Germantown

Three weeks after Brandywine, eight days after his capital fell, Washington attacked. Four columns, four roads, a 14–16-mile night march, and orders to hit a veteran army simultaneously at five in the morning: the Trenton plan, scaled up nearly five times, with no way for the columns to talk to each other.

The British line at Mount Airy broke and ran, and for about an hour the attack was winning. Then the fog swallowed the columns, about 120 redcoats barricaded themselves in a stone house the artillery could not dent, and somewhere in the smoke two American divisions opened fire on each other.

A defeat the army walked away from feeling like winners, a major general cashiered, a stone house that still stands with the battle's scars on its doors, and the famous quote about Germantown impressing France that the supposed speaker never actually said.