Page:The Hessians and the other German auxiliaries of Great Britain in the revolutionary war.djvu/7



history of the German auxiliaries, who fought for Great Britain in the Revolutionary War, has not received from American writers the amount of attention which its importance would seem to deserve. Much has been made of the fact that seven thousand French soldiers and nineteen thousand French seamen assisted the United States in the siege of Yorktown, but we have forgotten that a force of between fifteen and twenty thousand Germans served for seven years against us; that more than twenty-nine thousand were brought to America for this purpose; that more than twelve thousand never returned to Germany. I know of no American historian but Bancroft, who has made any thorough study of this subject in the original authorities, and the general nature of his work does not call on him, and, indeed, would hardly permit him, to write the history of the German troops in detail. Doctor George Washington Greene has published interesting reviews of three of Kapp's books, and the narrative of Baroness Riedesel has been translated into English by William L. Stone,