It is warfare stripped of grandeur and grandiloquence. It seems to me the most poignant detail of the whole heroic schema. His wig, that essential mark of the gentleman, has fallen off to uncover, in shocking revelation, his shaved head. He was a cavalryman or perhaps a mounted officer-whether French or English, whether friend or foe, hardly matters now. Tucked away in the bottom right-hand corner lies a man as dead as a doorknob but done nicely in perspective, his head to the viewer.
Dressed in his great brocaded frock coat and full bagwig, he sits confidently astride his magnificent steed while pointing magisterially, if a little vaguely, to his battalions battling it out below on the Flemish plain. In one, the victorious general is, of course, front and center.
In Blenheim Palace, that lumpy and unlovely McMansion, there is a series of tapestries commissioned to glorify the military career of John Churchill, first duke of Marlborough. Peter Johnson, a friend of many years, kept me good company in tramping some of the major battlefields, and my dear friend LuAnn Walther tracked down an elusive (for me) Tolstoyan reference to explosive shells! If it had not been for the truly heroic forbearance of my wife, Kathryn Court, this book would not have been written, for its author would have been found swinging from a beam in the barn-if we had had a barn. I owe thanks to my friends Mike and Sue Rose of Casebourne Rose Design Associates for producing the maps. Army’s Medical Corps, helped me understand the nature of gunshot wounds. Fackler, M.D., an eminent battlefield surgeon and a retired colonel in the U.S. Clay Smith, journeyman gunsmith at Colonial Williamsburg, was enormously helpful in educating me about eighteenth-century gunsmithing and the ballistics expert Martin L. Alex Hoyt has been a stalwart adviser and occasionally has had to endure the bleatings an author will invariably direct at his long-suffering agent. I hasten to add, however, that any errors which may remain are, of course, entirely mine. The associate editor, Marie Estrada, was a paragon of care, courtesy, and professionalism and Vicki Haire, who copy-edited the manuscript, was wonderfully diligent and hawkeyed. Throughout he has been a model of kindness and constructive criticism. It was my great good fortune to have been commissioned to write this book by one of the most experienced and revered editors of American publishing: Hugh Van Dusen of HarperCollins. Lexington and Concord: The British Retreat, 19 April 1775
”: Bunker’s Hill, 17 June 1775 211ġ4 A Vaunting Ambition: Quebec, 31 December 1775 222ġ5 “We Expect Bloody Work”: Brooklyn, 22–29 August 1776 230ġ6 Fire and Ice: Trenton I, 25–26 December 1776 Trenton II, 30 December 1776 and Princeton, 3 January 1777 251ġ7 The Philadelphia Campaign: Brandywine, 11 September 1777 Germantown, 4 October 1777 and Monmouth Courthouse, 28 June 1778ġ8 The Saratoga Campaign: Freeman’s Farm, 19 September 1777 and Bemis Heights, 7 October 1777 288 ~ The War in the South ~ġ9 The Laurels of Victory, the Willows of Defeat: Camden, 16 August 1780 313Ģ0 The Hunters Hunted: Kings Mountain, 7 October 1780 and Cowpens, 17 January 1781 323Ģ1 “Long, Obstinate, and Bloody”: Guilford Courthouse, 15 March 1781Ģ2 “Handsomely in a Pudding Bag”: The Chesapeake Capes, 5–13 September 1781 and Yorktown, 28 September–19 October 1781 341Ībout the Author Credits Cover Copyright About the Publisher Part Two: The Great Battles ~ The War in the North ~ġ2 Ambush: Lexington and Concord, 19 April 1775ġ3 “A Complication of Horror. List of Maps viii Acknowledgments ix Introduction xġ “A Choaky Mouthful”: The American Soldier The Militia 6 The Continentals 19Ģ Lobsterbacks: The British Soldier 36 Britain’s German Auxiliaries 48 Loyalists 52ģ “Men of Character”: The Officer Class 63Ħ The Things They Carried: Weapons, Equipment, and ClothingĨ The Sanguinary Business: Wounds, Disease, and Medical Careĩ “Trulls and Doxies”: Women in the Armies 177ġ0 Cuff and Salem, Dick and Jehu: Blacks in the War 183ġ1 “The Proper Subjects of Our Resentment”: Indians 190
For my father, Joseph Stephenson, a soldier of the Second World War