Page:The Hessians and the other German auxiliaries of Great Britain in the revolutionary war.djvu/178

 160 until at last the noise was frightful. It was a terrible cannonade, and I was more dead than alive. About three in the afternoon, instead of my guests coming to dinner, they brought me one of them, poor General Fraser, on a stretcher, mortally wounded. Our dinner-table, which had already been set, was taken away, and a bed for the general put in its place. I sat in a corner of the room, trembling. The noise kept growing louder. The thought that they might bring me my husband in the same condition was horrible to me, and tormented me incessantly. The general said to the surgeon, ‘Conceal nothing from me! Must I die?’. . . I often heard him exclaim, with a sigh. ‘Oh, bad ambition! poor General Burgoyne! poor Mistress Fraser!’ ”

The general lingered through the night and died on the following morning. So crowded was the house that the baroness had to remove her children into the passageway that they might not cry out and disturb the dying man. His corpse lay all day in her room. As his staff and the general officers of the army gathered about his grave, the Americans, ignorant of their purpose, directed artillery against them. Thus, with the hostile cannon firing his last salute, the gallant leader of the light troops was laid to rest.

At ten o'clock on the night of the 8th the army set out northward. Riedesel commanded the head of the column. The hospital, with its eight hundred inmates, was left behind. The boats, with what remained of stores, made their way slowly up stream. The