Page:The Hessians and the other German auxiliaries of Great Britain in the revolutionary war.djvu/192

 172 respect are but slightly justified by Burgoyne's report.

But we must return to the baroness. On the afternoon of the 10th of October the Americans began to fire again on the British army. “My husband sent me word,” she writes, “to go at once to a house which was not far off. I got into the carriage with my children. We were just coming up to the house when I saw five or six men with guns on the other side of the Hudson River, aiming at us. Almost involuntarily I threw the children into the bottom of the carriage, and myself over them. At the same moment the fellows fired and shattered the arm of a poor English soldier behind me, who was already wounded, and was also retiring into the house. No sooner had we arrived than a terrible cannonade began, which was principally directed against the house where we had sought shelter; probably because the enemy had seen a great many people go in and thought the generals must be there. Alas! it was only women and wounded men. We were at last compelled to take refuge in a cellar, where I placed myself in a corner near the door. My children lay on the ground with their heads in my lap. Thus we spent the whole night. A horrible smell, the crying of the children, and, more than all these, my anxiety, prevented my closing my eyes.

“Next morning the cannonade began again, but from another side. I advised everybody to go out of the cellar, and undertook to have it cleaned, as