t the whole English
army! Ah, well, a sterner foe than any who marched beneath the red
flag of Great Britain had grappled with him, and he had been
defeated,--but he had won his freedom!

For forty hours now that little band of men had marched and fought, and
when it reached its camp at midnight the whole army was exhausted. The
only man among them all who preserved his even calmness, and was
apparently unaffected by the hardships of the day, was the commander
himself,--the iron man. Late into the night he dictated and wrote
letters and orders, to be despatched in every direction in the morning.
The successful issue of his daring adventure entailed yet further
responsibilities, and the campaign was only just begun. As for
himself, the world now knew him for a soldier. And a withered old man
in the palace of the Sans Souci in Berlin, who had himself known
victories and defeats, who had himself stood at bay, facing a world in
arms so successfully that men called him "The Great," called this and
the subsequent campaign the finest military exploit of the age!

CHAPTER XXVI

_My Lord Cornwallis_

And so the departure of my Lord Cornwallis was necessarily deferred.
The packet upon which he had engaged passage, and which had actually
received his baggage, sailed without him. It would be some days before
he would grace the court of St. James with his handsome person, and a
long time would elapse before he would once more rejoice in the sight
of his beloved hills; when he next returned it would not be with the
laurels of a conqueror either! He was to try conclusions once and
again with the gentleman he had so assiduously pursued through the
Jerseys; and this time, ay, and in the end too, the honors were to be
with his antagonist. The Star and Order of the Bath, which his
gracious and generous Britannic majesty had sent over to the new
Caesar, General Howe, with so much laudation and so many words of
congratulation, was to have a little of its lustre diminished, and was
destined to appear not quite so glorious as it had after Long Island;
in fact, it was soon to be seen that it was only a pyrotechnic star
after all, and not in the order of heaven! Both of these gentlemen
were to learn that an army--almost any kind of an army--is always
dangerous until it is wiped out; and it is not to be considered as
wiped out as long as it has any coherent existence at all, even if the
coherent existence only depends upon th