nothing to the torture in his soul. Drugged with wine and sleep, he had been hardly able to shake off his slumber and go down into the street where the despised rebels were shattering his troops and his pride. Confusion had confounded confusion as he fought the fumes in his brain and babbled at his men, seeking an escape where there was none. There followed the ultimate shame of limping to the empty church and lying there on his back in a pew while his people were shot into submission. He must have wandered a deep hell of remorse for betraying his prince and his men and his own soul. So his long soldiering ended in an immortal failure in a bleak village. The only kindness his fate could begrudge him was to let him die at last. The least risks soldiers take are the hazards of the bullet. Their own mistakes and the lotteries of military luck are their deadliest hazards. Everything had promised Washington as great a disgrace as Rall's. He had come late, with a third of his men, in broad daylight. Nothing had happened as he planned. If he had been wounded and captured he might well have been strung up as the traitor the King called him. His only safety was to absolve himself by victory over his King from the laws of the King. What he had done now was merely to dash across a narrow river and capture an outpost of mercenary soldiers disorganized by a Christmas revel, an intoxicated commander and a driving storm of rain and snow. His troops slew 22 of them, wounded 28 too badly to move, and 56 others who were taken across the river among the 868 prisoners." 11 His own army had four wounded and none killed at all. His triumph was so precariously snatched from an overpowering enemy that, instead of pushing on as he had hoped, he was glad to be able to return across the river and stand on guard against the revenge of insulted pursuers. But he had tasted victory and so had his men. For once they had followed where he led, had marched up to the attack, had charged on cannon, had taken an enemy army prisoner. They limped home to their boats and the icy river, but their shoulderblades were not turned to the foe in terror. They had made an orderly attack and an orderly retreat, the two first lessons in good soldiery. Washington had at last an army, a little one but a good one. The moment he had a weapon he wielded it well. He had known that immediate victory was vital. A week's delay would have been as fatal as a disastrous defeat. But even he could not have dreamed of the shock that brief incursion gave to the British Empire. He could not have foreseen how it would stir the doubtful Americans to the belief that success and hope lay with him; how they would come flocking to him who had been abused for indecision, yet lashed out so ferociously at so dark an hour. They would flock away again after the dazzling successes that immediately followed Trenton. He would have Valley Forge to weather and treasons and panics for years on years. But he planted one foot on eternal glory when he made the raid on Trenton. Washington-like, he took no credit to himself. He uttered no Cæsarian, "I have come, I have seen, I have conquered." He wrote to Congress, his masters for all of his dictatorship: "I have the pleasure of congratulating you upon the success of an enterprise, which I had formed against a detachment of the enemy lying at Trenton, and which was executed yesterday morning. "In justice to the officers and men, I must add, that their behavior upon this occasion reflects the highest honor upon them. "When they came to the charge, each seemed to vie with the other in pressing forward; and were I to give a preference to any particular corps, I should do great injustice to the others." 12 He had earned and his men had earned this respite from the old reports of "dastardly cowardice." He never had to whip them over their backs again. On the first of January he wrote to Congress that he had crossed the Delaware again to face the furious Cornwallis, called back from his ship, and the indignant Howe, recalled from his divertisements. He was going out to meet the enemy on their own ground. Incidentally he apologized for having pledged his personal credit as other officers did theirs, and borrowed gold enough to hire an army for six weeks longer. He paid even those reluctant soldiers a compliment: "The troops felt their importance, and would have their price." He had proved himself a general. He had taught his soldiers to fight. He was now resolved to teach them to persevere in the war for a country, even if he had to pay for their education himself. It was just dawning upon them that they had a country to fight for. AFTERWORD This volume carries Washington no farther for the very simple and stubborn reason that it was impossible to go beyond this point without leaving still untold a multitude of facts important or picturesque or both. Many of them have lain undisclosed (or at least uncollated with reference to Washington) in countless manuscripts, in scattered archives, in pamphlets, monographs or in ponderous collections of documents. Washington, like every other animal, vegetable and mineral, was an evolution in body and character. With him as with all other earthly beings, environment played a vital part and changed him while he changed it. It is no sacrilege to represent him as a boy before he became a man, and a man before, and while, he became a god. And there is no kindness to him in suppressing the facts, for the more fully the truth about him is told, the greater his achievement becomes. The actual Washington has been long enough dispossessed of his character and even of his name. He has been left to wander like that other pilot, the unburied Palinurus, through oblivion for more than a hundred years, his words censored, his deeds miswritten and his humanity concealed. It is hard to imagine what comfort or pride George Washington could find in paradise, looking down to see incense burned and hymns chanted before a pompous caricature of himself. There is no glory in that for him, since his last name came from his father and his mother selected his first in honor of a kindly friend. The pity of all this falsehood was that it defeated its own object, and made a lie out of a man peculiarly devoted to the truth. Washington was a supreme realist with an intense interest in the facts about everything from manure to patriotism. He was an unusually truthful man and never tried to deceive himself. He rarely tried to deceive anybody else, except, of course, in the usual ways sanctified by ancient custom to dealers in real estate, horse-traders, and military people. He seems to have destroyed none of his records and accumulated everything. He piled up an enormous pyramid of documents and was pathetically eager not to be misunderstood. He made a beginning at correcting the spelling and grammar of some of his writings, but he made no attempt. to falsify their meaning. What would be his amazement if he could return and read what Sparks, Bancroft and others made out of the writings, the activities and the character of himself and his contemporaries? Like the poor woman who had her skirts cut off while she slept, he would gasp: "Can this be I?" It may be remembered that in the old poem, the distracted woman felt that her little dog would be able to decide: if he barked at her, she was not herself. And he did! And she moaned, "This is not I!" Could the Washington we know have gone home to his pack of hounds, what a howl they would have set up! The cruelty of this misguided perversion of history is the injustice it does to Washington, for there is nothing more precious to a man than sympathy and the sweet privileges of pitying affection. Pathos is the most endearing of all qualities, and it has |