The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [73]
The attack had been a surprise, as the men hoped, and the vaunted Hessian army never had time to organize and fight back. The battle ended less than an hour after it commenced. The Americans had killed about thirty Hessians and captured nine hundred twenty. The Continental Army also confiscated six cannon and one thousand muskets, plus, the soldiers delighted in telling friends later, all of the instruments from the German band that Rall had loved so dearly. In fact, on the Fourth of July, 1777, the captured Hessian musicians used those instruments to serenade a Philadelphia crowd celebrating the first anniversary of independence.14 The soldiers were pleased. Captain John Polhemus wrote, “We whipped them terrible.”15
The snow-covered village of Trenton was a somber scene. “I took a walk over the field of battle and my blood chilled to see such horror and distress, blood mingling together—the dying groans and garments rolled in blood,” said Sgt. White, who took an elegant sword from a slain Hessian officer lying in the snow as a souvenir of the fight. It was one of the few times that General Washington expressed some joy and broke his usual calm demeanor. “It is a great day for our country,” he said to some of the enlisted men as he rode through the fields around the village.16 He later wrote to General Cadwalader that “the officers and men who were engaged in the enterprise behaved with great firmness, poise, and . . . bravery.”17
Greenwood was as relieved as White, McCarty, Bostwick, and the others but they had little time to savor the victory. The inability of Cadwalader and Ewing to transport their men across the Delaware meant that the three hundred Hessians who escaped southward would soon reach the British outpost at Burlington and riders from there would bring the news to Lord Cornwallis twenty miles away in New Brunswick. The British would soon be in hot pursuit of the Americans. Following his original plan, Washington led the army up the Delaware, with the nine hundred prisoners of war, and marched into Pennsylvania, again crossing the icy river, this time with boatloads of prisoners as well as his own soldiers.
Some of the enlisted men dawdled in Trenton, to the dismay of the American generals. One was White, proud that he and his comrades had taken the disabled Hessian cannon. They insisted on fixing the axle and pulling it all the way back on snow-covered roads to Pennsylvania, which they did despite an exasperated Henry Knox constantly haranguing for them to hurry up. White was so exhausted when the men, with their prize, reached the crossing point at the Delaware River that he laid down in the snow and took what he considered a well-deserved nap as the troops began to pile into the boats for the return crossing.18
Others spent much of their time remarking on how ordinary the much-feared and highly publicized Hessians, “the greatest soldiers in the world,” actually appeared. They were not supermen after all. One enlisted man noted that they were “moderate in stature, limbs not of equal proportion, and their hair cued as tight to the head as possible, sticking straight back like the handle of an iron skillet.”19
Greenwood found much humor in the way the Americans treated the once vaunted Hessians. Many men had taken the ornate brass helmets from slain Hessians and placed them on to their heads, smiling at each other as they did so. He noted, “With these brass caps on, it was laughable to see how they would strut, fellows with their elbows out and some without a collar to their half-shirt, and