The reports of deserters, and other unofficial reports, made the total losses, hoth British and German, from eight hundred to a thousand men ; and it is difficult to make one helieve that four hundred Americans, familiar from their childhood with the use of firearms, sheltered by ample defenses, from which they could fire deliberately and with their pieces rested on the tops of their defenses, 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 different days, without any connection withtheeach other, now severally separately declared had been inflicted on the enemy's advance on occasion under and consideration.

Eight hundred to a thousand

put hors de combat

in a running

HISTORY

WESTCHESTER

COUNTY

musketry fight by four hundred continentals, whose total casualties were but nineteen! That was noble work indeed-- it was magnificent, and also it was war. But it becomes our virtuous duty as an honorable historian to decently caution the unwary reader here. Dawson's extreme compassionate feeling for the miserable Tories of Westchester County procures naturally from his magnanimous pen a properly respectful reception of the British forces sent to their relief by a gracious sovereign; and in this particular he goes so far in several places as to express impatience at the traductions of General Howe as a military commander which so characterize the writings of American partisan critics.1 On the other hand, Dawson nowhere discovers any favorable conceit of the mission of the mercenaries, which for aught that can be detected to the contrary he may even regard in the conventional fashion as mere infamous butchery business for pay.