Long Island

Boston falls, both sides race to New York, and the largest force Britain had ever sent abroad fills the harbor. The Americans fortify a wooded ridge with four ways through it, and watch the fourth with five men on horses.

Ten thousand men walk all night around the American left, two signal guns fire at nine, and the forward line collapses in a morning. At a stone farmhouse on the Gowanus Road, about 270 Marylanders charge again and again to buy the rest of their command time to escape.

Two days trapped against the East River in a cold rain, then one improbable night: fishermen rowing an entire army across a mile of tidal water, a fog that lingered past sunrise, and empty trenches at dawn. The army survived, and with it the war.