' It was not the practise, when this skirmish occurred, to notice, in detail- the operatii.iiis of the German mercenary troops, in the despatches of tlie Royal Commander-in-chief to the Home Government ; and the losses sustained by those troop.'*, in whatever act ions tliey were engaged, were seldom, if ever, included in the detailed Reports of Casualties which were sent to and published by the Government, at London. The Reports of (be operations and the casualties of those troops were made to the several sovereign Princes, Electors, etc., of whom those troops were, respectively, subjects ; and, except in some few instances, when individual enterprise luis unearthed some of th^m, the text of those Reports and much of the official correspondence remain in their original repositories, unopened and seetuingly, uncared for.

The reports of deserters and other uiiofficial reports made the total loss, including both British and German, from eight biindreil toa thousand men ; and it is difficult to make one believe that four hundred Americans, familiar from their childhood with the use of firearms, sheltered by ample defences from which they could fire deliberately and with their pieces rested on the tops of their defences, could have possibly fired volley after volley, into a large body of men, massed in a closely compacted column and cooped up in a narrow country roadway, without having inflicted as extended a damage on those who received their fire, as deserter after deserter, to the number of more than half a dozen, on ditl"'^rent daj'S, without any connectitin with each other, severally and separately declared had been inflicted on the enemy's advance, on the occasion now under consideration.