harrison Bird, author of the highly praised Navies in the Mountains; The Battles on the Waters of Lake Champlain and Lake George, 1609-1814, tells this story with drama and color. The major figures on both sides of the struggle come alive especially "Johnny" Burgoyne, who is the sympathetic hero of the book. The battles themselves are re-created in stirring detail, and the account of the climactic, hard-slugging battles at Saratoga will keep any reader in suspense until their final outcome is assured. The book contains four pages of half-tones and six line-cut maps, including an endpaper map. Harrison Bird has been involved in military history for many years. He has been first Curator and then Adviser to the Fort Ticonderoga Museum, and recently he was President of the Company of Military Collectors and Historians, of which he remains a Governor and Fellow. Currently he is chairman of the committee on history for the Lake George Park Commission, Hessian Artilleryman courtesy Mrs. John Nicholas Brown, Collection. Jacket design by Ronald Clyne 116843 |
