Washington [208]
Aware that he saw only a fraction of the British Army, Washington was tormented by a nagging question: What had happened to the bulk of the enemy’s forces? Around noon Lieutenant Colonel James Ross of Pennsylvania informed him that, on a reconnaissance expedition, he had clashed with five thousand British troops on the west side of Brandywine Creek, along the Great Valley Road; he thought these troops had been led by General Howe himself. Washington didn’t fathom the full meaning of this news, though he did, as a precaution, shift troops under Adam Stephen and Lord Stirling to bolster General Sullivan’s men at Birmingham Hill, a position to his right that was well placed to resist any sudden flanking move from the upper forks.
On the spot, as his original battle plan unraveled, Washington sorted through a blizzard of contradictory information. Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina remembered his patent frustration: “I heard him bitterly lament that Coll Bland had not sent him any information at all and that the accounts he had received from others were of a very contradictory nature.”15 Amid sharp clashes at Chadds Ford, General Sullivan relayed a report from Major Joseph Spear saying that he, too, had been at the Great Valley Road but found not a trace of Howe’s army. Tricked by Howe many times, Washington feared that his nemesis was about to deceive him again. Indeed, he drew the wrong conclusion from Spear’s report: he imagined that Howe had turned south and was doubling back to Chadds Ford. But in fact Howe was heading north in a long, looping movement; around noon his soldiers and horses, veiled by thick fog, waded across the northern crossing at Jeffries Ford, of whose existence Washington was unaware. As they splashed through waist-high water, the British and Hessians were flabbergasted to encounter no American resistance. By one-fifteen P.M. Washington had received reports of two British brigades moving upon Birmingham Hill from the north and abruptly realized that Howe had outwitted him. He spurred his horse toward the hill as fast as it would fly, but he still didn’t comprehend that the two brigades were merely the advance guard of Howe’s vast army.
Around four P.M., to the resounding beat of drums, British and German troops barreled forward in three sharply drawn columns, undeterred by a torrent of American canister and grapeshot. Piercing a wide hole in American lines, they engineered a deadly attack, firing muskets and charging in bayonet attacks. Tree branches snapped, leaves fluttered down, and gun smoke enveloped the battlefield. Soon the ground was thickly littered with dead bodies, mostly American, and some patriot divisions turned tail and ran. To complete a pincer movement against the Americans, Knyphausen and his men blasted their way across Brandywine Creek, diving at the Americans in a fierce bayonet attack that left the water dyed red with blood. The American private Elisha Stevens recorded the horror of “cannons roaring, muskets cracking, drums beating, bombs flying all round,” not to mention the groans of dying men.16 At five P.M. Washington dictated a message to Congress: “At half after four o’clock, the enemy attacked General Sullivan at the ford next above this and the action has been very violent ever since. It still continues. A very severe cannonade has begun here, too, and I suppose we shall have a very hot evening.”17 Washington had been completely deceived by Howe. “A contrariety of intelligence, in a critical