Page:The Hessians and the other German auxiliaries of Great Britain in the revolutionary war.djvu/108

 Far differently was the night passed by the American army. The troops under the immediate command of Washington, at his camp on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware, above Trenton, numbered only twenty-four hundred men in condition to undertake an arduous expedition. These started at three o'clock on the afternoon of Christmas Day, every man carrying three days' rations and forty rounds. They had with them eighteen field-pieces. This force reached MacKonkey's Ferry at twilight. Here the boats were manned by Glover's sailors, from Marblehead, and between the cakes of floating ice the little army was rowed across the river. So pitiful was their condition that a messenger who had followed them had easily traced their route “by the blood on the snow, from the feet of the men who wore broken shoes.”

Meanwhile, Cadwalader was to have crossed the river at Dunk's Ferry, below Trenton, but the ice was packed against the Jersey shore, and, though men on foot could get over, there was no hope for artillery. The eighteen hundred men destined for this part of the expedition waited in vain through the December night. At four in the morning, Cadwalader, sure that Washington, like himself, had been turned back by the difficulties of the expedition, ordered his half-frozen men back to their freezing camp. “The night,” writes