The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [99]
Gates may have hated him but the men and many officers in the fight loved Benedict Arnold. “A bloody fellow he was,” wrote private Samuel Downing of New Hampshire. “He didn’t care for nothing. He’d ride right in. It was ‘come on, boys,’ not ‘go, boys.’ . . . There wasn’t any wasted timber in him.” An officer, Captain E. Wakefield, agreed. He wrote, “Nothing could exceed the bravery of Arnold on this day; he seemed the very genius of war . . . he seemed inspired with the fury of a demon.”20
His men, inspired perhaps by Arnold’s wounding, took the redoubt a few minutes later, killing or routing the Hessians inside it. As darkness fell, the entire American line advanced quickly, forcing the English and German soldiers to flee. The Americans suffered remarkably few losses.
Burgoyne had failed again, once more defeated by men led by the energetic Benedict Arnold. He did not see any other way to advance as evening began and ordered a general retreat, hoping that Clinton had somehow received his messages. The entire army pulled back. It would march north and then halt. This procedure was followed for a few days. As they retreated, the British also burned down the home of General Schuyler. Burgoyne possessed no intelligence concerning American outposts around his new position. He waited and did nothing. “The greatest misery and utmost disorder prevailed in the army,” wrote the Baroness von Riedesel of those days after October 7. She added that her husband wanted a hasty and immediate retreat northward to save the army, but that Burgoyne seemed immobilized. The British “lost everything by his loitering,” she added.21
As it turned out, Sir Henry Clinton did send the troops that Burgoyne had begged him to transport north. He ordered three thousand soldiers to sail up the Hudson to meet Burgoyne at Saratoga, but the voyage went slowly. They received no messages from Burgoyne and dawdled. The ships stopped to bombard and burn Kingston, New York, an easy target. Then the captain in charge of the fleet decided that he did not want to sail any farther north without explicit orders and headed back to New York, leaving Burgoyne without reinforcements.
The one hundred plus wounded American soldiers were transported south to an army hospital in Albany. Their gruesome wounds stunned veteran doctors there. One surgeon wrote of “mutilated bodies, mangled limbs, incurable wounds.” One man, he noted, was shot through the face with a musket ball that knocked out some of his teeth and tore off half of his tongue. Another had his face and half his throat blown open by a cannonball. A third was shot in the head with a musket ball and lay on the bed, bleeding profusely. He told the doctor the ball had apparently fallen out of his head and asked him to fix the wound. The doctor examined him and found that the ball was still in his skull, prevented from killing him by a thick bone in which it had lodged. The doctor sat back, told the man what had happened, and joked that it was a good thing that American foot soldiers had skulls too thick for shots to penetrate.22
Gates had been busy during the time between the first battle on September 19 and the second on October 7. Using information gleaned from reports from scouting parties such as Wild’s, he had moved militia, one unit with eleven hundred men, into positions north of Burgoyne to prevent him from escaping. With the main American army to the south, militia to the north, thick forests to the west, and the Hudson on the east—and supplies dwindling—the British had nowhere to go.
That must have been apparent to Burgoyne on the day after the second battle, October 8, when his camp came under assault from various cannon batteries that surrounded it. The house that General von Riedesel occupied alone was hit with eleven cannonballs.
One of the regiments continually harassing the Redcoats was Wild’s. On the morning after the battle, the First Massachusetts was ordered to scout the enemy as well as they could. They marched toward their camp only to