Page:The Hessians and the other German auxiliaries of Great Britain in the revolutionary war.djvu/193

 Rh we should all be sick. My advice was followed, and I set many hands to work, which was very necessary, as there was much to do. . . . When everything had been cleared out, I considered our place of refuge; there were three fine cellars, well vaulted. I proposed that the most dangerously wounded officers should be put into one, the women in the second, and all other persons in the third, which was nearest the door.

“I had had the place well swept out and disinfected with vinegar, and we were all beginning to get into our proper places, when the firing began again terribly, and created great alarm. Several people who had no right to come in threw themselves towards the door. My children had already gone down the cellar stairs, and we might all have been smothered, had not God given me strength to place myself before the door and bar the entrance with outstretched arms; otherwise some of us would certainly have been injured. Eleven cannon balls went through the house, and we could clearly hear them rolling away above our heads. One poor soldier had been laid on the table to have his leg taken off, when a cannon ball came and carried away the other. His comrades had all run away, and when they came back to him they found him in a corner of the room, whither he had rolled himself in his fear, and hardly breathing. I was more dead than alive, but not so much on account of our own danger as for that in which my husband was, who yet often sent to ask how we were getting on, and sent me word that he was well.

“Major Harnich and his wife, a Madame Rennels, who had already lost her husband, the wife of the good lieutenant who had shared his broth so kindly with me