Brandywine

Howe put his army on 260 ships and made a six-week sea move to land barely closer to Philadelphia than when he started. Washington picked the last good line in front of the capital, a creek an army could only cross at fords, and set a guard on every door he knew about. He did not know about all of them.

A morning of cannon fire at Chadds Ford that was only a show, a flank march of some fifteen to seventeen miles hidden by fog, scouting reports that cancelled each other out, and at two in the afternoon the British army standing behind the American right. Then the hardest fighting of the day, and a nineteen-year-old French volunteer with blood filling his boot.

Congress fled, the bells left town, and the British marched into Philadelphia fifteen days after the battle. In between came a midnight bayonet attack Americans called a massacre. And the one thing Howe's masterpiece did not buy: the destruction of the army, which attacked him again within a month.